On Information
I. The currency beneath everything
Information is the fundamental currency of the world.
It is the unit of exchange underlying money, relationships and energy.
Dollars, in all their capitalistic might, abstract away much richer information about whatever is being sold or purchased. “A bottle of wine aged for 10 years in Venice” can be compressed down to a $100 figure. A single number that encodes something about the effort of the seller and the demand of the consumer.
In relationships, years of shared experiences can be averaged into a single emotion like love.
And even in physics, information is often considered more fundamental than energy or matter; for no system can be described without it.
This is all to say that the world runs on abstractions. It is an onion, and tragically, most of us struggle to reason across it’s layers.
To that end, I romanticise about getting closer to truth. Learning to better traverse the layers of the onion and come back up richer in information. Learning to become an information trillionaire.
II. What makes information valuable
Information, like money can be of strong or weak currency. Useful, or useless. If there is a concept such as informational wealth, it would feel appropriate to define it as the possession of useful information.
By that standard, a TikTok kid sponging up bits – scroll by scroll – likely isn’t becoming the wealthiest mind in town, regardless of how many bits pass before his eyes, because little of that information gets retained by the end of the day, and can be made useful.
But, on the opposite extreme, a world memory champion might also be in the informational lower-class, since facts in isolation can still have extremely low utility.
As you might know from school, kids that do best on the test are rarely the once that memorise textbooks.
So you may say, if these two are not prime examples of informationally wealthy, who would be?
Humans tend to interact with information in three ways: via acquisition, processing and transmission. Informationally wealthy people tend to efficiently acquire information, compress it into useful models, and use those models to make better inferences and act more effectively.
For instance, a person who understands probability does not need to memorise hundreds of isolated facts about Poker. A handful of principles about expected value, variance and uncertainty let them reason across the game. And what’s more, if this person wanted to play Blackjack or Roulette, their models would transfer, while the memoriser would need to learn an entirely new handbook of facts. That probabilistic thinker may possess fewer facts, but more useful information or models that allow him to reason across the informational layers of the onion.
And as it goes with wealth, when you are poor, money compounds linearly, when you are middle class, it compounds quadratically, and when you are rich, it compounds exponentially.
I think the same holds with informational wealth. The bigger your network of useful models becomes, the cheaper each new piece of useful information becomes to acquire, and thus the more their value compounds over time.
III. How to become information-rich
Since there exists more and less useful information, there must exist more and less useful methods for acquiring it, processing it, and transmitting it.
For instance, I think some school subjects teach objectively better models for processing information than others. If you’re lucky, Astrology might teach you facts about our planet system (in addition to all the metaphysical woo), but Astronomy will equip you with models of gravity, which you could use to reason about many planets, even those you haven’t seen before.
I think the defining skill of the informationally wealthy is thus in identifying, building and using good world-models. A good model compresses thousands of observations into a small number of rules without throwing away the essence. Newton’s laws compress countless falling apples and orbiting planets into a few equations. Evolution compresses the apparent chaos of biology into a simple concept of selection pressure. Supply and demand compress millions of individual purchasing decisions into a simple relationship between scarcity and price.
In that sense, the highest-yield information is the one that helps you interpret other information.
So, chase things that make everything else easier to understand in your world.
In my case, I want to learn to describe the world precisely, which calls for charting the depths of maths; question what any of it means, which means finding good models in philosophy; manipulate it even at the smallest of scales, which demands physics; rally people towards shared objectives, which takes understanding sociology; and share the joy of life along the way, which calls for learning to be human.
There is no end to how deep you can go, so you’ll dig through a lot of dirt before striking gold. But good models compound, so every one that you do get will make the next one easier to find.
Happy digging!