You Don’t Need To Know Everything
We are bombarded by information. Some of this information is useful. But the vast majority is irrelevant noise at best, or damaging at worst. Like many people, I find myself expending a lot of energy filtering out the onslaught of irrelevance. The signal-to-noise ratio feels especially bad during times of crisis, when multiple narratives compete for our limited attention. As Yuval Harari writes in Home Deus, “In ancient times, having power meant having access to information. Today, having power means knowing what to ignore.”
In making good decisions, we should think carefully about what kinds of information, and how much of it, we need. How much information is enough, how much is too much, how much do we need to know, what should we ignore, and how do we determine when we know enough?
The purpose of maps
The phrase ‘the map is not the territory’ is attributed to Alfred Korzybsk in the 1930s. “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” In other words, a map is a limited representation of reality. In fact, it’s intentionally limited. Nobody ever tried to create a map that reflected the territory with complete accuracy. Why?
Because the territory is too big and too complex to understand in its entirety. There’s far too much happening on it. The things we really want to see are mostly obscured by loads of other things we don’t want to see. So we ‘zoom in’ and narrow the scope of the map. We intentionally restrict it, so it shows only the things within the boundaries of what’s important to us for a given purpose. Different people therefore need different maps. They need to see different parts of the territory, from different perspectives, with different levels of detail.
Different people, different information
Not everyone needs (or wants) to know the same information. A company’s senior management team, for example, might want to see an organisational chart depicting the management structure and key subordinates. However, they probably don’t need to see every single employee in the company. On the other hand, a manager who is lower down the organisational hierarchy might need a chart that focuses only on their particular division, but in greater detail. It’s similar when thinking about the difference between priorities and perceptions at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.
But regardless, we all have to consider the same fundamental questions: what’s the situation, what am I trying to achieve, what do I need to know, and what can I ignore?
We don’t need to know absolutely everything. If we tried this, our map would resemble the territory with such excruciating detail that it would be overwhelming to the point of being useless. Such a map would take the full complexity of reality and throw this right back at us. As Korzybsk said, the fact that a map represents a structural abstraction of territory is what “accounts for its usefulness”. But we also don’t want to know nothing. We don’t want the map to include just some basic gridlines and the words “Here lies the territory” pasted across the middle. We want something between these extremes.
More information ≠ more signal
For many of us, the problem is not that our maps of the world include too little information, but too much. The more information we add, the more likely we are to include information that’s not useful at best, or misleading at worst. Also, increasing the amount of information does not necessarily lead to a proportionate increase in our understanding. Adding more information might result in a greater ability to make sense of things, but it’s also likely to result in greater accumulated nonsense and meaninglessness. Nassim Taleb summarises this phenomenon in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder in relation to news consumption:
A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities — even in moderate quantities… The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionately likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio… Say you look at information on a yearly basis… Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)… This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal… [Newspapers] need to fill their pages every day with a set of news items — particularly those news items also dealt with by other newspapers. But to do things right, they ought to learn to keep silent in the absence of news of significance. Newspapers should be of two-line length on some days, two hundred pages on others — in proportion to the intensity of the signal. But of course they want to make money and need to sell us junk food.
Data and decisions
The same insight applies to the relationship between the volume of information and the quality of our decision-making. Increases in the former don’t necessarily result in increases in the latter. This is especially true in our over-saturated and under-nourished information environment. Indeed, we often hear people clamour for ‘more data’ in the hope of improving the quality of their understanding and decision-making. The assumption is that if only they had enough data, or even just more data than they currently have, then they would understand situations better and make better decisions. As the philosopher Alan Watts once said:
People have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision in any given situation is infinite.
Purpose-driven information consumption
What we actually need is the right information, at the right time, in the right quantity, with the right quality, obtained for a particular purpose, and communicated in a meaningful way to achieve a particular result. And usually, that result is the ability to make some kind of decision. When thinking about what type, quality, and quantity of information we need to navigate a complex and uncertain world, we can think about our objective(s) and work backwards:
- What’s the situation (i.e., what’s the context of the problem)?
- What am I trying to achieve (i.e., what decisions do I need to make)?
- What do I need to know in order to make those decisions?
- What do I not need to know (i.e., what can I ignore)?
Often, the hardest part is step two: identifying what we’re trying to achieve and what decisions we’re facing. Once we’ve defined this clearly, the next hardest part is figuring out what information and insights we need to support these decisions. Once we’ve done that, a lot (perhaps most) of the remaining information that we encounter falls into the category of things we don’t need to know.
This might seem like an overly structured or even rigid way to approach information consumption in our daily lives. But how many of us regularly find ourselves weighed down by an overload of information, data, news, and opinions? It can get to the point where the information we consume ends us consuming us. If you’re one of those people who rarely gets the feeling of information overload, and instead feels like the signal-to-noise ratio of what you’re consuming is just fine, then that’s great. If not, try the approach above.
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