# Sea of Information Created: 2023_07_08 18:33 Tags: [[Technology]] [[Philosophy]] [[Education]] The value of information is trending towards zero, not because the information is not valuable, but because the ability to extract _useful insights_ is becoming more difficult as there simply is orders of magnitudes more information available. To mix metaphors, like finding a needle in a haystack; within a sea of information, you have to sail for long periods of time before you find your treasure. The interesting thing is that with technology there is only more and more information that can be captured, storing bits is only getting cheaper, but there are very few people that can extract useful insights about all of that data. Data competency will be an extremely useful tool in the future, and it is going to be largely driven on *what* insights we are looking for. What sorts of insights are you looking for, how do you gather that data, make it usable and extract that insight? I think that large language models have proven that the information that we care about is stored not in the specific nodes of the graph but the edges of the graph. We care increasingly about combining existing ideas and making new insights with the existing graph. I think for a long time it was very fruitful to have specialists who focused on deepening our knowledge in one specific sub-field, but as time goes on we need more generalists, more polymaths to draw connections across fields and make new connections in the graph. This is largely drawing from [[Range - David Epstein|the book "Range" by David Epstein]], but I'm trying to make the argument that this is true for information itself, not just those who discover things, we put too much emphasis on the discovery of things. It is the person who connects that discovery and culls it into other ideas to make something that is actually useful that deserves the praise. Information as we know it is changing, but the specialists, that we have long valued in our society, are struggling to adapt. We for some reason have come to value people who invest significant time into their education so much that we give them a title. On top of that we have more people being educated and for longer than ever before. Yet, I posit that the way we are educating for the wrong traits, valuing the specialist over the generalist. We need generalists because the nature of information is changing. It used to be the case that discovery of new ideas happened at a frenetic pace, but the next wave of ideas will be [[Generating New Ideas#Remixing|remixing existing ideas not only mastering them]]. ## References -