By Richard Saul Wurman (Founder of TED Conferences)
- This book helps you learn to recognise what is understandable and what is not.
“Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn’t tell us what we want or need to know.” ~ Richard Saul Wurman
- Communication
- Economy based on a information resource which is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of is not a problem, but drowning in it is.
- Understanding business
- Access is the antidote to information anxiety
- One of his most intriguing ideas is the use of We understand complex instructions if we can ask a lot of questions and participate in a dialogue - good conversation - as a model for the communications industry.
- The biggest challenge for modern civilisation will be figuring out how to turn information into organised knowledge.
- Knowledge, like people, places, things and organisational forms, is becoming disposable
- We are like a thirsty person who has been condemned to use a thimble to drink from a fire hydrant.
- More meaning, and fewer facts.
- During the age of industry, the world was ruled by natural resources, it is now run on information
- Information
- In our information-hungry era, raw data often pretends to be real information.
- Many countries already have most of their workforce in jobs that mainly process information.
- Information as something that reduces uncertainty
- Channel, storage and retrieval capacities of hardware are rapidly growing where human capacities hasn’t increased the same way
- Boredom can also due to information overload
- Five rings of Information
- Situations that cause information anxiety
- My expertise is my ignorance
- Some key ideas that help manage information and reduce anxiety
- Order Doesn’t Equal Understanding
- 3 types of business in sharing information
- You don’t need to remember all information
- It’s easier to build a new corporate headquarters than to create a new corporate philosophy
- A physical system contains information if it exhibits organisation
- Figuring out how to think about the problem
- Accuracy alone does not make things understandable
- Even if the needle is all you need, it will help to know how the hay is organised
- The ways of organising information are finite
- Think in opposites
- Looking at radical alternatives helps discover new possibilities and solutions
- Reorganising the information change its meaning
- Offering a variety of ways to access the same information
- Take decision by understanding the factors involved
- The world relies heavily on communication, perception, and the synthesis of information.
- Root cause analysis
- The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak - Notes
- Only one method for transmitting thought that somewhat captures the spirit of the mind - the medium of the conversation
- We have more skills to put thoughts together by language than we do by pictures
- Five-minute new idea rule
- Many instruction manuals don’t work because they don’t talk to the consumer
- Language determines thought
- We may need a new language to think differently
- Improve our knowledge of the language to improve our ability to understand and manage information
- We have tempted to solve all problems with “more” solutions
- Performance vs Function
- The emphasis on function will produce more technology without clear manuals and thus information anxiety
- Understanding the pitfalls of communicating information will give you a defence against information anxiety
- Communication equals remembering what it’s like not to know
- Learning requires not just facts but also stories and images
- Increased knowledge and improved technology reduced the need for struggle and a sense of satisfaction
- Way that you communicate in a three-dimensional event is very different from the way you communicate in a two-dimensional event
- What you take for granted you cannot improve - tax forms shouldn’t be confusing
- In order to acquire and remember new knowledge, it must stimulate your curiosity in some way
- Access guides by Richard Saul Wurman
- One effective way to learn is by expressing your uncertainties and trying to clarify what confuses you
- Personal AI
- Learning styles
- Creatively reorganising existing evidence to uncover new insights
- “aha!” thinking is different from general intelligence
- Apperception
- What is only a fact alone can be information if it is collected with other facts
- The way we make sense out of raw data is to compare and contrast, to understand differences
- Easing perception of a concept to humans
- Humans can only sample portions of reality and we need some tricks to overcome it
- You only understand information relative to what you already understand
- Better to ignore information that you don’t understand than trying to act upon it
- Things that seem so obvious to us today were brilliant insights at some point in time
- Sometimes, just reorganising or comparing what you know can reveal new insights
- We are affected as much by the flow as by the production of information
- We receive information in linear way, but we dont think linearly