In his article on Wired.com Clive Thompson illustrates how increased load of information can lead to a loss of knowledge due to ignorance or suppression of the truth. Surprisingly, it’s often us who unconsciously ignore or suppress the truth.

We will focus on two concepts that have significant impact on the perception of truth. The first is information noise and the second the problem of retrospective analysis of past events.

Information itself is almost useless until it is put into context resulting in what we call knowledge. The main problem with information and knowledge is that the latter is result of information processing which is by nature prone to errors. In order to make sense of all that information we construct stories in our mind trying to make logical and causal connections between the “facts”. Missing parts in the causal chain are subconsciously filled in to make sense for us. It is the way our brain works: things have to make sense and if there is not sufficient information we tend to artificially create causality between possibly unrelated scraps of information. Since we do not know if our story is correct but seem to be perfectly sound there is no need to doubt its correctness. Why? Because most information is not verifiable.

Less Is More

Whenever we read the newspaper or listen to some radio shows we automatically start processing the information and weaving a new story or extending an existing one. Consider the following: the elections are over and the news stations start interviewing party leaders who, on the side of the losers, try to explain why they’ve lost the elections. They come up with semi-intelligent arguments about bad campaign strategies, the failure to address the people’s needs and other excuses, yet, only minutes after the election results have been announced these people believe they know the reasons for the outcome. The same is true for the winning party, of course.

Just ask yourself: how do they know? The reasons for winning and losing an election can be manifold: the bad weather kept people away from the voting booths or they just had a change of mind on election day. We just don’t know, and so do the party leaders but they are convinced that they do. You see the problem?

We now enter stage two: the interviewer asks for an expert opinion. The expert explains in great detail why the election went the way it did adding lots of background information to the conglomeration of so called facts. What happens here is that we consume a great amount of completely unverifiable information that may change our perception of things. On the long run we’d be better off without all the noise since the election result is the only verifiable fact that really matters. Consequently, the more information we have accumulated about this particular topic the less precise is the knowledge of events that took place.

We can draw similar conclusions about such dynamics on a variety of topics, when it comes to gossip about celebrities, for example. We are flooded with random noise, useless information that does not add value to our body of knowledge.

We Don’t Know What We Think We Know

Thompson’s article ends prematurely. The most significant part is the where he refers to the Post-Fact Society, a term introduced by Farhad Manjoo, who, in my opinion, correctly concludes that there exists a

disjunction between truth and proof

in an information society. It is important to distinguish between what we actually know and what we think we know. One reason for the illusion of complete knowledge is that we try to examine past events in order to deduce what has happened, again creating a completely plausible story in our mind by connecting the dots of information. It does not matter if we are talking about events that took place hundreds of years or an hour ago. Since we have not been there, we cannot be sure that the information is accurate. We should always remain skeptic must refrain from taking arbitrary information as truth or even proof for our assumptions and theories.

Concluding Remarks

The more information you give someone the more hypotheses and theories they will formulate along the way and the worse off they will be. They see more noise and mistake it for information.

It is almost impossible to protect us from the mechanisms outlined above. It’s far more dangerous to listen to the radio for five hours a day than to read a weekly newspaper since the noise usually is filtered out over time. At least think about the information you’ve consumed today and evaluate it. How much noise did it carry?