Familiarity Can Be Dangerous

(to your knowledge management system)

Image by ar130405 from Pixabay

On January 9, 2007, the Wall Street Journal ran an article without reference to an author; the title was “Roberta Wohlstetter, Codebreaker” ¹ and provided a short glimpse into the life of an American historian and intelligence analyst. Roberta Wohlstetter died on January 6, 2007, at age 94.

Wohlstetter gained prominence from her work on Pearl Harbor, foreshadowing the 9/11 commission reports on the terrorist attacks in New York. Her work “Pearl Harbor: Warnings and decision” ² challenged the view that the failure to anticipate the attack resulted from a combination of factors, i.e., bureaucratic inertia, strategic misperceptions, inadequate communication, and not intelligence failures solely. ³

Not surprisingly, information was the leading culprit. Too much information, to be exact. Amid the “mountains of incomplete and often conflicting data,” the “analysts couldn’t distinguish the information that really mattered.” ⁴ That was 1941, and it is almost impossible to comprehend the mountains of information available today.

How do we distinguish between helpful information and mere information?

Thankfully (and you should be thankful, too), I’m not a national intelligence analyst. So, the most challenging task I face with information is anticipating which data pieces will be helpful that I can add to my knowledge base and which elements can remain dead information. Although the consequences vary significantly, the development is the same: how do you differentiate between the two?

Interestingly enough, in his preface to Wohlstetter’s book, the future Nobelist Thomas Schelling hinted that analysts tend to focus on “a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely.” ⁵ Because most analysts are people too ⁶ we can learn a thing or two about “the mere-exposure effect or familiarity principle.” ⁷

Advertisers have long known that “people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.” ⁸ “The effect,” according to Wikipedia, “has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paints, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds.” ⁹ I find it all the time in my notes when attempting to process reminders; dozens of sentences essentially saying the same thing spread across various authors. Unfortunately, familiarity with an underlying theme causes me to collect a mountain of dead information.

There is a difference between knowledge and information, and you don’t have to have the fate of the world hanging in the balance to see it. “Most of the time,” Sascha Fast says in his article on Zettelkasten — An introduction, “it is ‘dead.’ Information just is.”¹⁰

I have a mountain of dead information in my Bullet Journal.¹¹ Corralling all my dead data in one place is why I split my journaling into two pieces earlier this year.¹²

You must “make something from the information you process.”¹³ Sascha encourages us by translating “information to knowledge” through context and relevance.¹⁴ Context provides the scaffolding, the background framework for hanging the dress of relevance. Relevance is the “why” behind the connections.¹⁵ When we discern the relevance between ideas when we nurture and prune a concept, write about connections, move things around, making sense of the whole, we will have determined the information that matters. Isn’t that what working in your PKM is all about?¹⁶

Written March 11, 2023

While coffee may not be my cup of tea, I do have a passion for beautiful jewelry. If you enjoyed reading my article, I invite you to visit Jewelry Art by Linda, where every piece is lovingly crafted by hand with meticulous attention to detail.

Published simultaneously at Linda’s Brick Barn.

Footnotes

1. “Roberta Wohlstetter, Codebreaker,” WSJ January 9, 2007; Page A18.
2. Wohlstetter, R. (1962). Pearl Harbor: Warning and decision. Stanford University Press.
3. Ibid
4. Ibid (Codebreaker, 2007)
5. Ibid
6. I’m attempting to allow space for AI analysts.
7. Mere-exposure effect. (2022, December 17). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Fast, Sascha. (2020, October 27). Zettelkasten. Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/
11. Or Interstitial Journaling. I ‘r’ an Interstitial Journalist. (and didn’t know it) | by Steven Thompson | Feb, 2023 | Medium
12. Eliminating Obsidian Daily Notes. It started innocently with a question I… | by Steven Thompson | Jan, 2023 | Medium
13. Ibid (Fast, 2020)
14. Ibid
15. Ibid
16. Burleson, C. (2021, January 14). IA for PKM: Crows, Camels, Concepts and the Cognitive Divide. Medium. https://cody-burleson.medium.com/ia-for-pkm-crows-camels-concepts-and-the-cognitive-divide-7523c0bfa5eb