Referential Information
post by Jack R (Jack Ryan) · 2021-08-01T21:07:11.371Z · LW · GW · 1 commentsContents
Examples None 1 comment
Summary: pointing out a concept and giving examples.
When you learn about a thing, I claim that there are generally two kinds of information you get:
- Direct information: the direct, object-level information you get
- Referential information: the information you get about other things in a similar reference class to the object-level thing
I think often the referential information value is substantial, and I tentatively suspect that people don’t account for it enough in their decisions. This post is just meant to point out referential information and the value of it.
Examples
- Looking into the terms and conditions of a certain credit card, and how you go about setting it up
- Direct info = information about this specific credit card
- Referential info = information about how credit cards in general probably work
- Specializing in chemistry
- Direct info = chemistry knowledge
- Referential info = what other STEM fields are probably like, how hard it is to become an expert in a field, how to go about becoming an expert in a field, how research within a field is conducted, how progress is generally made
- Reading a paper from a field you know little about
- Direct info = the specific stuff you read about
- Referential info = some idea of what the frontier of the field looks like, the kinds of problems the field tackles, how the field tackles them
- Talking in-depth about the details of a complicated but mostly unimportant social interaction with the other person involved
- Direct info = what happened in that social interaction
- Referential info = how other people work, how complicated social interactions can be, how useful digging into details about social interactions can be
- Visiting another country or learning about a new culture
- Direct info = learning about that country or culture
- Referential info = learning how different a country/culture can be from your own
- Learning a new language
- Direct info = knowledge of how to read/write/speak the language
- Referential info = what it is like and how difficult it might be to learn a new language
1 comments
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comment by Viliam · 2021-08-10T12:55:44.272Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This distinction is probably most useful when there is a risk that something was placed in a wrong reference class (so the referential information is mostly irrelevant). So you may feel like you have a lot of information about something, but actually maybe you have none.