IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 72

decades, the life expectancy will
rise dramatically, as it has more
recently [22].
Similarly, it has been argued that
our modern lives are much less violent than any other time in history
[20]. Those statistics are misleading. They certainly don't include the
psychological violence we prefer to
inflict on people such as prisoners,
the overweight, and the ugly. Even
the level of physical violence varies
greatly among geographical locations and time periods. Dresden
and Hiroshima during World War

The net effect of scientific
discoveries may be an increase
or a decrease in our total
information.

II was probably more violent than
anything our ancestors ever experienced or even imagined. Averaging those out with the wealthy and
peaceful suburbs of America gives
a distorted view of what people
experience. Violence is localized
in the modern world to war zones
and poor urban slums. More importantly, a large world population distorts the violence statistics. One
cannot simply look at percentages
and gain insights. Otherwise, the
Biblical record of Cain killing Abel,
when the world population was 4,
amounts to a violent death rate of
25%, and it would be equivalent to
over 2 billion deaths today. Amount
of violence is better measured by
absolute numbers in specific locations and time to reflect what is
experienced by those people. Statistics in the form of averages is a
main source of low-quality informa-

tion that prevents insight and understanding [26].
Economic statistics similarly
hide important insights. GDP is a
measure of the total value of the
goods produced by a nation, and
it is often used as a measure of
wealth. By that measure, primitive
and more traditional societies are
often deemed poor, because they
rely partly on non-cash economies.
For the same reason, development
always seems to increase wealth,
despite the immense poverty and
suffering it creates in some parts
of the world. According to
this measure of wealth, if
the river is clean, and everybody freely drinks the river
water, that doesn't contribute to the wealth of a nation
- but if the river is polluted, and everybody has to
buy bottled water for cash,
then that is included in the
wealth of a nation, and considered growth. If everybody
is mentally healthy with
vibrant communities and extended
families, that does not contribute to
the wealth of a nation and it is considered poverty; but when the mental health of a community declines,
and people pay cash to get help
from professionals, that contributes
to the cash economy, and considered growth and wealth. These are
perverse measures of wealth and
growth, and they seem to be specifically designed to make modernity
look more desirable in the ongoing
competition between modernity and
tradition. After all, some benefit
immensely from modern development and the destruction of traditional societies [11].
Businesses also generate huge
amounts of information that is
designed to mislead, not to inform.
Advertising is a fundamentally faulty
model that relies on the sellers to
provide information about their own
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

products, although sellers cannot be
expected to be an un biased and
reliable source of information about
their own products. In fact, advertising is generally expected to be misleading, and consumers go to great
lengths to avoid it. This leads to an
information war, with sellers spending increasingly larger amounts on
advertising to overwhelm the defensive avoidance tactics of consumers, and the consumers increasingly
spending more effort on protecting
themselves from unwanted advertising. Like all information wars, it leads
to a vicious cycle, with constantly
diminishing returns to effort and
investment, which leaves everyone
worse off. All parties have an interest in reliable unbiased information
about products, but advertising by
sellers cannot provide that by simply
producing large quantities of unreliable and biased information [4], [27].
The fundamental claim is that
if all competitors advertise freely,
then the consumers can sort
through the exaggerated claims of
all, and find the truth in the middle. That claim is likely to be false,
and it also applies to many political, economic, legal, and social
debates. Such adversarial systems
generate a lot of information supporting various points of view, all
of which are biased in one direction or another. Truth may be somewhere in the middle, but it cannot
be discovered easily when nobody
has the incentive to argue for the
actual truth, but every part has an
incentive to distort the truth in their
direction. It is difficult to find the
truth in a court of law or in a political election when everybody argues
for their side by distorting the truth.

Solutions
The information content of a society determines the social problems it faces. Previous changes in
the human information repository
∕

december 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015