QUALITY-CONTROL OF
INFORMATION:
On the concept of accuracy of information in data-banks and in management
information systems
(Version
251223-1655)
This page's URL web address <http://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/diss-avh.html> and <https://archive.org/details/diss-avh/AvhDunn1972>)
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA
Ivanov, Kristo (1972). Quality-control
of information: On the concept of accuracy of information in data-banks and in
management information systems. Stockholm: The Royal Institute of
Technology (KTH). (Doctoral dissertation, 258 pages).
Copies
can downloaded as instructed below, while earlier they could be
ordered from the USA's National Technical
Information Service NTIS, order # PB-219297. Ref. Dissertation Abstracts
International 1974, Vol 35A, 3, p. 1611-A. Internationally the
text is catalogued at the National Library of Sweden-Library Information
System: LIBRIS.
The PhD dissertation was presented to the faculty of the Royal Institute of
Technology (KTH)
for public disputation and defense on 11 December 1972, at 2:00 pm in the hall
of the college, Valhallavägen 79, Stockholm.
PREFATORY NOTE
(rev. 240522-1600)
IN GENERAL
For a proper reading and
appreciation of this text and its numerous links, please refer initially to my General
disclaimer. This prefatory note consists of some updating and
overlapping texts that were written on different occasions, starting from the
publishing of the dissertation in year 1972, and that I have not yet had the
occasion of melt them down in a single text, which would amount to an updating
and extension of my original dissertation.
The doctoral
dissertation on Quality-control of information develops the
scientific meaning and foreshadows the necessity of what later came to be named
the Wiki-concept, especially as related to “Trust and security”. Quality-control in terms of the
wiki-concept can be seen as a theory of security
of computer systems as indicated in the conclusions expressed at the end
of other texts about human-computer interaction - HCI, on Information and debate and about Computerization of the whole society that today unfolds
into the hype of Artificial General Inteligence and ChatGPT, while struggling about fake news and conspiracy theories. The
implications for Artificial General Intelligence in my dissertation written
mainly in 1971 are outlined in its Appendix 11, pages A11.6-A11.9 on “Human
thinking and manipulation of symbols”, extended to pages A11.10-A11.13 on
“Information quality and Law”, all the while, as remarked on page A12:2, I had
not yet available West Churchman’s, at the time newly published synthesizing
book The Design of Inquiring Systems.
A general
problematization of so called fake news and conspiracy theories beyond
“alternative facts” (in Swedish “faktaresistens”) or in deeper
meaning paradigm shift
and worldview, is found in my paper on Information and theology,
especially in the
chapter on “The Galileo affair”. Such problematization is applied
later in my papers on The Russia-NATO-Ukraine information crisis,
Information: Massmedia
and Israel-Hamas war, and Wikipedia
democracy and Wikicracy. The theological dimension of the
problem is emphasized by the phenomenon of governmental censorship in
democratic western countries of the world, where early censorship based on
criminalization of atheism, such as in the historical case of the Atheism
dispute of philosopher Gottlob Fichte, has been substituted by
criminalization of antisemitism, depending upon its various controversial definitions by controversial mass media, including the “Legality of Holocaust denial”.
The narrow academic
approach to the discussion of “alternative facts” is, else, basically done in
terms of simplified Kantian philosophy, as implicitly done in Sweden. The discussion starts rhetorically
with the presentation of an oversimplified conflict between “reason” and
overpowering “feelings” that undermine the logic of facts. Philosophically,
however, “Reason” was split into (the critiques of) theoretical and practical
reason, and both are synthesized in the (critique) of judgment into an
aesthetics which is soon reduced to art and further down to “design”, as
outlined in the historical criticism of Kant’s approach that I revive in my
paper on Computerization
as abuse of formal science.
The concept of design, that only exceptionally is sometimes problematized in
academic research,
risks to become a catchword that today lends prestige to all engineering
effort, not the least to
computer-related efforts.
Design is an approach
based on a volume and kind of literature that is routine for philosophers. It
is, however “mind-blowing”, overwhelming the minds of most common educated
modern citizens (see for instance the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s “Kant’s account of reason”). It divorces the question from common
sense and from advanced psychology that historically was derived from
philosophy, and from theology and religion, which are replaced by a nominal
“democracy” that cannot work without the participation of common educated
citizens. The whole approach is criticized in my above-mentioned essay on the
phenomenon of computerization of the
whole society.
In this previously
mentioned paper on the Ukraine information crisis, I report the ultimate
observation and insight that fundamentally all information is fake (the more so
in war, when "the first victim is truth") if it is not accompanied by
what my dissertation focused on: an estimate of an error term. And that ultimately the determination of the error term
depends upon the people’s ethics and aspects covered in Steven Shapin’s Social
History of Truth, as well as the possibility of citizens' freedom of speech. It is usually guaranteed in democracy, but it is highly problematic
as historically analyzed in the classic Democracy in
America by Alexis de Tocqueville, and forcefully exposed by
e.g. Tage Lindbom in his book The Myth of
Democracy.
