The great information myth is that we think we know way more than we actually do.
That is both the individual “we” and the collective “we”. There is way more that we don’t know. What we don’t know is infinite. We have a set of rules that think we understand pretty well, but you know the possibility exists that everything that we think is true, could in fact be wrong.
And this “may” be true at every level of life. Sharing what we think know is probably the best way to realize what we don’t know. The imperfection of information at the deep level of physics seems to drive further research to look for better answers.
But this is true in other less scientific domains. If there is anything that the events playing out over the few years show us is that we don’t know anything about History. It is not that we haven’t been taught about some version of History, it is just that it didn’t happen the way that it did.
History is built on actions, and it really happens on interactions. The interpretations of these interactions just makes a lot of assumptions from the mind of those recording those actions.
The desire to retrofit the story of any event to our version of the truth drives the narrative of the past, and that narrative is also what drives our vision of the future. We use information that drives that narrative forward, but there are as many narratives as there are people and animals lucky to be alive.
There is not one information, one knowledge, or one narrative, but infinite narratives. This the big information myth and what makes building useful information systems and knowledge management systems so challenging.
