Compressing Information

The key to knowing far more than you do now

Learning is the art of compressing information.

I know, some people think learning means figuring things out, or maybe memorizing a bunch of stuff. But in order to figure things out and memorize them, it really, really helps to simplify them—to clump related things together, strip them of the nonessential details, and compress them to their most essential features.

If you think about how you understand, say, geography, you’ll find it’s heavily compressed. The planet is divided into oceans and continents where people live. The continents can be further subdivided; Europe and Asia aren’t really even separate continents, but we can draw an imaginary line to divide them more finely, and then Asia can in turn be split more finely into various countries like Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and, uh, Laos, wherever that is.

But what about Singapore? Or the Faulkland Islands? Or Madagascar? Those places aren’t part of the major continents, and that makes them a harder to memorize—they’re details, complications to the simple idea that the land on Earth can be divided into continents. And in my mind, all the islands I know are associated with larger entities: when I think about Sicily, it’s associated with Italy, just like Prince Edward Island is associated with Canada.

But before I started learning those details, as a teenager navigating through my adolescent world, I began with the personal picture: To the east was the highway, to the west was school, to the north the overpass and the park, and to the south was the arcade. Far, far away were ugly major cities that I didn’t want to visit, but got dragged to by relatives sometimes; where the cities were actually located, I didn’t know. This picture was practical, because it contained the things I was interested in. But it got in the way of understanding the actual map of the world. I didn’t realize that the latitude of most US cities was actually the same as cities in Italy or Japan, and I thought a person could probably walk from Spain to Denmark in a week or so.

To disabuse a teenager of these ideas takes only a few seconds with a globe. But many people have similarly terrible pictures of extremely simple things—things which are far more relevant to life, and more important to understanding the world around you than geography. And these are things that can be easily understood, if you’re willing to try to look at the big picture, rather than insisting on relating everything to the size of your favorite park, or the direction of the nearest grocery store.

Ready?

The Solar System

Let’s start with something simple; something that can be visualized, just like the places on a map: Let’s start with the solar system. If you’re immediately thinking about how many planets there are, and getting worked up on a number like eight or nine, you’re going about it the wrong way. The big picture is this: The solar system starts with Sol.

Sol Invictus—The Unconquerable Sun. Also known as Helios Panoptes if you’re feeling festively Hellenic today, or Taiyou (太陽) for the Land of the Rising Sun, or just Sunna for the old Germanic barbarians who gave us the name in English. That’s 99.8% of the mass and heat generation of the entire solar system, right there. The biggest and most important object is the sun.

What’s next? Well our own existence may just be a detail, but we could all be forgiven for thinking it’s important. So expand a bit, and you get:

1. The Sun

2. Rocky inner planets

3. A nearby asteroid field

4. Gas and ice giants, and then

5. Another distant asteroid field.

Now go just a little deeper and we have names and highlights: The rocky inner planets are called Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. After that, the first asteroid field called the Main Belt, where some of my favorite details like Ceres hang out. Then the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn with deep layers of metallic hydrogen beneath their gaseous hydrogen atmospheres, and the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, with oceans of supercritical fluid beneath the hydrogen. Finally some more asteroids in the Kuiper Belt, which is where Pluto spends his days, drifting around with all the other asteroids—that’s why Pluto isn’t a planet; the poor dear wasn’t big enough to clear his orbit.

There’s more, of course; moons and comets and meteors and the solar wind, and of course the great cosmic mystery of why Earth doesn’t fall into the sun, dooming everybody to a fiery extinction.¹ In fact, there’s even more than one dimension out there in space, and Mercury's orbit is tilted significantly away from the ecliptic. But those are all details—just details.

Compare this to what the solar system looks like if you don’t compress the information quite so adroitly. Don’t compress at all, and your head is jumbled by hundreds of celestial bodies ranging in size from asteroids to the sun:

