QUALITY-CONTROL OF INFORMATION:
On the concept of accuracy of information in data-banks and in management
information systems
(Version 240507-1625)
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. 240508-1120)
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”). 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. This is one main reason why the quality of
information ultimately converges on theological questions that motivated my
blog on 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.
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”. In this latter sense of trust and
security it can be seen also 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 the latter 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”, and applied in the paper on The Russia-NATO-Ukraine information crisis.
The usual approach to
the discussion of “alternative facts” basically is in terms of Kantian
philosophy, as implicitly done in the Swedish approach by the philosopher Åsa Wikforss. 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” is 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”. Design,
in turn, risks to become a catchword that today lends prestige to all engineering
effort,
not the least to computer-related efforts.
It
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”). 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 academic 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. This is one main reason why the quality of
information ultimately converges on theological questions that motivated my
blog on 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.
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.