In the beginning was the data

Are we losing wisdom?

There is a certain hierarchy in which the content of human mind is organized, and considering the way in which we understand this content, it can take higher forms of understanding in the human mind. In the field of knowledge management this is referred to in various ways, but we know it commonly as the knowledge pyramid, or the DIKIW¹ scheme. Russell L. Ackoff, a pioneer in the field of systems thinking and knowledge management, divided the content of human mind in five categories - Data, Information, Knowledge, Insight, and Wisdom.

Thomas S. Elliot was one of the first ones to formalize this hierarchy (or at least some aspects of it) even before the existence of the internet and computers. He points out the erosion of the knowledge pyramid (see the poem excerpt above), that the higher levels in the hierarchy (wisdom, insight and knowledge) are getting lost in the information. Even though this piece of wisdom was written a lifetime ago, it is more meaningful than ever today. We live in the age where we are overloaded by the amount of information on a daily basis. This article is written during the Coronavirus pandemics - the prime example of the information flood. For all of the information out there, almost all of us are personally responsible to manage what we are exposed to. And sometimes it can feel like we are drowning in the flood.

Before we had an app for everything, we would distribute the burden of living and organizing our lives to different outlets. If you wanted to book a holiday and accommodation, you would go to a travel agency (if you could afford one), and they would arrange everything. Many of us are nowadays responsible for arranging this ourselves now, and we rely on apps such as tripadvisor and AirBNB. If you wanted to know what is happening in our surroundings and worldwide, you would turn to the outlets responsible to provide us with information and summarize crucial insights about the world. Now many of us use Facebook and Twitter as news feed, which is overflooding us with information.

The essential idea behind journalism is to take the key information and data, and provide to the public insights and knowledge. By doing this, it would help people to make sense of the information, filter out the unimportant things, and combine many pieces of data and information into a coherent picture of the world for us to understand easier.

“In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

Climbing up the hierarchy

If case we are left to our own devices, we can manage better this flood of information if we understand the DIKIW hierarchy. Few people are taught how to discern between what is data, what is information, what is knowledge, and how to get insight and wisdom from them. If you haven’t been aware of this concept, or haven’t been contemplating on differences between information, knowledge, and insight, understanding those better could help you to navigate your way while scrolling on your phone or laptop, or through your TV channels. Understanding is the process with which we can transition to the next level of hieararchy. However, it all starts with data…

How to seek knowledge

In first weeks of the Coronavirus pandemics, there were numerous examples of major media outlets misinterpreting the data and the information that is out there. After all, most of journalists are not properly trained in data literacy. Some of the media outlets that do have data journalists on their payroll put out fantastic things which gave us key insights, and arguably saved countless lives.

As the rise in information techologies led to the faster news cycle, many media outlets adapted by producing news faster. What was left in the end was just information, and in the coronavirus news cylce, most of news available just provides us with data and information. News stories telling us every day how many new cases of Coronavirus are not that relevant to us in a wider scheme of things².

If the news story you are reading just says something similar to “3 new cases registered yesterday”, unless it is new in the area, this news story is not that relevant for you, and you can give into the FOMO. What they tell us is just information with little context, making it not more valuable than a row in a spreadsheet. Spending too much time in the noise of data that such news stories tell us can leave us with little mental space for other things. Instead, look for stories that summarize the information and provide you with knowledge and insight. The novel nature of the Coronavirus means that we still know very little about it, however new discoveries and insights are being published each day. Some of the best outlets for most recent insights are preprint servers for scientific articles and scientific journals. However, these are often written for an expert audience in mind, and the published manuscripts can be difficult enough to read, let alone to analyze critically.

All of this put a tremendous burden on the journalists, and on the people communicating to the public about the Coronavirus situation. In order to understand what is happening and convey that to the public, you need to be data literate, understand public health and epidemiology, and be scientifically literate all in addition to your main job. When the issue on which you need to report is complex and requires knowledge from multiple disciplines, it is difficult to expect that all of the media will have adequate reporting on the issue. The burden is ultimately on us, end receivers of information, since we need to choose ourselves what are the sources that we are following (assuming that we have access to free press). We can filter the amount of data and information we recieve, and seek to read or listen to stories and reports that provide us with knowledge and insight. Some media outlets recognized this, and they are amplifying stories that do exactly this.

This text does not aim to tell you how to find such outlets, but to outline what you should seek in media outlets. A good way to start seeking them is to listen to credible sources; website www.ourworldindata.org is doing a great job in tracking and compiling many different data sources and stories, and its founder Max Roser is sharing other relevant sources as well. One of the best curated lists on insightful articles on the Coronavirus pandemics I have seen so far is by The Pudding. They are updating the Twitter thread with articles continuously, and if you want to understand better what it means to take data and information, and turn them into knowledge and insight, make sure you read some of these articles.

Frank Zappa - Packard Goose

¹ - different authors use different paradigms. In this context, I’ve chose the DIKIW paradigm. ² - this only applies from a context of end-reciever of news. For data practicioners, humanizing data is a must!