Knowledge stratums

I am sure you have played the telephone game at some point. A message starts at one end of a chain, gets whispered from person to person and by the time it gets to the other end its completely mangled. Its fun, and carries a deep lesson about how information degrades.

You have also probably either made or received a photocopy of a photocopy at some point. Grainy, thick, sometime distorted to the point of it almost being illegible. Each time it goes through the machine it gets artifacts, which then live on and get amplified in all succesive iterations.

A lesson from timekeeping

In the Network Time Protocol (NTP) the atomic clocks are the “source of truth”: as close as we can get to accurate time. They call this “Stratum 0”. A clock that directly follows the atomic clock is considered “Stratum 1”. A succesive clock that uses “Stratum 1” as a reference is a “Stratum 2” and so on and so forth.

NTP cannot eliminate the drift, but it can build a heuristic to easily understand where we are in relation to “true time”. A “Stratum 3” emits a metric that informs users about its accuracy, instead of pretending its the atomic clock.

An application to knowledge

Everything we know sits in some relative “stratum” in relation to the ground truth of reality. If I run an experiment, the information I learn from it is “Stratum 1”. If instead, I read about an experiment from a well reviewed and trusted paper, I am at “Stratum 2”. “Stratum 3” could be reading an article summarizing the paper, then listening to someone talk about it over coffee would be “Stratum 4”. You get the idea.

There is nothing wrong about holding Stratum 3 knowledge: most of our knowledge about the world is already indirect. The problem is when we lose track of which “stratum” we are in, or even worse stop caring.

We have to know where we stand

I think this is specially relevant with the rise of the internet and AI tools. It is easier than ever to get what feels like “Stratum 1” information: confident, articulate, no visible uncertaintly… but we cannot observe the chain that produced it.

More than ever we carry the responsibility of knowing in which stratum our information comes from, and need to have the discipline to measure our actions in proportion to it. The more a decision matters, the more we should focus on lower stratum knowledge.