Intelligence Amplification
Created: May 21, 2016 / Updated: July 24, 2025 / Status: in progress / 2 min read (~227 words)
- Know it exists
- Find it
- Keep it up to date
Information organization is critical. Similar to how a dictionary is organized/ordered in alphabetical order, information needs to be organized in some fashion as to make retrieval relatively simple and efficient given rules on how to perform retrieval. It is acceptable to trade rule complexity for faster retrieval.
To know information exists, the information has to be dismantled into its components. Some components will be considered critical/unique enough to be used as instance identifiers (similar to how one would do object equality in a programming language).
Finding information is generally about how you plan to query it in the future. For instance, at a low level where information is decomposed into data, we obtain a database with tables, each table containing rows of similarly structured elements. These elements can then be queried using a relative simply language composed of a set of operators. As a whole, it now becomes possible to retrieve matching data. But information is not data. Information is the synthesis of data.
Keeping information up to date means that you need to know it exists and that you've found its previous iteration so that it may be updated with the up-to-date information.