Information • What’s it good for?

The good of information is its use in reducing our uncertainty about an issue which comes before us.  But uncertainty comes in many flavors and so the information which serves to reduce uncertainty can be applied in several ways.  The situations of uncertainty human agents commonly find themselves facing have been investigated under many headings, literally for ages, and the categories subtle thinkers arrived at long before the dawn of modern information theory still have their uses in setting the stage of an introduction.

Picking an example of a subtle thinker almost at random, the philosopher‑scientist Immanuel Kant surveyed the questions of human existence within the span of the following three axes.

• What’s true?
• What’s to do?
• What’s to hope?

The third question is a bit too subtle for the present frame of discussion but the first and second are easily recognizable as staking out the two main axes of information theory, namely, the dual dimensions of information and control.  Roughly the same space of concerns is elsewhere spanned by the dual axes of competence and performance, specification and optimization, or just plain knowledge and skill.

A question of what’s true is a descriptive question and there exist what are called descriptive sciences devoted to answering descriptive questions about any domain of phenomena one might care to name.

A question of what’s to do, in other words, what must be done by way of achieving a given aim, is a normative question and there exist what are called normative sciences devoted to answering normative questions about any domain of problems one might care to address.

Since information plays its role on a stage set by uncertainty, a big part of saying what information is will necessarily involve saying what uncertainty is.  There is little chance the vagaries of a word like uncertainty, given the nuances of its ordinary, poetic, and technical uses, can be corralled by a single pen, but there do exist established models and formal theories which manage to address definable aspects of uncertainty and these do have enough uses to make them worth looking into.

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