Knowledge and Information

One of my basic convictions is that symbol manipulation ability is what distinguishes intelligent entities from non-intelligent ones. For manipulating increasingly larger chunks of symbols, we create higher level symbols which encode a number of lower level symbols. Vocabulary is then that set of symbols. I would define an extensive vocabulary as one with a large number of symbols, that is, the width of the vocabulary. Vocabulary can also be more or less intensive, depending upon the complexity – or depth – of the symbols. Higher intelligences have the need and the capacity to handle more extensive and intensive vocabularies.

Vocabulary matters. It allows us to reason about the real world more effectively. It allows us to avoid illogical constructs arrived at through ill-defined and vague ideas poorly understood and consequently improperly communicated.

One of my pet peeves (which stimulated this comment) is the conflating of ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. They are cats of two distinct breeds and are not interchangeable. The first does not require a brain whereas the latter cannot exist outside a brain. A telephone directory does not have knowledge of my phone number; it merely represents that data as information. When you look up and internalize that information, you have knowledge of my phone number.

Information is what economists call a public good (non-rival, mainly) while knowledge is a private good because it is associated with a brain. The same amount of information can lead to a lesser or greater amount of knowledge depending upon how many brains internalize that information.

The revolutions in ICT has lead to a decrease in the cost of replicating and disseminating information. It has not reduced the effort required for information to be incorporate in a brain into knowledge. It is an information revolution; it is arguably not a knowledge revolution. There is an explosion in information (some would argue that it is merely a data explosion) maybe but certainly not a knowledge explosion. Indeed, too much information – information overload – can lead to a decrease in knowledge acquired because humans have limited CPU power and if too much is used up in input of information, less CPU capacity is available for processing the information into useful knowledge.

From the introduction that Rajesh Jain quotes in one of his tech talks, it is not clear to me that Mokyr distinguishes between knowledge and information. With the distinction in mind, it is interesting to re-read the quoted text and find evidence of much muddled thinking.

In my own field of development economics, I have noted a similar muddling of two very distinct concepts: growth and development. Not being able to distinguish between the two often leads policy makers to mistake growth for development: the former is neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter. So also, more information is neither necessary nor sufficient for greater knowledge.

Finally, let’s keep in mind the following: Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom, and finally wisdom is not enlightenment.

Numbers – 5

The Business Standard of 12th Jan 2004 carries an item on page 3 with the heading 33 million more Indians in poor list in 2001-02. The percentage of people below the poverty line is estimated to be around 25. That is, India has about 250 million people who are so unimaginably poor that they can’t cross the poverty line that is set way below what can be considered necessary for a human existence. For all the progress India is supposedly making, we have increased the absolute numbers of the abjectly poor by 33,000,000 in that one year alone.

Let’s put the number of the abjectly poor in perspective. Consider the number of people below the poverty line at the time of India’s independence. We had about 350 million people then. Assuming that 50 percent of them were below the poverty line then, there were 175 million abjectly poor people then. Now, about 55 years later, we have 250 abjectly poor people. There has been an increase of 75 million in the ranks of the abjectly poor.

Whatever else one can say about India’s progress, there is no way anyone can claim that India has made any progress in reducing poverty. Hundreds of billions of rupees have been spent in poverty reduction and yet we have not able to not just reduce poverty, we have actually seen an increase in the number of the poor.

How on earth could we have achieved this: spending huge amounts and still not being able to reduce the absolute headcount of the abjectly poor? The answer is not hard to find. The analogy I use is this: imagine trying to fill a leaky bucket. There is no way of ever filling it if the rate at which the bucket leaks is greater than the rate at which water flows into it. India’s misfortune is that the rate at which the population of the abjectly poor increases overwhelmes the resources available to lift people out of poverty.

Consider this report from the BBC simply titled 24 Children:

In the small town of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, down an alleyway off the main street and behind some shops, is the home of Mohammed Omar and his wife, Aasiyah Begum… They have 24 children… Aasiyah Begum has given birth to 29 children she thinks, but five have died.

Of the hundreds of millions of Indians who are abjectly poor, one thing we can be sure of: to a first approximation, they are poor because their parents were abjectly poor. Poverty, like riches and skin color, is inherited.