Nearby Stars, Planets, Moons, and Unusual Asteroids		
Actaea		Herculina  	S/2004 S 12
Adrastea  	Hermione  	S/2004 S 13
Aegaeon		Hermippe  	S/2004 S 17
Aegir		Herse		S/2004 S 21
Aitne		Hiʻiaka		S/2004 S 24
Alauda		Himalia		S/2004 S 26
Albiorix  	Hippocamp  	S/2004 S 28
Aletheia  	Hydra		S/2004 S 29
Alvaldi		Hygiea		S/2004 S 31
Amalthea  	Hyperion  	S/2004 S 34
Amphitrite	Hyrrokkin  	S/2004 S 36
Ananke		Iapetus		S/2004 S 37
Angrboda  	Ijiraq		S/2004 S 39
Anthe		Ilmarë		S/2004 S 7
Aoede		Interamnia	S/2005 (208996) 1
Arche		Io		S/2006 S 1
Ariel		Iocaste		S/2006 S 3
Atlas		Iris		S/2007 S 2
Aurora		Isonoe		S/2007 S 3
Autonoe		Janus		S/2009 S 1
Bamberga  	Jarnsaxa  	S/2010 J 1
Bebhionn  	Juliet		S/2010 J 2
Beli		Juno		S/2011 J 1
Belinda		Jupiter		S/2011 J 2
Bergelmir  	Kale		S/2011 J 3
Bestla		Kallichore	S/2015 (136472) 1
Bianca		Kalyke		S/2016 J 1
Caliban		Kari		S/2016 J 3
Callirrhoe	Kerberos  	S/2016 J 4
Callisto  	Kiviuq		S/2017 J 1
Calypso		Kore		S/2017 J 2
Camilla		Laomedeia  	S/2017 J 3
Carme		Larissa		S/2017 J 5
Carpo		Leda		S/2017 J 6
Ceres		Loge		S/2017 J 7
Chaldene  	Luna		S/2017 J 8
Charon		Lysithea  	S/2017 J 9
Cordelia  	Mab		S/2018 (532037) 1
Cressida  	Margaret  	S/2018 J 2
Cupid		Mars		S/2018 J 3
Cybele		Megaclite  	S/2018 J 4
Cyllene		Mercury		S/2019 S 1
Daphne		Methone		S/2021 J 1
Daphnis		Metis		S/2021 J 2
Davida		Metis		S/2021 J 3
Deimos		Mimas		S/2021 J 4
Desdemona  	Miranda		S/2021 J 5
Despina		Mneme		S/2021 J 6
Dia		Mundilfari	S/2022 J 1
Dione		Naiad		S/2022 J 2
Diotima		Namaka		S/2022 J 3
Doris		Narvi		Sao
Dysnomia  	Nemesis		Saturn
Earth		Neptune		Setebos
Egeria		Nereid		Siarnaq
Eggther		Neso		Sinope
Eirene		Nix		Skathi
Elara		Oberon		Skoll
Elektra		Ophelia		Skrymir
Eleonora  	Orthosie  	Sol
Enceladus  	Paaliaq		Sponde
Epimetheus	Pallas		Stephano
Erinome		Pallene		Styx
Erriapus  	Palma		Surtur
Ersa		Pan		Suttungr
Euanthe		Pandia		Sycorax
Eugenia		Pandora		Sylvia
Eukelade  	Pasiphae  	Tarqeq
Eunomia		Pasithee  	Tarvos
Eupheme		Patientia  	Taygete
Euphrosyne	Perdita		Telesto
Euporie		Philophrosyne	Tethys
Europa		Phobos		Thalassa
Europa		Phoebe		Thebe
Eurydome  	Pluto		Thelxinoe
Farbauti  	Polydeuces	Themis
Fenrir		Portia		Themisto
Ferdinand  	Praxidike  	Thiazzi
Fornjot		Prometheus	Thisbe
Fortuna		Prospero  	Thrymr
Francisco  	Proteus		Thyone
Galatea		Psamathe  	Titan
Ganymede  	Psyche		Titania
Geirrod		Puck		Trinculo
Gerd		Rhea		Triton
Greip		Rosalind  	Umbriel
Gridr		S/2003 J 10	Uranus
Gunnlod		S/2003 J 12	Ursula
Halimede  	S/2003 J 16	Valetudo
Harpalyke  	S/2003 J 18	Vanth
Hati		S/2003 J 19	Venus
Hebe		S/2003 J 2	Vesta
Hegemone  	S/2003 J 23	Weywot
Hektor		S/2003 J 24	Xiangliu
Helene		S/2003 J 4	Ymir
Helike		S/2003 J 9

Growing up, I knew an autistic guy who thought like this. There was a lot of random, unusual, and totally unprocessed knowledge there. He spoke in a monotone, but he was happy to share! In retrospect, conversations with him felt kindof like wandering around on Wikipedia, except some Chicago engineer was fighting with a California game designer over the mouse, and I mostly had to just listen to what came out of the random links they clicked.

