Completeness
“Completeness is rare in history” — Barbara Tuchman (American Historian)
Let me indulge you with the notion of completeness. It’s a concept that I first encountered when I’m in college, in the Artificial Intelligence class specifically I believe. Back then, I didn’t fully grasp what it meant. After all these years, I think I finally got a glimpse of it and I would like to discuss it with you — this interesting piece of a topic. In this story, the completeness that I would like to talk about is the complete information.
So what is complete information? In game theory, complete information is a state where every player is well-aware of all the information that is currently present in the game. They all know and follow the same rules. They all know each other’s strategies, state, type, and payoffs¹ so every player knows about everything and everyone. Simply put, every player has the same knowledge. In a complete information world, each player has a chance to maximize their strategies and utility given the information provided.
This makes me think… can we reach a state of completeness in the game of life? 🤔
Every day in our lives, we’re faced with decision-making. Our thought process affects those decisions, and the thought process is built on our current knowledge at the time. So to always makes the correct decision, what level of knowledge do we have to have? Or can we make decisions that are complete though? I’ve realized that maybe we can’t.
It’s impossible to attain complete information in real life, well… unless you’re a God. Even in this information era of the internet and you think you can have all the accessible information there is, there might be a slight chance of possibilities that there’s information that you didn’t know about. To say, “I know it all” is arrogance. Even scholars are using “according to Dr. X from University Y” to humble themselves and to open the possibility for the unknown to arise in the future.
I think there is no situation where we can decide with complete information in a real-life scenario. There’s always a chance that we don’t know something. Think about it, what’s the probability that you knew everything beforehand? How confident are you to say A or do B given your current state of knowledge which you claimed: “I know everything about it.” Can it be stated as a fact, or is that just simply an opinion?
That’s why it’s hard for me to write a story that I can claim as knowledge. Most of my stories I deemed as opinions so there’s no right or wrong. On top of that, I also usually just reshared known knowledge concisely or more simply. Rarely, I created a complete story.
I think the best you can do is a state where you are “approaching the completeness”. It’s a state where I imagine a y = 1 / x² function. You can set your way to completeness, but you’ll never be there. Just like the arrow will never touch the Y.
I’m thinking that maybe… you can reach a state of completeness, and that is related to scope. But it will take too long if I include it in this story, so lemme know if you’re curious about my thought. If you are, maybe I’ll consider writing it or maybe I will sometime in the future if I’m in the mood 😜
Hope you enjoy this little brain exercise.
Cheers 🍻 — ferzos
