The emergence of wisdom

From a scientific point of view, the following questions are very important, particularly as "big data" and "machine learning" enter science.

What is the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom? 

What is the relationship between them?

In chapter 1 of The Model Thinker, Scott Page has a helpful discussion on these questions, built around the diagram below.

I like the diagram because the hierarchy shows how the different entities emerge from one another. Here is Page's explanation.

At the bottom of the hierarchy lie data: raw, uncoded events, experiences, and phenomena. Births, deaths, market transactions, votes, music downloads, rainfall, soccer matches, and speciation events. Data can be long strings of zeros and ones, time stamps, and linkages between pages. Data lack meaning, organization, or structure.  

Information names and partitions data into categories. [It suggests something about how the world may be structured (or not). It identifies patterns.]

Plato defined knowledge as justified true belief. More modern definitions refer to it as understandings of correlative, causal, and logical relationships. Knowledge organizes information. Knowledge often takes model form. ...models explain and predict.

Atop the hierarchy lies wisdom, the ability to identify and apply relevant knowledge [to a particular problem]. Wisdom requires many-model thinking. Sometimes, wisdom consists of selecting the best model, as if drawing from a quiver of arrows. Other times, wisdom can be achieved by averaging models; this is common when making predictions... When taking actions, wise people apply multiple models like a doctor’s set of diagnostic tests. They use models to rule out some actions and privilege others. Wise people and teams construct a dialogue across models, exploring their overlaps and differences.

Aside 1. I note that this many-model approach is similar to the method of multiple hypotheses advocated by John Platt and that I have blogged about previously.

Aside 2. Page quotes these great lines 

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? 

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

taken from the opening stanza Choruses from The Rock, by T.S. Eliot. However, reading the whole stanza I feel that a lot is being missed as the poem is really about secularisation.