Personal knowledge management

In my previous post titled: "The Enigma Project and the God Protocols" I mentioned the importance of having a networked decentralized database were data can be securely stored and computed on. I also mentioned in a previous post the DIKW hierarchy. To reiterate, DIKW stands for data, information, knowledge, wisdom. Typically when the DIKW hierarchy has been referred to it has been about knowledge management and usually it's a big company with a huge database to leverage.

The Enigma Project or something like it is politically interesting because it enables empowerment of the individual. Personal knowledge management is one of the fundamental use cases and benefits of having what I've called in previous articles an "exocortex" or "external mind". Just as knowledge management can be used to make an organization more effective by better management of knowledge personal knowledge management does the same on a personal level. The impact of this could be as large as the impact of the personal computer as it will make knowledge workers immediately much more productive in practice.

Let's begin with defining Personal Information Management

Practically, PIM is concerned with how people organize and maintain personal information collections, and methods that can help people in doing so. People may manage information in a variety of settings, for a variety of reasons, and with a variety of types of information. For example, an office worker might manage physical documents in a filing cabinet by placing them in folders organized alphabetically by project name, or might manage digital documents in folders in a hierarchical file system. A parent might collect and organize photographs of their children into a photo album using a temporal organization scheme, or might tag digital photos with the names of the children.

This is considered a "soft skill" and something everyone does more or less. There are limits to human memory such as a limit to the amount of phone numbers we can remember (so we have address books), a limit to the amount of friendships we can manage (so we have social networking sites), and a limit to the amount of attention we have. It is beyond the scope of the human brain to be able to go beyond Dunbar's number and beyond the limits of human attention to be able to track all details of everything in the environment. Personal information management helps with this by allowing humans to better organize their own thoughts, their own mind, and in a sense these tools act as an external augmentation to the limits of the brain.

What is information vs knowledge?

First, information management and knowledge management are not the same. Knowledge is arrived at and not believed. Knowledge in the "knowledge is power" sense of the word is scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is arrived at through the scientific method which can be seen in the quote below:

The development of the scientific method has made a significant contribution to how knowledge of the physical world and its phenomena is acquired.[17] To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning and experimentation.[18] The scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.

All knowledge is acquired from the initial step of data collection. Data is the items which get stored in a "database" of any type. Data by itself might not be very useful in raw form and data isn't even information because it doesn't necessarily tell us anything we can do something with. So what is data?

Data are signals

Simply put, data are just signals which have to be interpreted. These signals can be thought of as "sensory stimuli". For example a dog can smell better than a human because it has a better sense of smell but it's not enough for a dog to smell and bark. The dog which smells and barks at the Terminator (reference to the movie) is responding to sensory stimuli but it is the humans who have knowledge of Terminators who interpret not just the dogs barking but a lot of other data in the environment. So the quote below defines the relationship between data and information:

Information is the meaning of these sensory stimuli (i.e., the empirical perception). For example, the noises that I hear are data. The meaning of these noises (e.g., a running car engine) is information.

Now consider that sensors are everywhere. Sensors are human, non-human, machines etc. Sensors simply are anything which can sense an environment and relay the signal to others. The signals being relayed are the data which in an Internet of Things context best be encrypted for privacy.

Information as meaningful data

Once enough data has been collected then it is put into context and becomes meaningful. Language is used to convert information while data could just be dogs barking, birds chirping, people screaming, all of this without any context or understanding is just data. But once it's connected and in for example a language such as English, such as if the dog barking in the previous example can be interpreted to mean "Terminator" or "intruder" then you have information. Information is something you can act upon because it's structured data. If data are points then information are the lines.

Knowledge as processed information

To have information does not mean to have knowledge. Knowledge in the scientific sense are facts. You can have information and not know what to do with it because you don't have knowledge. Information is transformed into scientific knowledge through the process of the scientific method. At the same time if you have the facts (previous knowledge) and when you get new information then you can apply previous knowledge to improve understanding of the new information. Of course it's a bit more complicated than that but knowledge is the end goal of acquiring information because the more facts you have to work with the narrower your search space becomes.

Wisdom as enlightenment

Wisdom gives us a big picture understanding of our collection of knowledge. Knowledge describes to us how stuff works while wisdom integrates knowledge into something of utility. Knowledge itself might not be useful but wisdom makes that knowledge useful. Decision makers strive to make wise decisions because wise decisions add value.

Personal knowledge management

Assume for sake of argument that personal growth is a goal of the knowledge worker or human being in general. If personal growth is a goal then the expansion of a personal knowledge collection is going to be part of that goal. This is why people may read a lot of books or study new things. But just having a lot of knowledge inside the human brain doesn't mean trying to contain all of human knowledge inside a particular human brain is feasible. Some of us are more forgetful than others, and more importantly the knowledge outside of the brain has to be managed in a private secure fashion.

Personal knowledge management could take a form where every individual with access to a smart phone can download an app. This app could take on an interface of a personal data assistant or personal AI assistant like Siri, Cortana, or any of the others being developed but the difference maker here is that this app would not be owned by a corporation of other human beings and the data being computed by this app could be truly private. This app would become a true extension of the brain and just as we don't like the idea of other humans peering into our thoughts and judging our subconscious we might not want those same humans peering into our external minds for the exact same reason.

Conclusion

Many humans today if asked would flat out tell you they would rather die than have their brain chipped and their thoughts read by Google, Facebook, or BCI corp. Humans as we currently know them are accustomed to having their thoughts truly private, their brains, subconscious, truly private. On the one hand it means other humans might not know what they are thinking but then who should be the one to decide what data is to be shared and what data is not to be shared? For this reason the concept of a decentralized global private exotortex is intriguing and it is a concept which may be enabled by projects like Enigma at least in theory. It must be noted that any thought in digital form can potentially be intercepted, eavesdropped, tapped, backdoored, but with security it is about minimizing the amount of people capable of accessing it.

The holy grail of a decentralized private globally accessible exocortex is a network where everyone feels comfortable sharing all their most private intimate data, thoughts, feelings, secrets, in a secure way unaccessible to any other person on the planet. At the same time we want to be able to gain the benefits of being able to compute over that secret data without having to sacrifice privacy to gain security, to gain better knowledge, to gain deeper understanding.

Alice if she shares her data with the exocortex she is actually trying to share Alice(A) to Alice(B), or in other words Alice is talking to herself and communicating with her own subconscious. The external processing of her thoughts should be able to take place securely outside of her brain without Bob, Eve, or any malicious Mallory types from being able to determine what Alice is thinking. Alice needs to be able to develop her good (or stupid) ideas in privacy without interference yet with the benefit of being able to escape from ignorance through personal knowledge management and external computation. Alice with privacy would remain with the ability to define herself as a person, as a cyborg, as a human, or whatever she sees herself as without interference by advertisers, corporations, or hackers.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex