The brain seeks understanding through symmetry
It is a function of all of these characteristics that history is considered the best way to adapt and anticipate events to effectively manage evolving situations. This is the standard approach and thinking.
However, this is not a perfect or even an ideal approach. It is simply a function of a limited brain in which binary thinking is the default setting. Wisdom is recognizing the limits of such an approach. Indeed the smartest people in the room are often not those who know all of facts but understand context and meaning, without which facts can be rendered useless. (And you almost never know what percentage of the facts you know, or don’t know, and how relevant they might be). Such wisdom is critical because our brain’s need for energy-saving shortcuts will lead is to accepting very limited and flawed perceptions of everything, ourselves included.
The wise, creative mind will ask itself in a challenging situation these questions.
What are the simiarities that suggest a past situation is the same as the present one?
How are the current and past situations the same and how are they different?
How is the context and meaning of the current situation different from the previous one?
This is where intuition and creativity come in. Instead of opting for the simplistic approach (Kahneman’s System 1 thinking) one should look creatively for the similarities and the differences to determine how valuable any past information is.
But how do you know that?
You challenge any facts in an open-minded way.
Part of this critical analysis is understanding how the data has been framed and presented.
What is the data called?
For example a data set pertaining to murders might be called “Essential information for catching a serial killer” or “Some serial killer data”.
Who framed the data?
Think of a drug trial where a pharmaceutical company is trying to get approval from the FDA. Will the data be framed differently by the pharma company than by a panel of independent experts?
And any data, and “information” derived from it, are at least in part, if not wholly a product of human perception. Who decides what “information” is important, and who weights that “information”? Let’s imagine a study in which a thousand people were asked about their eating habits. How generalizable is such “information”? Questions abound. Are all genders, socioeconomic factors, cultural differences, and age groups equally represented? How reliable is the information provided? What other variables might contribute to eating preferences? What is the exformation, the “information” that has not been included?
Now all this applies to external data, presented in the form of independent facts. What about internal data, the information that resides within us from our own experiences, perceptions and education?
This has its flaws, too. It can be very colored by our individual experiences but it has something else that external data doesn’t. It has feeling, and feeling very often leads us to search for context and meaning.
Have you ever seen some “information” and felt “there’s something not right about this?” Somehow it doesn’t seem to resonate and this leads you on a deeper exploration of the data and your intuition.
Sometimes, when exploring what seems odd about “information”, you discover that you have misunderstood what was being presented. Other times, you will see the limitations of the presented data: not enough of it to be conclusive; very situation-specific and not relevant or generalizable; too many false assumptions, etc., etc.
It’s not that “information” is worthless, far from it. But “information” always needs to be critically analyzed for meaning and context, and that is a specifically human activity.
