Data & Information
… and getting information from data
How do you define being smart? What does it mean at all?
Is it the size of data you store in your brain?
Is it your book count? Is it your final grade?
Or is it combining different concepts? Finding new patterns? Being open to challenges and positive change?
Is it accepting you don’t know anything? Is it rejecting that you already know?
Answering philosophical questions is not my thing, I guess, so I’ll cut to chase.
The More Facts You Know, The Smarter You Get?
In my opinion, knowing a lot of facts doesn’t necessarily make you smarter.
Being smart has a direct relationship with being able to transfer your knowledge from field A to field B.
So if you are smart, you can also figure it on your own, how to find the fact #16, given facts #1, …, #15.
But it gets interesting: If you in fact learn more facts, you are more likely to recognize hidden patterns, which makes you more likely smarter.
But it is time-consuming to take in so many facts.
What if we had the option to not grok everything but still find the patterns?
So we find out that most of the textbook facts are boring and underrated. Instead, it is cool to learn how to learn better.
After graduating from an university, you won’t be using every piece of information that you learned in weeks before graduation exam.
You will rather remember how you learned, which book you have read to get to the mindset you once had.
So, with this in mind, can we safely assume that someone who learns how to learn faster becomes smarter?
Who cares if you know so much facts? People are not driven by facts.
Wars didn’t happen just because someone realized a fact.
Sometimes it is more than facts that creates an illusion, it is information.
Does Information Drive The World?
Diffen.com defines data and information as follows:
Data: Data is raw, unorganized facts that need to be processed. Data can be something simple and seemingly random and useless until it is organized.
Information: When data is processed, organized, structured or presented in a given context so as to make it useful, it is called information.
It is okay to know so much about thoughts of Ancient Greek philosophers, but studying philosophers doesn’t make you a philosopher. Likewise knowing what someone smarter knows doesn’t make you smarter.
Yeah data is the new gold. But information is diamond.
We are not machines storing ones and zeros. We are processing human bits.
Information is relevant for us. Information makes us smarter. Context makes us smarter.
How to Get More Information?
So what do we need?
We need to gain more information from data.
But how?
Using statistics, advanced math, machine learning…
Statisticians are not always liars. Statistics is not always used for manipulation. Statistics is not the art of lying.
It finds a compromise between people, rather than trying to find the correct answer. It finds the most correct answer.
So what do you think, who decides which is the most correct answer?
I tried to answer this question in my other article. Thank you for reading!
