Searching

Information must be found before it can be learned and acted on. To “find” something it must both be recognized as the information that a person is looking for, and it must exist in a way that allows them to learn it. Given the limits of human perception, that means that it must be very close to them. Information is easiest to find if it has been organized in a way that makes it easy to find, and the method of organization is understood, such as in a card catalogue or internet search engine.

There is too much information in the world for all of it to ever be fully organized in a way that allows every individual piece, or set of pieces, to be found quickly and easily. A huge amount of this information is of importance to people.

People are able to organize the information that they have in their brains in a far greater variety of ways than can be achieved with methods such as card catalogues or internet search engines, because they can organize it according to any or all of the types of information that they are able to have about it. This makes it very easy to search the information that a person knows. People are thus often integral to finding information, particularly when it is not organized.

The ability to successfully search the information that a person knows is related to how well they are known by the person searching. Knowing someone's personal information in particular can be highly important to searching their information because it allows a person to better personalize the information communicated, i.e. allows the two people to have the clearest understanding of what is being searched for, why, and how important that search is.

There is a close connection between two people knowing large amounts of information, including personal information, about one another, being able to search one another's information, and having a social relationship. Social relationships are thus vital to understanding, and searching for, and solving problems with, information. Support for this claim is found in the fascinating work of Robert Putnam, and co-author Lewis Feldstein. It is summarized in breathtaking power and completeness with the discovery that a person's participation in a social movement is more closely linked friendship with other people in the movement, than it is with how much the movement would effect their own life.

When two people are using a single, given form of communication, their rate of information exchange is essentially fixed at an upper limit. The only way for them to exchange more information is to spend more time together.

By far the most and the most personalized information can be passed when it is communicated in person. This is due to the inherent human ability to get information from all of the many complex parts of complete language, such as body language, tone of voice, and meaning based on physical context, and the importance of these to the trust of unfamiliar information.

Face to face communication is only possible when people are very close together. Due to the time and energy required to come close to someone far away, an increase in the average distance between two people, or the difficulty with which they can come close to one another, is almost always accompanied by a very large decline in the amount of information that they learn from one another. This applies equally to the likelihood that someone will learn any given piece of information, not only the pieces that are learned from a person. Distance has an impact even at the level of feet or inches, if that is the distance that impedes the passage of information. This fact was drilled repeatedly and forcefully home in a vast amount of very famous work. Robert Putnam describes the loss of community in the United States due to people living farther apart. The celebrated author Jane Jacobs relates the vibrancy of entire neighborhoods to factors of its design that impede or abet the exchange of information between its residents. While not written from that perspective, her magnum opus on urban planning can be entirely understood, and again, now better quantified, and acted on, in terms of information. UCLA professor of anthropology Jared Diamond documents the spread of technologies (i.e. ideas i.e. information) being dictated by geographic features, and Columbia professor of economics Jeffrey Sachs points out that a river or ocean border is vital to economic success for a country because of the importance of shipping to travel and trade, which is to say exchanging ideas, that come with them.

The most powerful method of searching for information is a large group of people who know large amounts of different kinds of information, who know one another well, and who are close together. The most powerful method of learning information is to be part of that network. This is buried deep or displayed prominently in every example I have given, and millions more that I have not.

And once more- together, all of the information that is relevant to a problem, and the way in which someone wants it solved, allows any problem to be either solved or resolved.