How to effectively apply our new definition of value?
Portal Admin
August 28, 2024
[RESOURCES]
One of our major advances this year is the informational entropy-based definition of value, whose mechanism and explanation are provided in the short research note [1]. Since its inception, the concept has enabled us to efficiently perform some research tasks that would be impossible otherwise.
However, the above-mentioned short paper may need some kind of guidance so that someone new to it can more readily apply the concept. That’s why this post is written.
Illustration. Informational quanta, interactions, and value, following the notion of value [1]. Created by Bing AI.
In our view, one cannot think meaningfully without having serious questions. This postulation leads to the following tentative questions that you may find useful.
Several questions that can walk one to a fruitful application follow.
Question 1: Having reviewed the related literature, what types of information can you identify to be the most important for the research question at hand?
Information is a gross term that can refer to generic information (without immediate specific use), data (more or less ready for building relations of some sort), or patterns (ready insights emerging from the set of information or data).
Question 2: What are the likely and possible interactions coming out of the pool of information, according to the extant literature, and in your own views/perspectives?
Don’t worry about the differences between what the literature tells and what your intuition or experience hints at. The established literature, no matter how firm and well-known, can be wrong, too. That's why science needs your labor.
Question 3: What are the possible ways to reduce the “mess” of informational quanta and interactions, so that the outcome can be better understood and more useful information, data, and patterns can be perceived as valuable to decision making, given your research question.
Dealing with this third question may need a bit of help, preferably from a portal's mentor, in the first place. This help is supposed to reduce the “heat” in our brains. (You know that when energy is transferred in a system that is not doing work, the unusable form creates heat!)
So, that’s it. We hope you can now start employing the concept and will shortly appreciate the “usefulness of useless knowledge” [2].
References
[1] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Further on informational quanta, interactions, and entropy under the granular view of value formation. https://philarchive.org/rec/VUOARN
[2] Flexner A. (2017). The usefulness of useless knowledge. Princeton University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400884629/html