Information, knowledge, wisdom

How do these three puzzle pieces fit together?

How do we tell them apart? How do we acquire them? How do we apply them?

2 Comments

karmen says:
ah, semantics. Here’s my take:

Information: the basic stuff, like greensmile suggests, multiple bits.

Data: information from a certain set

Knowledge: useful, retained information

Wisdom: knowledge that applies to more than one type of information, and is valuable to share with others

I’d like to think that the latter is only applicable to sentient species.. but something tells me I’d be wrong.

August 10, 2006 @ 6:46 pm
george says:
I’ve been playing around with something I call the Noetic Hierarchy. From the top:

Wisdom: moral judgment based on tacit knowledge (experience).

Understanding: capacity to interpret and explain - needed for anticipatory decisions.

Conceptual knowledge: learned explicit encoded concepts - basis of language.

Procedural knowledge: learned implicit and tacit - basis of skills.

Phyletic knowledge: inherited - basis of what cognitive psychologists call folk-knowledge, and affect.

For information I like: News of difference that makes a difference (attributed to Gregory Bateson). Shannon information follows along this line in some interpretations - messages that have lower a priori expectancy (by the receiver) convey more information. It’s a measure of surprise. Hence knowledge is the inverse of information. The more you know the less you are surprised!

Conversely, the receipt of informational messages is transformed in the brain to knowledge.

George

January 29, 2008 @ 6:49 pm