Today these aspects
tend to be trivialized by their unconscious reduction to (Wikipedia’s) alternative facts (and its section on “see also”), fake news, misinformation and disinformation, seasoned with references to groupthink (and its “see also”). Societal focus on trendy “disinformation” has
motivated my writing a special paper on the issue with the title Disinformation as a myth. Further trivialization takes place
when information is qualified by ad-hoc terms such as those catalogized in my
above-mentioned text on quality-control of information. Examples I give in my
dissertation are validity, reliability,
dependability, correctness, timeliness, exactness, usefulness, consistency,
authenticity, completeness, degree of detail, recency, controllability,
goodness, trueness, relevance, pertinence, acceptability, refinement,
approximation, currency, rightness, coverage, etc. A final and definitive
example of trivialization appears in a cynical interpretation of simplified
post-modern thought that, I have seen, appeals
to careerist post-doctoral students who promote their dissertation by means of
“socialization” in an academic subculture of “sense-making”, by adducing the
additional qualifier of information “plausibility” where
People favour plausibility
over accuracy in accounts of events
and contexts […]: "in an equivocal, postmodern world, infused with the
politics of interpretation and conflicting interests and inhabited by people
with multiple shifting identities, an obsession with accuracy seems fruitless,
and not of much practical help, either."
Wikipedia’s page on
the Big Lie,
can be finally seen as
an oblivion of the basic problem of the
myth of democracy since it forgets the basic problem and presupposition of
democracy, namely the question of who wants what and why, and that a majority, even if feeling of having a good conscience, does not necessarily want the good and
right. A whole book that logically illustrates the limitations of democracy but
without theological grounds ends in a sort of cynicism is the not yet
translated Brazilian essay by J. Cavalcanti Netto, Democracia,
um Mito [Democracy, a Myth]. Anybody who perceives having a
good conscience can feel authorized to conceive a big lie, with all the complexity which is hidden in the theological
discussions under the classical label of Credo quia absurdum
[I believe because it is absurd].
The intellectual
insight obtained from the mentioned sources regarding the myth of democracy was
finally supported by other insights obtained during my above-mentioned work in
understanding the information system of the Russia-NATO-Ukraine crisis. A
complementary demonstration came from the debacle of democratic free
expression, or official mistrust of freedom in communication and power of
argumentation, as displayed in governmental western censorship of news from the Russian network Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik News. In Sweden this was directed by decision of The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (corresponding to USA’s FCC), following
EU imposed sanctions announced 2 March 2022, while all those
western countries are not in war. EU imposed sanctions were later imposed on
persons who were anonymously judged to be politically incorrect, as in the case
of Jacques
Baud. He was blacklisted by the European Union
as a person spreading Russia's propaganda and targeted by European sanctions,
which included an asset freeze and a travel ban in the EU. This is one main reason why the
quality of information ultimately converges on theological questions that
motivated my blog on Disinformation,
Conspiracy
theories, my early essay on Belief and
Reason, later on Information and Theology
already mentioned
above, and finally a comment on Conscience and Truth.
WITH REPEATED AND ADDITIONAL DETAILS
The dissertation,
written long ago in 1971-1972 in a naturally narrow disciplinary context of a
university, and prior to all above-mentioned refinements, forestalls the
possibilities of computer technology more than twenty years before the advent
of its initial partial implementation in the WikiWikiWeb (see below). An ultimate most known example is the online
encyclopedia Wikipedia, the most popular
wiki-based website, and one of the most widely viewed sites in the world. It also foreshadows by 40 years the
scientific meaning and one main answer to the problem of “fake news” as triggered by social media.
The consequent
problems of all this were addressed later in articles about Wikipedia democracy and wikicracy: editing Wikipedia, and conceptually in Information and debate, while the search for ultimate
theological implications is outlined in essays on Information and Theology, and Reason and Gender. The main ideas of the dissertation itself and
their juridical implications are summarized in the book (in Swedish) Systems development and rule of law. Further technical details are found in
the account of the computer programmer who developed the first wiki by starting
to code the WikiWikiWeb in 1994: Ward Cunningham with his book The wiki way (2001), co-authored with Bo Leuf. The latter also expressed the core of
the consequent idea of participatory design and computer-supported cooperative
work in his book Peer to peer: Collaborating and sharing
over the Internet (2002).
