Notes from a discussion between Simon, Deutsch, Shubik, & Daddario on Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World

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Key Takeaways

  • Abundance of information can lead to information overload, making it difficult to prioritize and process information effectively.
  • The value of information no longer lies in storage, but the ability to access and utilize it (which definitely still includes controlling access via the storage).
  • Growth of knowledge increases the power of actions + improved warning / consequence-prediction of our actions (48).
  • To deal with this overload, the options are (54-5):
    • Skip
    • Delay
    • Chunk
    • Rush (& increase error)
    • Filter / Reduce Information - to improve it, one must:
      1. Recognize Target
      2. Track & Maintain Focus on Target
      3. Interpret Object (search for generalizations / methaphors similar, but not quite just like it)
      4. Decide
      5. Act
      6. Feedback / Learn
  • Knowledge of the human is the limiting factor (therefore, human data is highly valuable and was traditionally hard to get).

Highlights

"We must know more about ourselves as data processors and decision makers; but knowledge of ourselves is expensive" (58-9, Deutsch).

"Delegating memories means decentralizing decision-making capabilities and accepting some redundancy by building more capabilities" (Deutsch, 55).

"In order to interpret relevance, we must think about knowledge not only as access to information but as the entire cycle of obtaining, storing, and processing information" (67, Deutsch).

"...science can only flourish when it is untrammeled and open-ended. We must be careful not to institutionalize our information systems in such a way that they inhibit or interfere with this necessary freedom" (Daddario, 38).

"a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon, 40-1).

"In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. ...we must... know how much it costs, it terms of scare attention, to receive it" (Simon, 41).

"An information-processing subsystem... will reduce the net demand on the rest of the organization's attention only if it absorbs more information previously received by others than it produces.... To be an attention conserve for an organization, an information-processing system (abbreviated IPS) must be an information condenser" (Simon, 42-3).

"'knowing' shifts from the storage or actual physical possession of information to the process of using or having access to it. ... science is: the process of replacing unordered masses of brute fact with tidy statements of orderly relations from which these facts can be inferred" (45, Simon).

"In a knowledge-rich world, [progress] lies in the direction of extracting and exploiting the patterns of the world so that far less information needs to be read, written, or stored. Progress depends on our ability to devise better and more powerful thinking programs for man and machine" (Simon, 46-7).

"Life requires us to balance risks; it does not permit us to avoid them altogether" (72, Simon).