Mind the Gap: Spotting the Brown Noise (2)
Part 2 of a series of "noisy" posts about information noise in general, and brown noise in particular: what it is, who creates it, how to spot it, and what we can do about it.
The online information noise
For far too many people, the Internet is practically just a huge source of information. They say information is food for brain, so if you are like me and you like food, you can think of Internet as a really big bag of baguettes. Each baguette is a webpage, a piece of news, an article, a post, or a comment. There are big baguettes and small baguettes in the bag, and all of them are pieces of information, ie data. And, as it goes, there’s noise associated with each of them, with various levels of SNR.
According to informatics theory1, the more information we generate, the more irrelevant and inaccurate information, ie noise, we create, too. However, lately it feels there’s been an increase in information noise across Internet, from news all the way to actual products2. It even seems to me that some of this noise got to levels strong enough to distort the sa(i)d baguettes into something else (just let your imagination run wild on this one).
Naturally, I would like to avoid it in the same way I do with the real, obnoxious noises. Unfortunately, avoiding information noise proves to be damn difficult. The problem is that when we ordinarily turn to the Internet, we do so trying to find the right “baguettes” for this or that. Nowadays, literally, that feels like looking for a needle in the haystack. Listen, I’m not trying to blame the search engines here: the process is relatively noise-free (high SNR) when your search is precise, like when you wanna pinpoint some specific piece of information such as an address, a person, an article, or a definition. The noise actually comes into play when you wanna learn or research something, and your search is kinda fuzzy. The overload of information noise which comes back will soon overwhelm you, until you come to a point where you can’t deal with it anymore3. That’s when you realize that good, clean information is actually buried underneath vast heaps of noise that continue to show up at every click. And in the process of finding the right piece of information - ahem…baguette, you and I are poised to deal with all that noise.
I found three types of information with low SNRs in the proverbial haystack:
BS information: this is almost pure noise, distilled to perfection, like (I guess) good cocaine. It holds very little information and it’s delivered by specialized dealers. Like the guy who’s making 10K/month by investing in cryptocurrency. Or some orange guy tweets. Like cocaine, it’s meant to get you high and away from the actual bit of real information. Although hard to recognize sometimes, it’s always intentional, make no mistake about it.
Mis-/Dis- information: tricky to figure out, unless you have a point of comparison. It carries intentional noise as well, because it’s meant to manipulate and generate alternative, distorted facts and beliefs. Misinformation spreads wrong information believed to be true, while disinformation spreads wrong information known to be false. This includes conspiracies, legends, and brainwashing stuff like “we lead a special operation not a war”. It often involves sophisticated empty language, like “our lander had ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon”. Quite successful in manipulating people’s opinion (the “Dis-“ in particular).
Incomplete information: This creates noise by omission, ie the noise is there but you have no idea of it. After you consume it, you think you have all the data to use for your next action. You have no idea of the gaps, though. Usually the gaps are there due to ignorance or negligence (unintentional noise), sometimes due to malicious intent (intentional noise). No matter how it got there, a gap will almost always influence your follow-up actions and decisions in a negative way.
Amongst these, the misinformation and incomplete information are the types with the lowest SNR. They both expose people to the most dangerous type of information noise during exploring, learning, or researching sessions online. This particular noise induces false believes and understandings of how things are or supposed to work, it is hard to avoid, and many times even harder to identify.
I call it by analogy, “brown noise” because… well, I hope, pretty obvious reasons.4
[to be continued…]
Shannon CE. A mathematical theory of communication. In: The Bell System Technical Journal . Murray Hill, NJ: Bell Laboratories. 1948;27:379-423.
There are several other negative effects, some outlined in this EU report.
There’s also the so-called “noise bottleneck” that contributes to it, a term coined by Lebanese-American essayist and mathematical statistician Nassim Taleb (yep, the same guy who wrote The Black Swan). It states that when the volume of information increases, our ability to comprehend the relevant from the irrelevant becomes compromised. You can find more about it in his book Antifragile, or, if short on time, in this article.
Apparently some people find it easier on the ear than white noise. I am definitely not one of those people.