Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1.3
Why people forecasts are usually wrong
Social connections are different from physical and biological connections. In biologi-
cal and physical webs the connections involve passing something tangible between the
nodes; be it electrons, phonons, momentum, or energy, in each case a physical quantity
is transferred. In a social web connections are made through telephone calls, Internet
messages, conversations in a coffee shop, letters, a meaningful glance at a cocktail party
and hundreds of other ways that involve the transmission of that ephemeral quantity
information. Consequently the prediction of the behavior of people involves knowing
how people create, send, receive and interpret information. It is therefore worthwhile
to take a little time to examine, at least qualitatively, what some of the limitations of
present-day information theory are when the web involves people.
Information transmission is considered classically to be the bundling of data into a
message, followed by propagating that message in space and time from the sender to
the receiver. The condition of the sender is not taken into account in considering the
creation and transmission of information, but in a social web the sending of a message
may markedly change the sender. This is the basis of psychoanalysis, for example, in
which telling the story of psychological trauma can change a person's experience of
trauma and modify subsequent behavior.
Historically information theory has a similar disregard for the receiver of informa-
tion. Receiving a message is not expected to change the receiver's ability to receive or
interpret subsequent messages and yet bad news can often result in a person's blocking
subsequent messages, at least in the short term. A spouse, on hearing of the psychologi-
cal trauma of his mate, can be overcome with pity, grief, remorse, pain (take your pick)
and disconnect from the sharing. What the receiver hears in the message determines
whether they continue to listen or how they interpret what they hear if they do continue
to listen.
Only the messages measured in bits, information throughput in a channel, and
error rates are considered in traditional information theory, with the sender and
receiver being ignored. This failure to account for what some might consider to be
the more important parts of an information web may be related to the mistaken
idea that meaning and understanding are not part of information. Meaning can be
included in the theory only through the characteristics of the sender, whereas under-
standing can be included in the theory only through the properties of the receiver.
Meaning and understanding are psychological properties of the humans involved in
the web and are not merely properties of a configuration of abstract symbols that
constitute the information; they are meta-properties of a message and they are not
unique.
But how is such a glaring omission as that of meaning and understanding made in
such an important area of science as information theory? The answer is that it was a
conscious choice made by Shannon in his 1948 paper and was, for better or worse,
accepted by subsequent generations of scientists and engineers. Shannon restricted the
application of information theory in the following way:
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