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Information vs. Knowledge — the Forgotten Differential
Being knowledgeable isn’t about what you know. It’s all about how you tear that information wide open.
If you look back through the annals of history, you will find in most every civilization a period of time known as their “golden age.” In practically all of these golden ages there was an element of progress that specifically related to the compilation, exploration, and innovation of human knowledge.
Over time, a strange thing happens to history. It changes. And I don’t mean in relation to time or new events — it is our very perception of what happened, how it happened, and who it happened to which shifts and transforms. This is perhaps a very natural thing to have happen. The problems arise when we lose the lessons of that history in the process of transformation.
One of the common threads running through the diverse intellectual traditions of golden ages across the globe was the expression of knowledge versus the information it is based on. In Islamic jurisprudential discourses, this one concept produced entire schools of thought. The same was true in Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic, and Christian societies all over the world.
The very nature of knowledge and what it constitutes has been debated and…
