INFORMATION ABOUT INFORMATION

        Let’s move on the properties of information. The first step to studying of properties is to structure the ocean of information that surrounds us. Let’s initially divide the information into classes. I distinguish 8 classes of information that can be grouped into 4 groups, since the classes in each group are interconnected, but opposite to each other. These are:

• Useless and Useful information;

• Direct and Parainformation;

• Detailed and Generalized information;

• Quality and low-quality information.

       Based on this classification, each information can have 4 facets. For example, the information can be useful, detailed, direct, qualitative. Mathematical calculations say that the number of combinations of these facets can be 16.

       Now let’s distinguish types and kinds of information. For the rigor of our study and clarity of understanding I will give definitions of each class, type, kind and subkind of information.

Direct Information is information that comes to the recipient from the provider or source of information.

Parainformation is information that arises at the recipient of information under the influence of received informations, and does not come from anywhere. For example, when receiving information that you will be given the smartphone “Samsung” the parainformations arise about high quality of this phone. In everyday life parainformation is closely related to, but does not exhaust, such concepts as assumed information, since assumption is made on the base of direct information (fact).

Generalized Information is information that is reduced to a set of informations. For example, when it is state that organization worked better in the current year than in the previous one.

Detailed Information is information that has not been generalized, on the basis of which generalization is made.

Useless Information is information that is not necessary for the decision making and generating new information.

        Here I want to note that I consider 2 cases of using information in this book: - for decision making and for generating new information including developing an opinion about something or somebody, abstracting from cases when information is used for entertainment (to spend time), for communication (to chat).

Useless information is divided into 2 types:

• Information that is not relevant to the matter;

• Excessive Information.  

       As for information that is irrelevant, everything is obvious when you need to make a decision whether to launch new product (for example, a knitted product), the recipe for preparing a dish is information that completely irrelevant to this. The difficulty is that sometimes the decision can be made in the future. Therefore, when we talk about this type of useless information, it is useless now or in the foreseeable future.

Excessive Information is information in excess of what is necessary for decision making and generating new information. Unlike irrelevant information, excessive information is relevant to making a specific decision and generating new information but it is not needed in a given situation. Excessive information is divided into 2 kinds: - unnecessary detailing information and repeated information. In turn repeated information is divided into the trivial repeated information and when the same thing is said in different words. Negative results of excessive information using are wasted time and distraction from the main thing. Sometimes, however it can be used to hide the main thing, but we talk about this separately in this book. 

Useful Information is information that is necessary for making specific decision and generating new information.

Quality Information is information that adequately reflects reality.

Low-quality information is information that is not adequately reflects reality.

Let’s first look at pow-quality information (LI), that will help us understand what the quality information is?

 

Insert: The answer of AI

       Most often low-quality information is also called Disinformation. Disinformation is usually understood as fiction or inaccurate (distorted) information. In fact, disinformation should be included incomplete information and incorrectly generalized information.

Moreover, disinformation is only one type of low-quality information. In general, the composition of low-quality information is presented by 3 types of information:

1. Disinformation;

2. Pseudoinformation;

3. Incorrect parainformation.

       Most often, if you are asked to say what low-quality information is, the answers will be that it is disinformation, deception (lies), fiction, gossip, inaccurate information, slander, etc. Despite the abundance of terms, and based on structure of information presented in this book, only 3 from 4 types of disinformation are meant (inaccurate, fiction, incorrectly generalized), and in general there are 10 kinds of low-quality information, that is, people mostly see only tip of the iceberg (30 percent). Let’s examine iceberg as a whole.

Disinformation includes the following kinds of information:

• Inaccurate (distorted) information;

• Fictitious information;

• Incomplete information;

• Incorrectly generalized information.

       As for inaccurate and fictitious information everything is obvious here – this is what in everyday life is designated as lie, deception, fiction, slander. Let’s stop in more details on incomplete information and incorrectly generalized information.

         Incomplete information is one of the most common and most insidious kinds of disinformation. It was not for nothing the Jesuit said: “Tell the truth, the only truth, nothing except truth, but God forbid you tell the whole truth”. To identify this kind of disinformation you need to ask a revealing questions or to create the situation and conduct metainforming. I will analyze this type of questions as revealing ones together with other types of questions late when considering structure of the questions.

       The most common answer to the question asked by the recipient of information when (and if) when he or she knows about the missing informations: - “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”, and the most common answer is: - “You didn’t ask!”.

       I will give an example from my own practice. As an alpine skier, I usually go to Alps once a year to ski with a team about 10 people. Alpine skiing is an unsafe sport, so upon returning I have to answer questions from my wife, who is worried at home. Once, to the general question: “How was your skiing?” I provided the following information: “Not bad, everyone is alive and well”. At the same time, I kept silent about the fact that there were 2 minor incidents in the group: - one person flew off from the slope (no injuries, bruises) and one collided with another skier (no injuries, bruises, helmet cracked). Thus, the information was incomplete. If the information was complete, perhaps next time my wife would be against my trip.

        Incomplete information is most often еру basis for the appearance another kind of low-quality information – incorrectly generalized information, and the second question is whether the incompleteness of information was used for the incorrect generalization intentionally or not.

       The incompleteness of information can have different consequences in terms of decision making or new information generation depending on the level of value of the information (we will consider this property below). The more valuable information the more negative consequences of using incomplete information.

       I would like to notice that we are talking about incompleteness of detailed information, because generalized information is incomplete information by definition and their properties should be considered separately.

       Here the question arises whether the incomplete information is always low-quality information. The answer is no, only in cases when incorrect conclusion (generalized information) is made on its basis. In some cases, it is not necessary to consider all informations to make conclusion (generalization), it is enough to consider the main (basic, representative) informations.   

