Information

There is a huge problem in the world today (From my perspective anyway); there seems to be a loss of a skill for a majority of humanity to be able to process information and draw conclusions.  It’s almost as if people have become mindless. People in complete control of their faculty, will take in the information, will filter it based on experience and perception and then draw a conclusion. 

Great chunks of the population today takes in the information and do not process it all or even if they do its lost in translation. The information becomes the conclusion. Look at how people reacted to information on Covid-19 or the elections in India and elsewhere. There has been no attempt by the general population to assess, understand and then draw a conclusion. The greatest example is from 2 years ago when the PM of India asked people to make a noise during the lockdown as a mechanism to show solidarity with the heath care workers; people took it to be a mechanism to get rid of the pandemic - the noise was going to get rid of the disease. Or another example of the news broadcasts today - no longer are facts presented, but it has become a circus where the news caster will present his/her/their conclusion without giving an explanation of how that conclusion was reached based on the facts. 

Business and industry also suffers from this lack of skill. Gone are the days when a smart employee or business person would look at the information or data provided and very quickly come to some conclusion. We are now in the age of AI and ML where discrete algorithms try and replicate the skill that some folks had. I am all of using AI and ML to go through tons of data which seemingly is not related; and am willing to look at the conclusion drawn by these algorithms. However that conclusion will just be another data point for me to use my perception and draw a conclusion.  

My guess is this loss of skill started in the financial sector where access to information made a huge difference to how you would perform on the financial market. Analysis of multiple pieces of information was consigned to machines and the conclusion of the analysis was considered statistically far better than what a human could achieve. The brokers were requiredonly punch in the trades. Somewhere along the line the news industry and the political establishment picked this simple model of presenting the conclusion to great success from their point of view.  It is now ingrained in business and industry to use a spreadsheet to analyse small chunks of data that could be done by a human. The conclusion drawn by the spreadsheet is considered accurate. An entire new career path has been created - the one of an spreadsheet analyst. 

The ability to process information was a key to humanity succeeding so far. Handing that ability over to unscrupulous people and machines might just doom us all. 

C