Posted by Reilly Atkinson on November 08, 1999 at 13:31:46:

In Reply to: Re: Information Overload posted by Denham on November 07, 1999 at 22:37:07:

Denham -- Good stuff to discuss. The issues of dealing with existential or personal overload are those with which a liberal education is concerned. The whole point of a liberal education is primarily to learn how to learn on your own, then to think critically, analytically and creatively, to develop political skills -- to minimize the impact of intellectually bent or corrupt professors -- and to learn how to do the impossible.

Students are guided toward personal resolution of Hume's dilemma: how can one operate in a world that you cannot trust nor understand? This, perhaps in a subtle fashion, requires students to learn to cope with a rather emotionally charged type of information overload. At a more pragmatic level, students have to deal with reading lists of impossible length, or homework assignments of extreme difficulty, and so on. In these cases, students must learn to cope with heavy overloads of knowledge and information. In so doing they begin the process of learning to operate in an environment of "too much" -- information, knowledge, and so forth. You learn to cope by coping.

I developed my "hueristics" as an undergraduate, research graduate student, professor, business school student, consultant..... I pretty much cut
info and knowledge to size by intuition, based on many years of dealing with such problems -- you get an instinct, a gut feeling as to what's important, and how to proceed. For example, three of us developed by trial and error a special form of reading so that we could precis roughly 2,000 books and articles in six weeks -- all dealing with urban growth and change. Here was a case of objective overload.

I was trained to deal with such issues, as is the case for most scholars and researchers. And, the training was largely sink or swim. So my basic hueristic is "Just do it". Another group that deals prctically with overload is trial attorneys -- I worked once with an attorney who mastered much of the theory and practice of survey research(Survey Research 101) in just a couple of days.

Education is the antidote to information overload. And I think that the "professional approach" to assessing filtering and using information can be taught. The Harvard Business School's case study approach puts heavy emphasis on operating with incomplete information. Looks like there's a need for a companion: decision making in a growing environment of too much data and info. Should be long on practice and short on theory.

Reilly Atkinson

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Information Overload Mezei 18:46:00 11/08/99 (1)
  • Re: Information Overload Reilly Atkinson 12:18:52 11/09/99 (0)

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