The Information Problem

Unlike times in the past, most contemporary problems are not the lack of resources or even resourcefulness, as it is the lack of valid information. In this, those who work hardest, are those with the most to gain from spreading misinformation, by which they hope to create their opportunity. Many even create a problem, even if none existed before. They may even come to believe that their distortions are actually true, particularly if they are successful at convincing many others to believe it so, concluding that so many other people couldn’t be wrong, even if they knew it to be false when they first came up with the idea.

Chief among these are those who propagate information -- which is the media collectively known as the newspapers, television, radio and other transmissions of advertising. But it is not the advertising that is paid for that is the greatest sources of misinformation, but the so-called “objective” articles and commentary of misinformed people or those without the ability to validate information effectively -- a category of folks who in a former era, were known as journalists -- or professional journalists. The entire information game has passed them by.

Such people now, are the most vulnerable to being deceived and manipulated -- because the information game is played on a much higher level than the old journalism could encompass. They have been supplanted by the new information processors -- people whose primary skill is the validation of information, before it is processed for truthfulness. That validation process cannot be done at the end -- it must be done at the beginning of the information process. It is the model of modern information processing, taught as computer processing, or data processing. It is actually a generic skill for processing any kind of information -- and not limited to processing information only about computers, or information processing per se.

That is the essential skill required today for everybody -- and renders the specialized skills and disciplines irrelevant. It breaks down the walls by which experience and knowledge of life has been fragmented, specialized and compartmentalized in the past. While there are those with exceptional abilities and predispositions in certain areas, it is not because they have delimited their field and range of study. The old Ph.D. of the 20th Century, has become a baseline for the well-informed person in the 21st Century.

Today’s generic researcher is capable of accessing quickly what took those in a previous era, a lifetime to be able to learn and access quickly -- but that now is a skill that is largely unnecessary in an era of unlimited memory and storage capacity. It used to be that a primary function of most human beings was to memorize and store information -- which we now realize, is not the highest use of human possibilities. Like a computer, the human is most effective processing real-time information, from moment to moment. If one can do that well, it doesn’t require memory and memorization to function in such a world.

That information is encoded in the very structure of every existence -- and can be examined directly, not as a memorized piece of information but verifiable as truth in the moment, of which there is sufficient processing capacity to do so now. The truth that is only a remembered thing, is no longer necessary, and may be counterproductive, in determining what is essential to know.

The real process of understanding, is eliminating all that is not essential to the task. In many people, that is 95% of what they know.