What Is “Information”?
Naively thinking more information is better, we swamp special efforts to find the truth
I’ve been late to Yuval Noah Harari’s most recent book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. It’s a shame, because while I’d assumed after Sapiens that Harari might be intellectually spent (that was a great book), it turns out he was not. In fact, far from it, with the topics in Nexus highly germane to our world and the problems we’ve allowed to surface.
One of the core concepts Harari explores is what constitutes “information,” landing — after much interesting and informative deliberation — on this functional definition:
Information is something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network.
In certain areas, these “new realities” are affixed to a search for the truth or affixed to reality. In many others — music, religion, fiction, myth, and more — they are not.
We represent those areas seeking truth and to probe reality, yet seem to have lost track of this distinction and its import, allowing what Harari considers “the naive view of information” to intrude and override our norms and society’s expectations.