But you can also go wrong another way:

If you compress too far and fail to go into the details, you lose the existence of apples, this blog, and all humanity. This isn’t even that bad, though, because it focusses on the largest central mass—the sun—and it’s not hard to increase the detail if you start here. Critical complexity may be missing, yes, but everything is arranged so that it will be easy to accommodate more information. Given about three minutes and a mnemonic device about how My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles someone with this schema is pretty well set.²

Seemingly more useful, but less accurate, is when people compress the information by taking their own innate perspective as most important, and then thinking Earth is somehow the biggest thing in the solar system to come up with some model for the universe like Geocentrism or the Flat Earth:

This last mistake—this insistence on compressing information on an ad hoc basis in terms of personal perception and experience—ends up being the most common problem getting in the way of people understanding what’s going on around them. And it’s hard to correct or expand, because everything is jumbled in terms of size, position, and relationship. When you insist on compressing things subjectively, you won’t get an accurate sense of the big picture. The art of learning is knowing how to compress information so that you get the clearest picture, with the most detail relevant to your own life, in a way that takes as little effort and mental space as possible.

You

OK, so let’s make it much, much more relevant—and also much, much harder: Let’s talk about you. The temptation to compress information subjectively can be extremely strong when it comes to yourself; the only other realms of knowledge which even come close to providing the same incentive to compress information subjectively are also things related to yourself, like your hobbies, your friends, your country, your clothes, your home, your God, or your political party. But this is what it looks like when you try to compress your world like that:

Egocentrism: The psychological analogue of Geocentrism

I don’t deny this is useful, particularly if your mental resources are limited.

I do deny it is objectively accurate. (Because it is inaccurate, it has the potential to cause you misery.)

I also deny that it easily accepts correction or accommodates new information. (Because it resists correction, it has the potential to prevent you from escaping miserable situations.)

And it’s sadly common. People by the sheerest habit always seem to default to assuming that everyone is just like the way they are; many are so deeply espoused to this kind of thinking that when I try to tell them I’m not that way, they argue with me. The Golden Rule is based on this—do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and never mind that they might be annoyed anyway.

People are different from one another. Remarkably different. And your very uniqueness means that what seems to work for understanding everyone else may not work for you. In order to understand yourself with the best compression of all the information involved, you need to take a step back, learn what a human is, and then figure out what kind of human you are. To know the mean and standard deviation. To know human nature, and your personal individuality.

It would take a lot of time and text to be thorough about the best way to build this understanding. But I can give you a sense of the rough outline I use:

• Age

• Intelligence

• Extraversion

• Sex and related characteristics

• Culture, social group, and related values

• Sanity

• Irritability

• Moral character

• Organization

• Aesthetic Appreciation

In my experience most people are pretty good with the demographic variables, age, sex, and culture; everybody in the 90’s and 00’s was always asking age/sex/location (ASL) in chatrooms. But growing up I missed a lot of this—I compressed too far, too judgmentally, and too egocentrically, so I missed, and misread, people around me.

Me

Maybe you never had any trouble with this yourself. But failing to encode social information wisely was really, really awful for me. It meant misreading myself, trusting the wrong people, snubbing people I should have trusted, and wandering into social isolation and dead-end jobs for almost a decade.

Whether that happened because of poor upbringing, or as a reaction to other people using bad models to understand me, or just because of my own impatience and youthful inflexibility doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I’ve learned there can always be more nuance that’s important to learn, and now I’ve reached a schema that finally unlocked a pretty good life—what matters is that many people I encounter seem also to be in a bad place because they compressed critical information about themselves and other people in the wrong way.

What’s the right way? Well I’m not going to tell you exactly how to do that right now. But be patient with me; perhaps another day.

1. It’s the same reason a little girl spinning around in a circle doesn’t get hit in the face by a jump rope in her hand, even though she’s constantly pulling it towards herself. Also: the same reason a space elevator could be extended from Mt. Kilimanjaro up into low Earth orbit, if we could ever find something with a high enough strength-to-mass ratio to make it out of.

2. Admittedly you could take a shortcut and shake them for about eight seconds yelling “Earth! We live on planet Earth! Earth orbits the Sun!” but they might not like you much afterwards.