Incorrectly Generalized Information – when information, to which a set of detailed informations are reduced, does not adequately reflect the reality.  Helga Drummond, a professor at the University of Liverpool gives the following example.

During the Gulf War (operation “Desert Storm”) one of the reports was about the successful bombing. It was reported that about 80% of bombs reached their targets. However, it was not reported that significant number of targets hit were dummies and that the enemy suffered minor damage [9, c.54].

        In this case the information “successful bombing” is incorrectly generalized information. To identify incorrectly generalized information, it needs to obtain detailed informations on the basis of which the generalized information was obtained. And here it is appropriate to recall another catch phrase: “the devil is in the details”, and the devilry is that only one detailed information can refute generalized information (conclusion). This is used in the falsification method (search the detailed informations which refutes the conclusion or hypothesis). 

       Examples of unintentional incorrect generalization abound in Nassim Taleb’s famous book The Black Swan: unpredictability of the black swan [14]. The book begins with an example when generalization that all swans are white is made without taking into the account the information that there are black swans in certain region.

       The next type of low-quality information is pseudo-information or unclear information. Pseud-information is information that includes several images reflecting one original and/or one image for several originals.

Let me explain with examples;

• Several informations reflect one original – for example a letter of one of the banks to the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus contained request for the allocation of credit resources, only in one place of the letter was the amount 12.5 billion of rubles and in another – 12.5 million of rubles.

• Several originals are reflecting in one information, for example, in instruction for using a cell phone (ancient, push-button) it was reported that to perform a certain function it needs to press the middle button in combination with another button. However, this type of phone had two types of buttons – functional and for dialing a number.  

• a combination of the first two cases, for example, when there are several reasons and several consequences and each of the consequences can be caused by each of the reasons under consideration. For example, these are common symptoms of different diseases (temperature, headache, nausea).  

       Let’s move to the next interesting type of low-quality information – incorrect parainformation. It includes the following kinds of parainformation.

Inaccurate parainformation is parainformation that differs from the parainformation that exists in reality. I will give an example of incorrect parainformation from my practice, which is some curious. The deputy head of one state governing bodies, namely the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus was, sent a document that returned from him with resolution: - “What is this?”. Based on this information the employee of this body assumed that the head did not quite understand the meaning of the document.                    Therefore, during the day the staff prepared detailed explanatory information. The assumption (parainformation) turned out to be inaccurate. The accurate parainformation was: - “Why is the submitted document printed on so such poor quality paper?”.   

Unjustified parainformation is parainformation that doesn’t exist in reality. Examples of unjustified parainformation includes giving hiding meaning to statements into which the speaker only intends the literal meaning, reading hints where no one actually exist, attributing intentions and designs to somebody that they do not have.

        Parainformation is closely connected with such a genre as anecdote, which causes laughter because the parainformations formed at the beginning are not at all the same as that which reveal at the end of the anecdote. Therefore, as example of unjustified parainformation I will give an anecdote: - “When the husband went fishing and didn’t take a fishing rod, the wife thought (unjustified parainformation) that he had second fishing rod”.

Unsuccessful parainformation is parainformation that in not created, although it exists in reality. For example, not catching a hint, no guessing someone’s intention. And again an anecdote: - “A man come to the shoes store with the box under his arm and asks the saleswomen: - “I bought the shoes from you the day before yesterday, I put them on twice and a toe come out of my left one! The saleswomen yawing: - “What would you like to see come out of it?”.

       Speaking about parainformation it needs also to note that it potentially carries a greater possibility of the appearance of low-quality information then direct information due to its nature. Therefore, it is obvious that the best way to check assumed information is to obtain the direct information. However, a person, realizing (or may be not enough realizing) that he is dealing with parainformation and having the opportunity to obtain direct information, does not always realize this opportunity. In other words, sometimes he is ready to assume for a long time rather than to find out (to ask). By the way, this is what happened in the above example with inaccurate parainformation. The whole day was spent to prepare an explanatory note, which turned out to be unnecessary.

       The analysis of the structure of information and in particular useless and low-quality information allow us to describe the characteristic of Useful and Quality Information (UQI) – this is relevant, non-fictional, accurate (at the time of decision making - actual), clear, complete information, in which there is no excessive information, the generalized information is correct and the parainformation is true. Thus, UQI has 8 characteristic (parameters).

      To fully describe the structure of information it needs to highlight two more kinds of information: - positioning information and methodological information.

There is a number of informations tied with a single information and that position this information, i.e. set coordinates for finding this information in the ocean of informations. Let’s call described set of informations positioning informations.

Positioning Informations (PI) are important parainformations that set coordinates of information. PI are informations that are answers to the following 5 questions:

1. Where is the information located?

2. When was the information created?

3. What is the source (primary source) of information (who created the information)?

4. What is the form of presentation of the information?

5. To whom was the information transmitted?

       Since the deep nature of information is connected with change of the state of objects, and this process has an essential time characteristic, then among 5 positioning informations most important is information that is the answer to the question: “When was the information created?”. The second most important (the reader will understand later) information is information that is the answer to the question: “What is the source of information?”. 

       Therefore, to obtain UQI it is important to identify at least 2 positioning informations that are answer to the questions: - “When was the information created?” and What is the source of information and is it the original source?”.

       Separately it is necessary to highlight informations describing the method of an information obtaining (creating). These are informations that are answers to question: “How was the information obtained (created)?” Let’s call these informations like methodological informations.

Thus, information has a complex structure and in order to cover it in its entirety, we will present the structure of information in the form of diagram.