It's a brave new world.......................

 

1) "We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe."

-full post is here

Just the facts....................

 

If your favorite media outlet has you confused about what is going on in the Middle East, one idea would be to check in with the Institute for the Study of War blog.  Until proven differently, it will be my go-to site.

awash..............................

 We live in a world awash with information and we’re not enamoured with imprecision, less still a clear and certain plan to live out the best of our days (whatever the consequences) and, in the process, we’ve annihilated mystery only to be replaced with (Ye Gads) Artificial Intelligence; or another way to say that is we’d rather let something else do our thinking!

-Julian Summerhayes

A few snippets.............................

...........from the ever-readable Morgan Housel:

 There’s obviously a hierarchy of information. It ranges from life-changing good to life-changing disastrous.

That got me thinking: What would be the most interesting and useful information anyone could get their hands on?

---------------------------------------------------

We have so much information, and we know so much about the world. But no matter how much we ever know it will always be dwarfed by what we’re blind to.

-----------------------------------------------

I met someone a few years ago. When we parted ways he said, “Life is long. I hope we stay in touch.”

Life is long. No one says that. They always say, “life is short.” But obviously it could be either. We have no idea.

No worries......................

 To worry that the American electorate will be mislead by AI in any way that worsens political outcomes is akin to worrying that a man drowning in the Pacific ocean will be made worse off by the sudden appearance of a small rain shower off the coast of California.

-Don Boudreaux, from here  

What happens when information................

 .........................is widely available:

More information led to a more functional market for both suppliers and consumers. Profits increased and consumers experienced far less volatility in the price of the fish they were eating. Plus there were fewer fish going to waste.

One of the toughest jobs out there.......

      I was working on an HBR piece with Citibank's legendary Walter Wriston in his New York office when he gave me a short course on content versus context.

      "Every day I'm presented with three types of information," Wriston said.  "Facts, wrong facts, and damned lies.  My job is to know which is which."

-Alan M. Webber, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself

Seat belts fastened.................................

 Today most people believe that cultures are more matters of taste than sources of guidance for behavior that can mislead as well as inform.  We are all too keen to believe that all cultures are created equal, too slow to recognize the drawbacks of counterproductive cultures.  This is especially true of the hybrid cultures that have begun to emerge in the hothouse of subsidy and intervention in many parts of the world in this century.  Like the criminal subculture of America's inner cities, they retain incoherent bits of pieces of cultures appropriate to earlier stages of economic development and combine them with values for informing behavior in the Information Age.

       The Information Revolution, therefore, will not merely release the spirit of genius, it will also unleash the spirit of nemesis.  Both will contest as never before in the millennium to come.

       The shift from an Industrial to an Information Society is bound to be breathtaking.  The transition from one stage of economic life to another has always involved a revolution.  We think that the Information Revolution is likely to be the most far-reaching of all.  It will reorganize life more thoroughly than either the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.  And its impact will be felt in a fraction of the time.  Fasten your seat belts.

-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition To The Information Age

Checking in.........................

........with the always interesting Martin Gurri:

 But the beginning of any human structure is an uncertain affair. The present is always a tangle of contradictory visions and conflicting interests. What appears to be of all-consuming importance today is forgotten tomorrow—and even the supposed clarity of hindsight is mostly an illusion.  We know exactly when and how Rome fell, but why such a backwater of a city became one of history’s greatest empires remains a mystery. . . .

Mir insists that the disappearance of the newspaper must mean the end of journalism. I agree. A model formed to exploit scarcity can’t be expected to function in an era of overabundance. The facts of the world, it turns out, are virtually infinite in number and incoherent in pattern. The digital age resembles the Tower of Babel—an uproar of mutually unintelligible voices. The New York Times and CNN merely contribute to the din. In such an environment, conspiracy theories can become plausible explanations for the behavior of scientists. The more information we absorb, the less we understand.

-two excerpts from his essay, The Fall and Rise of the Mediators

Curate..........................

 1. Curate your information diet to be rich and diverse. Follow people who think differently than you. Read old books. Remember that what you put into your mind today is the raw material you have to work with tomorrow.

-Shane Parrish, more lessons here

Opening paragraphs....................

      In September 2016, the influential blogger and commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote a 7,000-word essay for New York magazine  titled "I Used to Be a Human Being."  Its subtitle was alarming:  "An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts.  It broke me.  It might break you, too."

-Cal Newport, from the introduction to Digital Minimalism:  Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

A conundrum....................