Amartya Sen, an economist who has spent some time thinking about the matter of poverty, had once remarked that if poverty were a contagious disease, the rich would eradicate it pretty rapidly. I see his point, that in the short run, poverty is not contagious. But I feel that in the long run, poverty is highly contagious. The deadweight of the poor can produce sufficient friction in the workings of the economy that even the non-poor find it difficult to survive.

Poverty is the outcome or consequence of a large number of factors. Oppression and exploitation are certainly very potent factors that keep the poor in poverty. But the most important factor for the poverty of the poor is, in my considered opinion, the real uncontrolled fecundity of the poor. I realize that in this age of political correctness and global social forums, this is not going to make me popular.

The question of economic development of the country cannot be answered without reference to the poor. We need to ask hard questions and if the answer turns out to be less than palatable for some people, so be it. But we cannot pretend that we can solve problems without understanding fully what are the causal factors that create them.

Numbers — 4

No one reading this is likely to be suffering from malnutrition, illiteracy, lack of health care, lack of drinking water, and any of the marvels of modern technology such as digital gizmos and jet travel. That is so because we are sitting on top of a very large pyramid at the bottom of which are the toiling thousands of millions. The top of the pyramid is mostly populated by the white people of affluent western advanced industrialized countries but they are not alone. The economic elite in poor underdeveloped countries around the world also rest content on the top of the pyramid.

We – you and I – belong to that elite 20 percent of the world’s population, whether you are in Mumbai or Manhattan.

The gap between us and them at the bottom is wide and becoming wider still. A number of questions need to asked and then answered. How wide is the gap? Is that gap good or bad? Can the gap be eliminated? Should it be eliminated? Will it be eliminated? Whose job is it to eliminate the gap? Which side of the gap does the fault lie? Should the gap be filled by leveling things downwards or should things be leveled upwards? Is it possible to level it upwards?

Before we get to the normative questions, we should have knowledge of what is. We have all come across the usual list of standard laments such as the following from a Cornell University report:

  • One reason for the increase in malnutrition is that production of grains per capita has been declining since 1983. Grains provide 80 percent to 90 percent of the world’s food. Each additional human further reduces available food per capita.
  • The reasons for this per capita decrease in food production are a 20 percent decline in cropland per capita, a 15 percent decrease in water for irrigation and a 23 percent drop in the use of fertilizers.
  • Biotechnology and other technologies apparently have not been implemented fast enough to prevent declines in per capita food production during the past 17 years.
  • Considering the resources likely to be available in A.D. 2100, the optimal world population would be about 2 billion, with a standard of living about half that of the United States in the 1990s, or at the standard experienced by the average European.

I don’t trust projections that talk about the standard of living of people a hundred years hence. Could anyone living in the year 1900 have imagined any of the things lying around your desktop today? They could not have imagined any of the things we take for granted. They could not have imagined that 2 billion people – that is more people than entire population of the earth in 1900 – would be living lives of such unimaginable luxury that their greatest troubles would be due to the excesses of affluence. We too are clearly quite not up to the task of imagining a world 100 years hence because the rate of technological change itself has accelerated.

I don’t trust any projection that talk about the distant future. What concerns me is the present and the near term: of the order of 10 or 20 years. In the long term, as Keynes famously remarked, we are all dead, anyway.

As Joel Cohen noted, “Though the future is hazy, much that is very clear can be known about the present. First, the size and speed of growth of the human population today have no precedent in all the Earth’s history before the last half of the twentieth century.”

Take a look at the figure below from The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA):

In the 45 years since 1950, India added five times as many people as did the US. India added 571 million people, while the US added 109 million. Compare that to the growth in per capita GDP. India’s GDP grew from $180 in 1960 to $463 in 2000 — an increase of $283 in 40 years (figures in constant 1995 dollars). Compare that to the US: from $12,837 in 1960 to $31,806 during the same period — an increase of nearly $19,000, or 67 times the increase relative to India. (Data from the World Bank.)

In the 100 years from 1950 to 2050, India will add 1.2 billion people to reach a total of 1.5 billion. Let’s read that number again: it will be one thousand five hundred thousand thousand. During the same period, the increase in the US population would be about one-sixth that of India. I am not going to go into the projected difference in the per capita GDPs; it is too depressing even for me.

The important thing to note is that no country with large increases in populations has ever been, or is likely to be, a developed country. We have to do a little arithmetic to convince ourselves that there is no way on earth can India move out of the poverty trap without changing its population growth rate, no matter how pretty a song you sing about IT superpower or how nimble a dance you dance about BPO. All this song and dance about India being a superpower in 2020 is merely arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while the Titanic band is paying ragtime.

