Information Theory & Social Media

I often describe the world using the language of information theory. That means I tend to think in terms of certainty, uncertainty, compression, and synthesis rather than isolated facts. The core idea is simple: facts by themselves are not value. Truth in isolation is not insight. Information only exists when something changes how you understand the world.

If something is certain, it carries zero information. If something is unexpected, it carries a great deal. A known fact adds nothing on its own. A novel synthesis that rearranges how multiple facts relate to one another can be extremely valuable, because it alters the underlying model you use to interpret reality.

Information is not meaning, and it is not evidence of value. Knowing facts that others do not—facts that can be searched, memorized, or repeated—does not confer insight by itself. Information is statistical surprise. The sun rising today carries roughly zero bits of information. A sovereign state defaulting overnight carries enormous information.

Most people confuse volume of data with information, emotion with signal, and narrative with truth. News is largely low-information repetition. Social media is high-emotion, low-information noise. What actually matters is what was not anticipated. Markets, systems, and people move in response to surprises, not to facts everyone already knows. Volume only becomes useful when it enables synthesis—when independent observations collapse into a pattern that was previously invisible.

That is where information begins.