Informational density as a source of anxiety

Capturing a thought to return to.

We are surrounded by First World Problems.  People complaining about minor consequences of living in the safest and most prosperous age for the overwhelming greatest portion of humanity.  Why all the anxiety?

Clearly there is the age old dynamic that those in the establishment (power, commerce, prestige, etc.) will always want to create the appearance of a crisis in order to maintain their beneficiary positions in the status quo.  I think that is a big part of the challenge, if not the largest part.  We've got a lot of people with an incentive to manufacture crises which reinforce (they anticipate) their own position of power, finance, and prestige.  

Think of the Establishment response to Covid-19

Think of the Establishment commitment to an otherwise indiscernible Anthropogenic Global Warming despite the epistemic weaknesses of the hypothesis.  

Think of the Establishment commitment to Department of Education control of public education despite the serial and catastrophic policy failures over many decades.

Think of the Establishment enthusiasm for DEI and ESG despite the absence of evidence of any real problem.

Think of transient Establishment fancies such as Occupy Wall Street, Trans, Nuclear Disarmament, Income Inequality, Housing First, Universal Basic Income, Defund the Police, etc.

So intentional pot-stirring for advantage is very real.  But is that the whole explanation?

I wonder.

Perhaps there is an inadvertent issue as well.  Moore's Law means that we have had five or six decades of truly spectacular technological progress and that progress has strained our social, cultural and legal norms.  I take that as read.

But perhaps there is another element.  

Doubling the number of chip components every two years has an additional implication which is both obvious and perhaps less remarked than it might be.  Obviously, Moore's law means that we all have more access to more information more of the time.  We see that in streaming and smart phones and the internet, etc.  

But think about it in measurement terms and in terms of quotidian transactions.  At each moment of our lives, with every action and interaction, I suspect everything is far more information dense than it once was.  

The concept is most easily seen in the work of Edward R. Tufte in his books starting with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. He focuses on simplifying the comprehension of the data displayed while increasing the density of information displayed.

I wonder if something similar is happening in the lived environment.  It is not just that the speed of things has accelerated and that the quantity is greater.  I wonder whether the density of information and inference is also now greater and the trade-offs more transparent and delicately balanced.  Tufte focuses on the trade-offs between density of information and the comprehensibility of that information.  

In the real world, beyond his Flat Land, the trade-offs are greater, usually characterized as trade-offs between Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Or as the Operations Manager in the apocryphal story said to the President of the company, "Faster, Cheaper, Better, pick two."

Since the information density and complexity has come on slowly (increasing every two years but integrating into daily life at a somewhat slower rate), perhaps we have not fully comprehended just how much more nuanced, informationally rich, informationally dense, and consequential normal actions are now which used to be flatter and simpler.

Buying a light bulb - are we being manipulated and exploited by buying high efficiency LEDs that don't last near as long as advertised and contain mercury and have to be disposed of carefully or are we environmental monsters for staying with the old trusted and true filament bulbs?  It used to be a simple economic and quantity decision involving cost and how many bulbs of 40, 60, 75, or 100 watts.  Now, our decision includes all that and the higher upfront costs versus the promised long term returns on efficiency, environmental considerations, status signaling considerations, operational considerations, etc.  

Cars, mortgages, health decisions, recreation, dining, etc.  Almost all transactions involve greater information density and complexity than in the past.  Even buying your groceries.  Loyalty program or privacy?  Cash or credit or debit?  If credit, which card with what reward program?  

Perhaps we are living in a much more information dense and decision consequence rich world than we did and perhaps the consequences, while on balance overwhelmingly positive on average, because of their complexity, threaten greater consequences than we are comfortable assuming.  

Speculation.