We need to understand what is at stake and wake up to the fact that we are short on lifeboats, that the hull is breached, the captain has ignored the warnings, the builders have messed up the design, and the binoculars were missing.

HMS Titanic — 4

In the last few days I have been trying to understand what caused the Titanic to sink. To belabor the obvious I must admit that I consider the sinking of the Titanic to be a metaphor. There are important lessons that I would like to draw from it. Continue reading “HMS Titanic — 4”

Used cars and used computers

From Rajesh’s Emergic weblog an item on second hand Japanese cars in the third world. I am reproducing my comment on Rajesh’s blog here for the record.
Continue reading “Used cars and used computers”

Numbers – 3

Joel Cohen’s book How Many People Can The Earth Support should be required reading for Indian policy makers. Here is more from the introduction:

The unprecedented growth in human numbers and in human power to alter the Earth requires, and will require, unprecedented human agility in adapting to environmental, economic and social problems, sometimes all at once. The Earth’s human population has entered and rapidly moves deeper into a poorly charted zone where limits on human population size or well-being have been anticipated and may be encountered. Slower population growth, along with many other improvements in human institutions and behaviors, would make it easier for people to retain control of their fate and to turn their attention from the numbers to the qualities of humankind.

These themes have consequences for action. Stopping a heavy truck and turning a large ocean liner both take time. Stopping population growth in noncoercive ways takes decades under the best of circumstances. Ordinary people … still have time to end population growth voluntarily and gradually by means that they find acceptable. Doing so will require the support of the best available leadership and institutions of politics, economics and technology to avoid physical, chemical and biological constraints beyond human control. Migration can ameliorate or exacerbate local problems, but at the global level, if birth rates do not fall, death rates must rise.

India’s population problem is a sort of tragedy of the commons and there is little chance that ‘ordinary people will voluntarily and gradually’ solve this problem. The incentives simply don’t exist, even if the knowledge and the understanding existed about the social disaster of excessive population, for individuals to act for the social good.

The solution to India’s population problem has to “make sense” to those who produce the children. That is, they have to have an incentive to produce the socially optimal number of children. I have worked out a simple mechanism that would solve this problem. Details at — when else — 11.

HMS Titanic — 3

Those in charge of the Titanic disregarded the warnings. And those who were not in charge were blissfully unaware of the fact that those in charge were not fully competent.

The Titanic had sealed its own fate by the cavalier disregard to those ice warnings by their Marconi operators. Particularly the last two, from the Maseba at 7.30pm and the Californian after 11pm. Had they paid attention to them they would have seen they were heading straight into an icefield. Source

The passengers trusted that the captain was competent. The importance of that simple concept called trust can never be underestimated. Without trust, we would accomplish very little. We have to trust that those who are supposed to know, do know; that those who are supposed to do, are capable, etc. We trust that the pilot knows how to handle the craft, and the surgeon the scalpel. We trust that the policy makers know what they are doing.

We only learn of a betrayal of that trust only when it is too late. Whether it is a ship, or a ship of state, some worry whether those whom we trust are worthy of that trust.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Titanic was doomed due to a number of factors which were linked into a chain. If any of the links were not forged, it would have avoided that fate. The first link of that chain was the structural link. It was designed such that if a few of its forward water-tight compartments were to get flooded, it would sink.


Source

There must have been some design considerations which dictated why the bulkheads did not go all the way to the ceiling. I am only noting the structural feature which made the Titanic vulnerable to negligent behavior. Perhaps if the Titanic was designed differently, it could have survived the negligent behavior of its crew.

The lesson to me is that the ship had a structural failure that was exposed due to the incompetence of its captain.

Numbers — 2

A few years ago, my college at UC Berkeley was searching for a dean. Prof. Joel Cohen was invited to check out the College of Natural Resources. I asked him about his book How Many People Can the Earth Support? over lunch.

A few years ago, he said, a journalist had called him up saying that he was doing a piece on world population and wanted to know from Joel how many people could the earth support. Joel told the caller that he could not answer that question off the top of his head. It could take him a few days and why didn’t he call back in four or five days.

