ABSTRACT
Citizens of modern, information-based, industrial societies are becoming increasingly aware of and sensitive to the harsh and discomforting reality that information abundance does not necessarily give us certainty. In fact, this abundance of information can sometimes lead to errors in decision making and undesirable outcomes due to either overwhelmingly confusing situations or a sense of overconfidence that leads to improper use of information. The former situation can be an outcome of both the limited capacity of the human mind to deal with complexity in some situations and information abundance, whereas the latter can be attributed to a higher order of ignorance, referred to as the
ignorance of self-ignorance
. As our society advances in many scientific dimensions and invents new
technologies, human knowledge is being expanded through observation, discovery, information gathering, and logic. Also, access to newly generated information is becoming easier than ever as a result of computers and the Internet. We are entering an exciting era where electronic libraries, online databases, and information on every aspect of our civilization — patents, engineering products, literature, mathematics, economics, physics, medicine, philosophy, and public opinions, to name a few — will be only a mouseclick away. In this era, computers can generate even more information from the abundance of online information. Society can act or react based on this information at the speed of its generation, sometimes creating undesirable situations — for example, price or political volatilities.
