117 - Information Surprisal and Utility - you want information you communicate to be useful and surprising.
I can spout at you crazy conspiracy theories, which are entertaining due to their level of suprisal but only go so far because of their limited use. You want information that can be useful to you by aiding in the creation of new knowledge or supporting the execution of a skill.
You also want information you are communicating to be surprising . People would get really annoyed if you walk up to them and say their name to them over and over again. It has a suprisal factor when you say their name for the very first time because it gets their attention. The fact that you want to “communicate with them”, which is what you are signaling when you say their name, will be surprising to them. Unless you signal to them in some other way, which removes the suprisal, such as walking up to them.
26b - Surprising & Useful Surprising & Useless Unsurprising & Useful Unsurprising & Useless
Surprisal & Prior Knowledge
118 - Suprisal and Prior Knowledge - one of the factors that makes figuring out the right level of information suprisal difficult is the level of prior knowledge the people you are communicating with have.
Giving an introductory textbook to a graduate student is going to be of limited use because there is no suprisal factor. They already know the information (prior knowledge).
Surprising & Useful Information
119 - Surprising and Useful Information - An example of this would be the documentary game changers . For the purpose of this example, lets pretend that the information is true and the science is solid. I haven’t evaluated it so I’m not weighing in on its validity. Given that, the information in the documentary is surprising because it challenges the traditional narrative of the necessity of meat for strength. But it is also useful because you can act on the information to improve your own health…
Surprising & Useless Information
120 - Surprising & Useless - Using the previous example (26b), say the information in the documentary was incorrect. Say that history shows that the science behind it isn’t valid. Such that when you go and try to make the same transition, it fails. This has slight utility because it removes an avenue of exploration. It can also be useful in the sense that surprising and useless information sometimes provides entertainment (e.g. bigfoot documentaries).
In the end you want to avoid this type of i…
Unsurprising & Useful Information
121 - Unsurprising & Useful - this category of information typically is what you’ve already learned. Because you already know it, it is useless when presented to you again. Ideally you’d instead want to be presented with new information.
The one exception to this is periodic review. If you don’t use material or review it then the retrieval strength for a memory will eventually drop to where you forget information.
Unsurprising & Useless Information
122 - Unsurprising & Useless Information - the worst type of information! This is the domain of cliches, whereby the phrase is unsurprising because its been overused and doesn’t help the situation at all because it is so generic.
Using suprisal and utility to look at what knowledge is worth prioritizing in development
209 - Knowledge Development Questions
What knowledge is worth developing? How much knowledge should you redevelop in the pursuit of knowledge development? What prior knowledge is worth making explicit in a zettelkasten? What existing developed knowledge is worth including in a zettelkasten?
Surprising & Utility Axis
A good way to think about this is through the suprisal & utility lens . The best information to develop, then turn into knowledge, is surprising and useful information. Surprising i…
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