Information vs Knowledge Essay

1. The community chosen is the community of economists. Some sources they rely on include academic journals, the news (on print, online, television, radio, and others), country reports, economic data, and financial market analyses. 2. One of the sources that could be taken as pure information is the economic data. Economic data sets of data that describe a single economy or the international economy. These data sets are gathered through quantitative information that are collected and computed statistically to give an accurate picture of the economy being studied. Economic data, in their raw form, is not analyzed, and even the analysis that accompany them are usually there to interpret the numbers to make them more understandable to the reader. This is information because it is the basis of knowledge that people create since they are considered facts from which knowledge can be gained. Economists use economic data to gather information about the topic that they are exploring and connect them with other data and past knowledge to form ideas, theories, recommendations, etc. hat would be helpful to their colleagues, policymakers, businesses, economics students, and even the common person. While some economic data agree with one another, there are those that don’t, depending on which organization does the statistic. The differences could confuse the readers as much as those that agree help them in gaining more knowledge about the particular economy they are studying. 3. Among these, the source that is actually knowledge is the academic journal.  Academic journals are works by experts on the field of focus of the journal (in this case, economics), and are peer reviewed by other experts on the field. These sources often become forums for academicians and experts since the authors of the articles in the journal introduce and present new research that critique existing research. Experts, then scrutinize the writings of authors who churn out their original research, review articles and even book reviews and it becomes a hub of theories, ideas, debate, etc. It then becomes easy to see why this is knowledge. Based on Lanier’s understanding of knowledge, that it is â€Å"created through a person’s interaction with her environment, her community, her social class, her history, her job, etc. Knowledge cannot be created in a neutral or objective way that exists outside of our real life situations. † Journals reflect a person’s ideas and experiences in relation to the information they have and are often opinions based on facts.vThe correlation between a person’s worldview and understanding in explaining and the information that they have printed in a journal makes the medium a hub of knowledge from different economists. 4. I believe that the community of economists, especially those in the upper echelons of the field, are already aware of the difference between knowledge and information in their field since information for them is usually hard quantitative data. But if they have not considered the difference, the problem that they can overcome in delineating one from the other is that they would be able to think more critically. Knowing that what they have is knowledge, they could accept it and draw their own conclusions. Upon the knowledge that the source that they have is knowledge, they could add such sources in their own minds and create their own conclusions based on different perspectives and could either accept one and reject the other and just not let what they read overwhelm them.