All three comments to my last blog on "Financial Literacy" are good and revolve around the same theme, captured by commenter "PPotts" with an old quote from famed retailer Sy Syms: "A knowledgeable consumer is the best consumer." Yes, indeed. As the Faber College statue in the classic movie "Animal House" read: "Knowledge is good." Hard to argue with that.
Yet in this Information Overload Age, knowledge of a few facts simply isn't enough (if it ever was). The Internet with its access to billions of bits of data seems to have created the illusion that we can simply log on to WebMD, Wikipedia or LegalZoom.com and diagnose our own illness, write our own business contracts or research, well, just about anything, depending upon whatever might be our crises of the moment. Over the holidays, my brother-in-law the doctor was lamenting that he spends about half his face-time with patients explaining the flaws in the diagnoses and/or treatments they've come up with through their Web research.
The late philosopher Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago addressed this problem a generation ago, by creating what has become known as the DIKW Hierarchy to describe the steps in the progression of human insight:
D: Data
K: Knowledge
U: Understanding
W: Wisdom
The idea here is that bits of data and knowledge of a few facts provide rather scanty insight; while the understanding, and hopefully, wisdom, gained by years of research, study and experience provide us with rather more insight into whatever problem or discipline we're interested in.