It took Joel three years to definitively answer that question and a fine job he did, in my opinion. The book was published in 1995. I quote from the introduction:

Though the future is hazy, much that is very clear can be known about the present. First, the size and speed of growth of the human population today have no precedent in all the Earth’s history before the last half of the twentieth century. Human numbers currently exceed 5.7 billion and increase by roughly an additional 90 million people per year. Second, the resources of every kind (physical, chemical and biological; technological, institutional and cultural; economic, political and behavioral) available to people are finite today both in their present capacity and in their possible speed of expansion. Today’s rapid relative and absolute increase in population stretches the productive, absorptive and recuperative capacities of the Earth as humans are now able to manage those capacities. It also stretches human capacities for technological and social invention, adaptation, and compassion.

Like in all other things, humans have a limited capacity for compassion too. When resources are severely limited, the thin veneer of civilization is easily scraped off to reveal the underlying unyielding will to survive at the expense of others.

The Convent and Cloyne Court

As a graduate student, I decided to spend my first term at UC Berkeley at the University Students’ Cooperative Association (USCA). The USCA is the largest student housing cooperative in North America modeled after the Rochdale Principles. The USCA is student run and student owned. In all we had about 20 houses and 4 apartment complexes housing about 2,000 students.

The house that I lived in is called Cloyne Court. It used to be a hotel and is even listed as a national historical monument. Cloyne Court housed about 150 students in about 80 single-, double-, and triple-occupancy rooms.

All household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, washing, and maintenance were done by the residents. In addition to our rent, we had to do five hours of ‘workshift’ every week. Like all other houses of the USCA, Cloyne Court had one common kitchen and one dinning hall for the 150 residents. Food was stocked in a huge pantry and in a walk-in freezer the size of a small apartment.

Under the best of circumstances, cooking is not an easy job. But for college students who can barely cook for themselves, the task of cooking for 150 people is well-near impossible. So dinner time was a real challenge. Around 6 pm, the dining hall would be crowded with students waiting for the food to show up from the kitchen.

The word may go around that there wasn’t much food that got cooked on some day. Perhaps the cooks weren’t very good and burnt half the stuff. Suddenly, there would be rush for the food as it was being brought out. All pretense of waiting for your turn would be dropped and pushing and shoving to get at the food would be so violent that half the food would end up on the floor.

If you were not quick, you were dead. If not dead, at least you’d have to order pizza to avoid starving.

During my one year at Cloyne Court, I learnt more economics than I could have imagined. I saw the tragedy of the commons revealed in all its stark reality. I understood why the Soviet Union collapsed. I learnt the common property problem and the problem of free-ridership.

I moved to a smaller house the next year. It was called the Convent because it used to be one before the USCA bought it. The Convent had 20 people and was restricted to graduate students. It was pretty well organized. Those who volunteered to cook were really into cooking. For 20 people, it was easy to cook enough that there was little chance of food running out. We all sat very calmly at the table while the food was passed around very politely. We had intelligent stimulating conversation at dinner. We had self-imposed rules: not taking any more than what we could eat, and cleaning up after ourselves.

The contrast between Cloyne Court and the Convent was stark and revealing.

HMS Titanic — 2

The HMS Titanic was a giant of a ship. It was doing 21 knots that fateful night.

Now it was 9.40pm, and still the ice warnings came. At no time had Captain Smith or the senior officers ordered a cautionary reduction in speed, or had gone to the trouble of having extra lookouts posted, something which Captain Lord of the Californian had already performed before he called it a day and brought his own vessel to a halt in the ice. When you put-together the ice warnings Titanic had received that day, it revealed that there was an ice-field 80 miles long directly in her path, and only two hours away if the current speed were maintained. Surely somebody in the next couple of hours must realise that Titanic is steaming at full-speed into an ice-field which has already made other vessels to heave-to for the night?

The warning messages kept coming in. Ice ahead. John Phillips was the radio operator in the Marconi room busy at the controls of the transmitters, sending messages to Cape Race in North America.

… under the immense pressure of sending commercial traffic, and at the same time having to cope with incoming warnings and messages, he snapped, as the nearby Californian sent an ice warning to Titanic. “Shut up, shut up. I am busy. I am working Cape Race.” Phillips’ now infamous snub highlighted how the commercial traffic had priority over the warnings. Perhaps if the Marconi men had not been so busy sending messages, the Titanic would never had foundered. But all of the previous warnings didn’t stop that happening either, so a last minute aversion was unlikely.