An example of more
recent research on related detailed secondary issues is Effects of moderation and opinion
heterogeneity on attitude towards the online deliberation experience (CHI'19 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human
Factors in Computing). At a less detailed level, with the diffusion and
increased use of the Internet news areas of research have been opportunely
created building upon the very same basic idea, displaying new problems and old
ones under new names. New split areas that are often divorced from
basic considerations of philosophy of science have been catalogued under such
names as Computer-supported cooperative work, Participatory design, Collective intelligence, and Cooperative overlap/Turn-taking (see also other related areas in their respective
Wikipedia-sections named “See also”). Contrasting artificial and
human intelligence, in lack of understanding of what intelligence is to begin
with, leads also to studies such as Human trust in artificial intelligence. It requires, in turn, an understanding
of The design of inquiring systems (complementary index here) and The meaning of human-computer
interaction
that today is challenged when seen in the context of Artificial General Intelligence and ChatGPT. For a proper reading and appreciation of
this text and its numerous links, please refer initially to my General
disclaimer.
DOWNLOADS
Local download from this site of the dissertation in pdf-format:
Whole
download (18 MB, 259 pp.), all parts in one
Earlier
arrangement, download in three parts:
Part 1 of 3 (22 MB) - Abstract,
Contents, Introduction, and up to including chapter 3, see "Contents"
Part 2 of 3 (44 MB) - Chapters 4
and 5, including Conclusions
Part 3 of 3 (48 MB) - Appendixes
1-12, and References/Bibliography
ABSTRACT
This paper is intended to assist those who develop, use, maintain, audit, or in
general may be affected by so-called Data-Banks and Management Information
Systems.
One
purpose of the paper is to recognize the importance of accuracy, or more
generally of quality of information. Data-Banks and Management Information
Systems may typically imply some processing performed on externally obtained
measurements and pre-processed inputs, while their outputs may be stored and
used by people in unknown contexts.
To the
extent that this happens it becomes more difficult to expect that the quality
of information can be represented by a measure of effectiveness of systems and
subsystems in relation to operational goals. Thus, a second purpose of
this paper is to suggest some possibilities of attaching a measure of quality
to discrete items of information, such as coded observations and intermediate
computational results.
The
paper consists of five chapters supporting five sets of statements regarding
the consequences of present practices, and what can be done to implement the
most necessary improvements. Illustrative examples emphasize administrative
applications such as in public planning and in industrial manufacturing.
KEY
WORDS (updated list)
Information system design, data integrity, privacy, security, secrecy,
reliability, validity, precision, EDP auditing, system management,
data-management, data base, actor network, inquiring systems, dialectics,
cybernetics.
----------------
SOME EVALUATIVE REFERENCES
(1) By Churchill
Eisenhart (1972). U.S.
Dept. of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards. (Letter,
pdf-format: Click here.)
(2) By Edgar
S. Dunn, Jr. (1972). Resources
for the Future Inc., author of Social information processing and statistical systems (1974). (Letter, pdf-format: Click here.)
(3) By Steven Shapin (1994): Long
after the publication of the dissertation a book by Steven Shapin, A
Social History of Truth, indirectly details and confirms many historical
roots of its scientific approach. It can be seen as extending the dissertation
and its applicability in discussing truth vs. secrecy in communication and
information technological (CIT) systems as related to the following keywords:
measurement, reasonable agreement, accuracy-precision-certainty-exactness,
error-failure, probabilistic discourse, conflict-cooperation,
power-politics-religion, political correctness, system trust, and
CIT-users-specialists as "invisible technicians". Most relevant
pages: 24, 26, 30, 32, 211-3, 216-220, 223-4, 226-8, 230-1, 310-1, 314, 318,
328-9, 338-9, 342, 350, 352-3, 355, 389, 412-3.
(4) By Laura
Sebastian-Coleman (2013). Measuring
Data Quality for Ongoing Improvement (see Appendix
D.)
(5)
Further evaluative references are contained in reviews of the book (in Swedish)
about privacy vs. security that was published in 1986 on the basis of the
published doctoral dissertation, [permitted download, pdf-format 66 MB] Systemutveckling och Rättssäkerhet [Systems development and rule of
law]. Cf. e.g. the review by Peter Seipel
(in Swedish) in Cecilia Magnusson & Olav Torvund (eds.) Myndighetsdata och
Rättssäkerhet: Nordisk Årsbok i Rättsinformatik, (Norstedts, 1988, ISBN 91-1-887351-0, pp. 193-196.)
(6) The
permanent timeliness of the subject of the dissertation and its further
development is also suggested by more recent problems of scientific method as
exposed in Lachlan J. Gunn, et al. "Too good to be true: when overwhelming
evidence fails to convince." Proceedings of The Royal Society A. To be
published (as per Jan. 7, 2016.). Arxiv pre-print:
arxiv.org/abs/1601.00900. Summary by Lisa Zyga in Why too much
evidence can be a bad thing. (January 4, 2016.), also at: http://phys.org/news/2016-01-evidence-bad.html#jCp.