Information Bottlenecks

Joseph Duveen manipulated the millionaire art-collection market of the 1940s. He would learn everything there was to know about his prospects' habits, tastes, and patterns. Oftentimes, he would pay people close to them for information, getting to know each person better than himself. If you're ambitious and competitive, nothing should be left to chance—information acts as a "sixth sense" with yourself seeming clairvoyant.

Using knowledge will ensure you hit your mark. You'll seem more charming, agreeable, and as if you have a superior sense of taste. Duveen used this to become Andrew Mellon's sole art dealer, even after Mellon swore off interest in ever meeting him.

How do you maximize your information flow?

Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, defined information not by its content but by its unexpectedness. He quantified information as the negative logarithm of probability—the less likely an event, the more information it contains. When someone tells you "it's smoggy in Los Angeles," that carries minimal information because the probability approaches certainty. But "it's raining in Monterey in June" delivers substantial information due to its rarity. Shannon's elegant formulation shows that perfectly predictable events contain zero information. This explains why seemingly "random numbers" generated by a formula you know contain no surprise at all—and therefore no information. "Information," in Shannon's framework, isn't about meaning or importance, but about the fundamental nature of uncertainty. The truly informative is that which we cannot predict.