How does one quantify an amount of information? Is it the amount of encoding it requires, per the theory of Shannon? Or is it, say, the amount of energy one’s graymatter consumes processing that information? It’s no complex dilemma, the physical can be quantified, and the rest is largely target dependent (let me put to rest any speculation - I am no fan of mind-matter duality (In the sense that I believe that one day we might be able to fundamentally weigh a lot of the quantities that are now considered ‘not-measurable’)). But in the context of our discussion, which is about the quantity of information relating to the value it has to us, the need for any fundamental unit of measure is absent, because we are concerned with the generality of its value and not in the specifics like how important might the knowledge of tomorrow's SENSEX high be to you and me. This same question, or some primitive version of it has been the body of one too many unfinished essays of mine, like wanting to see if the Chomskian idea of memes could generalise and be a fundamental unit of all the information around us, or the piece about being fed-up with my own mindless social media consumption (To be honest I try to finish this one again and again every 2-3 months).

There couldn’t be a better case study for this than the internet. In 2021, there are even fashionable words to clearly mark what could be an important differentiator between the valuable and the invaluable: The ‘Long form’ and the ‘Short form’. I think one can readily see how this difference is important, let’s say we are presented with two new and totally unrelated pieces of information, one in the form of a 10 second video and the other an editorial piece. Now, it is only natural that after processing them, we readily form opinions on both the subjects. But the holes in reasoning in the first case are not filled in by smaller truths that derive from reasoning, but from axioms that backtrack from this newly gained knowledge, assuming at every stage that the new knowledge is true (or false, if you never liked what was in that 10 second clip to begin with). The harm from this could largely be consciously minimised by the average person, if he/she refuses to take a position before examining the subject further and till atleast a few of the supporting arguments for the matter could be drawn directly from his/her first principles. While we are on the topic of the internet, one particularly vexing aspect of modern internet usage that we should discuss is non-linear recommendation systems. On second thought, I’ll not even delve into this, non-linear recommendation systems are straight up malicious. It’s mindless consumption.

One could also say that no information really is worthless, because value is only evident in comparison. So how much noise is really needed? Or is it needed at all? Could we, by only consuming ‘valuable’ information, continually raise our standard of what is ‘valuable’. Honestly, I do not know. But again, would anyone consciously resign themselves to this randomness and consume what it throws at them?