The information available to everyone on the planet is growing at an exponential rate.  Anyone with a smartphone today has better mobile phone capabilities than the president of the Unites States did 25 years ago.  We have better access to information than the president had 15 years ago.  We now have an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips anytime we want it. . . .
     Information flow will only continue to speed up in the future, so we have ourselves a conundrum.  It will become more and more important to separate the meaningful from the meaningless as most people will be continuously trying to drink from the fire hose of information instead of focusing on the truly important areas that they can control.

-Ben Carlson,  from A Wealth Of Common Sense:  Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity In Any Investment Plan

Hmmmmm..............................

"The wars waged by the Federal government against social conditions have ended with the enemy standing more or less where he was before hostilities began."

"From obesity to climate change, nothing is so personal or so cosmic that it can't be reckoned a failure of government.  If political power has become the guarantor of happiness, then politicians must take the blame for the tragic dimension of human life.  Democracy, as a system, must be held accountable for every imperfection and anxiety afflicting the electorate.  Political intervention, though a gesture of appeasement to the public, has compounded the distrust it aimed to nullify."

"Modern governments have many achievements to their credit.  They have built superhighways and helped eradicate smallpox and polio.  But they have promised many more things—nothing less than the good life—and they have asked for increasing control over wealth and power to get there.  Failure has been a function of extravagant promises and great expectations.     At some point around the turn of the new millennium, elites lost control of information, and power arrangements began to flip.  Assured of the public's wrath, elected governments have acted, or failed to act, motivated by a terror of consequences,   Legitimacy was equated with the deflection of blame, and the aim of governing became to exhibit a lack of culpability."

-Martin Gurri, in a few more wee excerpts from Revolt of the Public

Homo informaticus..................

This was the situation in Egypt before the uprising of January 25, 2011.  This is the situation in China today.  The wealth and brute strength of the modern state are counterbalanced by the vast communicative powers of the public.   Filters are placed on web access, police agents monitor suspect websites, foreign newscasters are blocked, domestic bloggers are harassed and thrown in jail—but every incident which tears away at the legitimacy of the regime is seized on by a rebellious public, and is then broadcast and magnified unto criticism goes viral.

The tug of war pits hierarchy against network, power against persuasion, government against the governed: under such conditions of alienation, every inch of political space is contested, and turbulence becomes a permanent feature of political life. . . .

But the rise of Homo informaticus places governments on a razor's edge, where any mistake, any untoward event, can draw a networked public into the streets, calling for blood.  This is the situation today for authoritarian governments and liberal democracies alike.  The crisis in the world that I seek to depict concerns loss of trust in government, writ large.  The mass extinction of stories of legitimacy leaves no margin for error, no residual store of public good will.  Any spark can blow up any political system at any time, anywhere.

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt of the Public

We don't.....................................?

"The relationship between information and human behavior is exceedingly complex:  but we seldom change our core beliefs because of a story we read online."

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt Of The Public

That assumes they once were..................

"But the news as an institution in a very real sense has ceased to exist.  The media elites, like elites everywhere, are driven by a fever dream of undoing the outcome of the 2016 election.  They desperately want the status quo before Trump back, and are willing to bash away, Trump-like, at their own standards and even the democratic process in pursuit of that aim.  I don't see how it's possible, from a posture of radical reaction, to reclaim the ideal of the news media as an honest broker of information."

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt Of The Public

Change...............................

Reading this book made me realize that democratized information poses a dilemma for modern society.  If the public loses patience and respect for government, the result would be disintegration.  If elites choose to dig in, they are likely to resort to repression.

To avoid these extreme outcomes, both elites and the public will have to change.  Elites will have to cede authority and permit more local variation and experimentation.  The public will have to be more tolerant.  Imperfections and bad outcomes should not be taken as proof of conspiracy or evil intent.  We should pay less heed to those who can only pour out condemnation and blame.  We should show greater appreciation for those who make constructive attempts to experiment and fix.

-Arnold Kling, from his Foreword to  Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public

Subtraction................................

"In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them."

-Austin Kleon,  Steal Like An Artist:  10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

And forget making good use of it..............

artist here               source here

The information tsunami..........

"Information, it turned out, has authority in proportion to its scarcity – the more there is, the less people believe."

-Martin Gurri, from this post that ends this way:

"But if you’re me, tracking the trajectory of this structural conflict between political elites who are bleeding authority and a public that is stuck in negation – if you’re me, you worry that in a few years we might look back on these dark times and think of Trump as the good old days…"