Learning

Information must be learned before it can be acted on. By “learn” I mean it must go in the brain of a person. If something appears to be learned, but the resulting understanding does not allow action the specific action you had in mind, it only means that some of the pieces that would allow that action were not learned. This is common, and hard to quantify, because information has so many pieces.

Learning takes place when a person is able to recognize the individual pieces of information that something can be described with as pieces of information that they already possess. A specific example of the broader phenomenon is that every word in a sentence must already be known before the meaning of the sentence can be understood. The best documentation for this I found, aside from my own experiences, is in the work of influential educator John Holt, and his descriptions of the difficulty of teaching elementary school students to accomplish what one might assume were very simple tasks.

Recognizing which pieces of information are relevant is not necessarily easy, or clear. Leaps of intuition still rely on pieces of information that were learned in other contexts. Learning something entirely new can be considered as recognizing a new word or image with the brain's ability to understand sounds and sights inherently, before they have meaning.

That so much new information can be made without learning new individual pieces is a result of the vast combinatoric complexity in which individual pieces of information can be combined.

A person's information can be thought of as the information itself, and the way in which they describe that information. This concept is clearest when considered as a list of words and their definitions. These "words" do not have to be words in the traditional sense. They can be anything to which a person attaches a distinct meaning, such as series of words, or non-verbal signs such as gestures, or feelings, or entire situations, as well as everything that is commonly defined as “culture,” which is when many people have a shared definition for a “word.” The definitions include all of the associations that a person has with each of their “words.” Together, these "words" and their definitions form the "complete language" of a person.

When communicating, people use their complete languages. Misunderstandings and conflicts, of eventually enormous scale, can occur any time two people have different definitions for a complete language "word" that one of them uses, or when one person does not have a definition for a "word" that another person uses. Many of these possibilities are often overlooked, because it is not obvious when the same complete language "word" in two people's complete language has different definitions to the two people. It can also be unexpected, if two people assume they are speaking the same language, or assume they have the culture. This formulation emphasizes that such statements are much more tenuous than commonly assumed, and not capable of being true for every conversation, even between the same two people. These claims are supported by the work of Stanford professor of linguistics John Rickford, and MacArthur fellow, Georgia state professor Lisa Delpit. Their work is essential for arguments regarding the origins of unexpected misunderstandings in different aspects of complete language. The context they use for their work is education, showing how crucial it is for teachers and students to speak the same complete language for effective learning at every level of education.

Because there are so many "words" in a complete language, and their definitions can be so complex, and are developed independently by every individual, everyone's complete language is unique. Learning to speak someone's complete language well requires a very large amount of time and exposure to that person, just like any other, traditionally defined language. To have different definitions simply means to have different information. While not all, an enormous amount of the information that any one person has can be learned by another person. All of these facts are visible when considering the very large differences in descriptions of gangs and gang members by journalists Kerrie Droban, Hunter Thompson, Alex Kotlowitz, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Luis J. Rodriguez, who have very different levels of familiarities with their subjects, and have spent very different amounts of time with them.

The degree to which information can be said to be personalized for someone is the degree to which it uses the complete language words and definitions of that person, which is also closely related to the emotion they attach to it. Inherent in this idea is that people's definitions include relations to themselves, in a degree correlated to how well they understand that definition. Personalization is deeply important to a person's ability to understand a given piece of information, as well as how likely they will be to act on it. Besides being inherent in the definition of complete language, this phenomenon can be seen in the many cases where people devote their lives to problems of which they were once victims.

A person who knows a lot of another person's information, which can be said also as a person who knows another person very well, is best able to personalize a given piece of information for that person.

Prejudice, be it based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or any other factor, can be thought of as the incorrect belief that the information of the person subject to that prejudice is not valuable. Historically, the presence of this information, or the absence of the information that these people's information is valuable, has lead to atrocities that range from social exclusion to genocide. The information that would prevent these horrific casualties can be learned as much as any other information can be learned. This theme is clearly and most famously described in the work of many black American intellectuals, including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. DuBois. It can be seen in the frustration of the authors to convince people of what they truly are, which is highly intelligent, fully feeling, completely human beings. These facts are simply information. No matter how difficult a task teaching them to some people has proved in the past, they are subject to the same, often easily understood, rules that govern all information. This formulation also sheds light on why the segregation of populations can easily exacerbate a problem, as the populations can not exchange information.