Information

I stumbled upon a quote recently from Albert Einstein which intrigued me: “Information is not knowledge.” This is a very profound statement by a man who was one of the great minds of the twentieth century and it got me thinking as well. I’m clearly not one of the great minds of either of the centuries I’ve lived in, but I had been pondering a similar subject of late. There is now so much information available to us, not just from books but also through our easy access to the nearly limitless data coffers of the internet. In fact, Einstein himself would probably be overwhelmed by how much we know … and can know. He missed the computer age by just a decade or two and the world has changed so much since then. However, I’m not here to sing the “aren’t we amazing” song. My interest today lies not in expounding our informational achievements, but in quantifying the value of the volume thereof. Especially in light of the advances in handheld wireless devices we have more information at our fingertips than we could previously even have imagined ... and we’re obsessed with it. The issue I see developing is that we seem to revel in accessing a broad spectrum of data, of facts, figures, news, opinion, history, gossip, technology, etc. However, I don’t always see it improving the quality of our lives, nor the value of our lives. This leads us to the next question. Fortunately, it was previously posed by someone more intelligent and articulate than me. The poet and critic T. S. Elliot once wrote, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Interestingly Elliot also died just a decade or two before the true computer age. Yet he, like Einstein, observed this phenomenon as early as the mid twentieth century. They both understood that just knowing things, and having access information, does not make us better as people, or as a society.

So for clarification, let me take Elliot’s wise words and condense them to a formula that Einstein may have appreciated:

           INFORMATION ≠ KNOWLEDGE ≠ WISDOM
In the spirit of the information age I myself went to the internet in search of a way to express my train of thought. I found an article on foundationsmag.com that helped clarify the difference between these three words. “What is this elusive quality called wisdom? How do we get it? … let’s begin taking a look at the four levels of thinking.

The first level is data-simple facts and figures. Second we have information. Information is data that’s been collected and organized. It is a reference tool. Something we turn to when trying to create something else. The third is knowledge. This is information that we have digested and now understand. Organized as knowledge, the information we have collected is given context. The fourth and final level is wisdom. Today, wisdom has become for many, indistinguishable from knowledge. But they are two different things. Often, what we find touted as wisdom is simply opinion. Knowledge is not wisdom. There is a big difference. Wisdom is the proper use of knowledge. To be more precise, wisdom is knowledge that has been applied in a way that takes into account all its pertinent relationships and that is consistent with universal laws.”

That’s exactly what I meant to say. There is an undercurrent of belief that our technology, our education, and the sheer data we posses makes us somehow better than our predecessors or those in third world countries. I’m not so sure because sometimes it seems that we have become dependent upon information, requiring larger and more convenient doses to satisfy us. That’s why it is important to differentiate between information, knowledge and wisdom. We may have become more technologically advanced, but it’s not clear that we have advanced morally or ethically, that we have grown in wisdom or character or virtue. These are the real measurements of better people or an elevated society. Our access to unlimited information does provide tools for actually making us better people, but so often they are lost in such an expansive mine of data that it can be difficult to dig out the nuggets that are really worth finding. There are just too many distractions, and as is the case in so many areas of our lives the good and the interesting tend to distract us from the great and the truly valuable. Thus we become, in a sense, intellectually ADD.

So, my friends, I would encourage us all not merely to fill our minds, but to improve our minds, not to mention our hearts and souls. Consider what would actually make you a better person, a better husband, father, mother, friend or citizen. Too much information without purpose actually makes us shallower rather than deeper. Wise Solomon once wrote: “Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding.” (Proverbs 3:13) Those would be fine words to live by, and they shed encouraging light on this subject. The secret to life lies not in what we know, but how we know it … and what we do with it.