Information and Value Creation
This text is about the concept of information and about defining how value can be created. The general idea is that information is the most atomic and essential feature of any living creature and that by improving the quality of the information we possess and spread we can create value.
Information is The Base of Life
To understand the importance of information the first step is realising that all living creatures (including oursleves) are simply bundles of information. This is usually refered to as DNA. Humans can be seen as an initial bundle of information (genetics) that has the capacity to ingest more information (knowledge and impressions). This is often seen as nature (genetics) and nurture (the things learned that aren't genetically inherited). Knowing that all humans are made of information, it seems obvious that to improve humans the way to go is increase the "quality" of the information we possess. Here we define quality as "something truthful or as close to the truth as possible", so high quality information equals information considered legitimate. As far as we know, this can be done via nature and nurture.
Create Value
Regardless of one's opinion about nurture vs nature, it's obvious that
information is passed through DNA and through education/teaching/nurture.
Since information is the base of our existence, improving the information we
possess will improve humankind. There are two ways of doing that: improving our DNA
and improving the information acquired during our lifetime. To create value, we must
therefore hold valuable high quality information (truthful information) and
share it with other people. There are a few requirements to be able to do this:
a methodical approach to discern and filter high quality information from
low quality information, the ability to gain valuable information and the
skill to share this information properly.
All of these three requirements are extremely hard to acheive. Filtering
good information is a very non trivial task that often implies previous knowledge
that have to be truthful. In other words, for someone to properly
assess the quality of an information, that person must hold truths about
all the pre-required knowledge related to that information. If one of the
information this person possess about pre-required knowledge is not true,
then his whole knowledge tree is biased and his judgement will probably be wrong.
Judgment in general is a very sketchy process. To be able to judge someone or
something (information) properly, one must ensure that his knowledge tree
is based on truths (on high quality information). For example, accessing
if a car is good or not requires knowing truths about all of it's components,
which is simply unpractical and impossible for most people. This is why we have
experts, the problem with experts is that we rely on them without even
really knowing if the truths they hold is true (it's
most likely not considering how hard gathering high quality information really is).
As you understand by now,
information is really touchy and precious: it's hard to gather good information and
to access if the information is good or not.
Let's get back to value creation. We know that to create value, we must
have high quality information and pass it to others
(because by passing quality information to others we improve
the quality and amount of good information they hold and therefore we improve
their whole being since we already concluded that humans were bundles of information).
So we need to obtain information, be able to filter it properly (very hard to do)
and share it with others. These three steps are essential to value creation
and have the following requirements: be an expert in something (to acquire true knowledge),
be very critical and introspective (to ensure your knowledge tree is decent in order
to judge the quality of information properly) and have decent communication skills
to share it with others.
In conclusion, information is extremely important and is the real root
of anything valuable. The issue is that it's extremely hard to hold
truthful information for various reasons and it's also hard to share
it with others. Thus, creating value is far from an easy task but it's
definitely the most valuable and rewarding task of all.