Thought Experiment
Lets say you are a student and the professor has just announced that he is going to hold a quiz tomorrow and the performance on this said quiz will affect your final grades. Obviously, everybody has theories on how the questions will be set - but most of them believe it will be 60-40 [or 70-30] split between theory and numericals. While talking to your senior, somebody the professor likes and has aced the course in the past, you are informed that this particular professor, asks only numerical problems for any and all quiz he conducts. During lunch, your classmates continue to engage in time-pass speculation about the paper structure.
a) Do you tell them what you got to know from the senior? [0 theory - 100 math]?
OR
b) Do you tell them what everybody believes? [60 theory - 40 math]?
What if this wasn’t about a test, but was related to your job? Or inside information on stock/crypto price movement?
Does your response change?
[Curious to know, so do let me know…]
Information Stockpiling
If you chose the latter option, you are not alone. What you have done is what is called as information/knowledge hoarding.
I have always been a student who found joy in learning outside the classroom and prescribed textbooks. Which by default took me out of the competitive behavior exhibited by my peers [which can be ascribed to multitude of reasons - parental/societal expectations, inter/intra/parasocial motivations]. So when I became aware of this behavior, it infuriated and amazed me in equal measures - enough to make me consider deep diving into this for my masters’ thesis. My original scheme was to study and evaluate if an incentivized intervention can be formulated to enable information sharing in situations which would otherwise prompt people to exhibit information hoarding. [For those interested, there are some lovely research papers - like the paper written by Anaza and Nowlin about how sales people go on about information hoarding; or this rather dry paper detailing the literature review on information hoarding and sharing].
What my final master’s thesis ended up doing was far removed from this fascinating topic. Still interesting in its findings, but not related to this - my original research question.
Which prompts me - Another thought experiment - [I did indicate plural experiments]
Q: Consider two scenarios:
Scenario A - There is a growing scarcity for X (something that you like and use)
Scenario B - There is a deluge of products similar to X but not X (to which you are partial)
In which of these scenarios would you stock up/hoard?
[Again mighty curious to know what your responses are…]
My guess is that you chose Scenario A. Which is understandable and completely explainable - there is scarcity and people hoard things when they are hard to come by. Which brings me to the Tudor connection.
You have probably either heard of “Gresham’s law” or the phrase, “bad money drives out good”. If you have not, then the phrase is the Gresham’s law. Named after an English financier during the Tudor dynasty.
Flashback
In the olden days, like Game of Thrones type olden days, when dragons still ruled the 7 kingdoms. Money = coins. The value of the coins was based on the metal which was used to make those coins. So obviously Gold > Silver > Copper. But with Khaleesi wanting to wage wars, and the Lannister’s growing debt, the wise men in finance decided that they could increase the number of coins in circulation by mixing the base metal with another. Which meant that silver was not all silver but silver + something, which meant 1 old silver coin was no longer equal to 1 new silver + something coin if you were to melt the coins to make Pinterest styled frames. So the people started hoarding the old silver coins and soon enough, only the new wannabe silver coins were in circulation.
So,
What does a 16th century financier have to do with Information in the 21st century you ask? Well, the answer is pretty evident. Look back at your response to the first thought experiment. If you chose option (b) and didn’t share the information with your classmates, you are essentially driving the good information out of the market. And what we are left with is WhatsApp University and weaponized misinformation.
The ramifications of information hoarding/stockpiling are plenty and almost all of them are negative when we are talking about overall and general wellbeing. For example - think back to the time you had to take a handover from somebody leaving the organization, (or), you joining a new company and trying to understand how things work.
A whole ton of research is being carried to create institutional/organizational structure/culture to induce more information sharing, primarily because sharing information leads to increased welfare for all parties concerned. Most of the suggested solutions (1, 2, 3, 4) seem to revolve around making changes in the organizational culture - but they are all easy said than done. Think there maybe something in Damon Centola’s work about leveraging social networks to address this stockpiling behavior.
Which brings me to the other paradox - People hoarding information when there is glut of it around. But again, this paradox is resolved if information is viewed as power rather than mere data. Then one can explain that everyone always craves more power than less. Even if they have all the power in the world, they crave for more, not sure what one will do with all the power, but more is definitely better than less. In that sense, information is viewed and treated just like power and money.
Like I said, this is a fascinating area of reasearch, one which is not really given the limelight it so rightfully deserves. Anyway, will keep you guys updated on my independent research on this and other areas that I am exploring.
In other things of interest…
Highly recommend watching ‘University of Laughs’ (Warai no daigaku) [2004] and 700 days of Battle: Us Vs the Police [2008] - Both funny, heart warming stories about characters with different ideologies with genuine laugh out loud moments.
Prof. Scott Cunningham is holding a series of lectures on Causal Inference from 9th - 12th August, 2021. Loved reading his book - “Causal Inference: Mixtape”.