Fishing about and about fishing

Pennyworth philosophy

WHAT IS INFORMATION?

Menakhem Ben-Yami

 

Information is any quantity of knowledge in any form that is shared between or

among agents. In my opinion, inert knowledge that is not shared should not be

ranked as information. In this respect, information is like money that in order to

be of any value must either change hands or otherwise productively used.

Money paid to the milkman, saved in a bank, or invested in a business has a

value. Money stored in a strongbox has no value, as long as it is not used.

Knowledge in various forms is stored in nature, and in human products of every

sort, and in human minds. Whether it is stored in the annual rings in a tree trunk,

or in a new scientific theory, it becomes information only when made available in

a form understandable to the party receiving the information. That “party” may be

any human being, my computer, an animal, or a robot. We all live in an age

when distribution of information, because of the accumulating knowledge and its

growing availability, and because of its ever-increasing accessibility, plays a

tremendous role in all aspects of life. While this explosion of information creates

technical, operational, and mental problems, it is a great blessing to education

and sciences.

One, and in my opinion, a major problem of our time is the tendency of

information to evolutionary speciation, due to increasing numbers of ever

narrowing fields of knowledge, and due to the language it is using. The swelling

knowledge keeps splitting in an evolutionary process into more and more

disciplines, with rifts between them deepening, and the people specializing in

them developing more and more exclusive terminologies and styles. Thus, we

have intra-disciplinary information, (physicist to physicist, sociologist to

sociologist, etc.), which we sometimes bunch together creating multi-disciplinary

information. But, we are at our weakest where it comes to inter-disciplinary

information, which I understand also as trans-disciplinary. I witnessed this

weakness on several workshops and conferences intended to be interdisciplinary,

but only managed to be multi-disciplinary. People were talking in

parallel, rather than to each other, and as we all know, parallel lines meet, if at

all, only in infinity. It seems that true inter-disciplinary exchange of information is

still rather scarce than common. So let me extend this essay’s title by adding the

question:

What is inter-disciplinary information?

Inter-disciplinary scientific information ought to be presented in a sort of scientific

Esperanto in terms of both, style and terminology, even more so where intended

for education and training. However, the speciation of knowledge and, hence, of

the whole scientific/academic system, has led to the evolvement of specific intradisciplinary

jargons, fully understandable only to insiders. This creates also

semantic problems: different disciplines using the same words or expressions to

describe different things, or different words or expressions to describe similar or

identical things. Misunderstandings occur. Another problem is the lack of effort

on the part of many specialists to make their information “friendly” and

understandable to specialists coming from other disciplines. Opinions persist that

in many cases this lack of effort or even professional obfuscation are deliberate,

to keep outsiders out and to boost the image of the insiders. So, here, we come

to the next question:

Why inter-disciplinary information?

Many problems we are faced with require inter-disciplinary information and

some, inter-disciplinary treatment by multi-disciplinary teams. There are such

things as “inter-disciplinary disciplines”, which require and often miss interdisciplinary

information. The various branches of ecology represent only one

example, as the one I’m involved with: fisheries ecology.

Fisheries ecology is the science that deals with marine ecosystems modified by

human interference. This interference is quite significant, considering that close

to100M MT of marine organisms worth over US$100 billion, are annually

extracted from the world’s seas and oceans. Since fisheries ecology supplies the

scientific basis for fisheries management and marine resources conservation

worldwide, it can be classified as an applied science.

Understanding and description of marine fishery ecosystems require input from

at least: marine and fishery biology, genetics, physical and chemical

oceanography, marine geology, geography, climatology, meteorology, and socioeconomics

of fisheries (people and markets), as well as marine research and

fishing technologies that in turn involve, among others, electronics,

hydroacoustics, and hydrodynamics.

One of the reasons, if not the main one, for recurring failures of institutional

fisheries science to provide right advise, is ignoring the role of any of these

disciplines by many of the scientists, whose job is to recommend to the

authorities in charge the management means and ways concerned. Such

disregard is probably caused by the complexity, and insufficient data and

knowledge of the marine systems on one hand, and the inappropriate character

of the information flowing from the different disciplines, on the other. People,

scientists included, tend to deal with things they know of, and stick to the

knowledge acquired from their own particular studies and experience. They find

it difficult to absorb information, however relevant, from other disciplines, all the

more, if such information is presented in an intra-disciplinary style.

This, consequently, leads to linear or two-dimensional concepts and paradigms

that try to explain complex systems in simplified terms. Let me continue with this,

fishery example: for several decades, now, fluctuations in catches have been

explained in terms of fish population dynamics only, as if the only or main cause

for fish abundance is fishing pressure. Such approach neglects environmental

influences. For instance, ENSO (ElNino Southern Oscillation) alone may reduce

the landings of pelagic fish (fish that inhabit off-bottom waters) in SW America by

some 4-6M MT, that is by 60-80%. ENSO’s climatic dynamics in atmosphere and

the ocean affect in a roundabout manner not only the abundance and availability

of Peruvian anchovetas in the Pacific Ocean, but also other fishery resources

throughout the World Ocean, as well as various crops on land.

More recently, ElNino events have gained a lot of popularity and may have

impressed people whose only tool to look at fish resources has been for years

only the discipline of population dynamic. This may help, hopefully, also in other

oceanic areas where environmental influences are not as strongly expressed as

in the case of ElNino. Now, why this change of attitude, if any? Because the

information about ElNino has been produced and widely broadcast in a manner

that was accessible and understandable not only to all scientists concerned with

fishery ecosystems, but also to administrators, and fishery operators concerned,

and because it spurred the latter to start asking questions about the reliability of

the population dynamics models.

Popular science has long been in circulation. It is directed as a rule at the wide

public. It cannot replace scientific and technical information, but it has

demonstrated how complex concepts can be presented in a “reader-friendly” or a

“viewer-friendly” manner. I think that the scientific community should develop a

“scientist-friendly” art of scientific information, so that we can write and talk

across disciplinary boundaries, understand each other, and work together, so

that while producing the latest picture of the world, less efforts would be required

to take into consideration information from all pertaining disciplines.

November 2000