Of course, Ibsen wrote this play over one hundred years ago, in 1882, so by its own logic this truth has aged into a falsehood. ;-)

Geoff

Needless to say, it makes even less sense to talk about the “intrinsic value” of information. As JP has demonstrated in another blog entry, any value information has resides in how it is interpreted. This depends on both WHO is doing the interpreting and WHEN the interpretation takes place.

Now, what may differentiate information from other commodities is that we may wish to talk about instances of information having NEGATIVE value. An example would be a piece of source code at an open-source site that has a virus concealed in it. Another example might be the intentionally planted bogus data about John Siegenthaler’s connection to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Back in the day Einstein warned us that just about any scientific discovery could be used for good or ill purposes. Perhaps we need to refine this warning with a better theory of negative information value.

My post dealt with keeping the nominal versus intrinsic distinctions simple, and concentrated on where the warranty for the nominal value came from. If that warranty can be obtained by gaming the system, then “bad” information will drive out “good”.

My thesis is that we can prevent this, by looking hard at the provider of the warranty and ensuring that the warranting process is kept honest. We haven’t got it right, the system can be gamed, but I’d like to think that we will learn more and that we can minimise the impact of Gresham’s Law as a result.

There is, of course, a separate discussion to be had on what constitutes good information and bad information in an “intrinsic value” sense. Is centrally controlled propaganda good? Is a reasonably well-written blog bad? There is some capacity to make “factual” distinctions between good and bad information, although I am uncomfortable with it; I have seen too many spin doctors at work, and the Lakoff and Chomsky arguments come to mind. But when it comes to ideas, it is positively dangerous to start defining ideas as good and bad, whatever the yardstick used and however well -meaning the attempt is. That path leads to thought police very quickly.

Now, what would it mean to apply this to information? Not that “bad information” drives out “good information” in the simplistic sense of the terms “bad” and “good” — ie. Wikipedia will drive out Britannica (although that is almost certainly going to happen). Instead, I’d read this to mean that “bad information” is information that has nominal value rather than “intrinsic” value. In other words, information that is valuable to the extent that a community of people agree it is valuable — without reference to some external criterion, like say physical reality.

In this sense, I’d argue that Gresham’s Law is already valid for the blogosphere, in spades. (Or more accurately, the Googlesphere.) Information is valued exactly to the extent that it’s linked to. Any reference to external validation is irrelevant — what matters is how many people blog you. That’s Gresham’s Law in action right there.