Learning Faliure Modes - Floating Information

I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. It has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.

I regret that I didn’t resume my passion for knowing how computers actually work behind the scenes. Instead, I jumped directly into applications. Now I’m learning version source control, which led me to Git , and to update Git and since I’m a macOS user, that led me to package managers like MacPorts and Homebrew .

I was curious to know more about how these two package managers simplify the process of installing and managing software on my computer, and how binary installation works. I could have watched a 5-minute video explaining how everything functions, but I really wanted to study it and test my knowledge.

I read documentation and learned what a package manager is. I reached this definition:

MacPorts is a package management system that simplifies the process of installing, updating, and managing open-source software on macOS.

Now the question became: how do I connect this floating information?

Knowing what a package manager is wasn’t enough. The first intuitive question I asked myself was: is it like pip?

At this point, my brain started working like KNNs, but now it was more like K-Nearest-Neuron.
K-Nearest-Neuron?

Floating information – About the problem

Floating information is everywhere in our lives. It appears whenever we hear something new that we can’t link to what we already know, so it just floats. This is why I call it floating information. I imagine it as information floating in space without anything holding onto it, no prior knowledge pointing back and forth to it. It keeps floating until it leaves the surface of the earth, until you forget it.

Floating information is hard to keep. You encounter it in many scenarios:

When you learn something new and keep hearing jargon that doesn’t make sense yet.
When you read poetry that is ambiguous, where you can’t fill it with imagination and the intended meaning isn’t accessible, so it just sits there in your head.
When a university lecturer shares a random fact or insight that feels off topic to you, and you can’t relate it to anything you know.

If I told you the answer is “never shake hands” and asked you to memorize it for the rest of your life, you would probably forget it by next Sunday. That is because it is floating information. I didn’t provide context, and I didn’t explain why this information exists in the first place. Your brain ignores things that don’t matter. It doesn’t give weight to information without meaning.

Floating information is everywhere when you try to learn something new. If the writing is not a coherent logical chain of thought, you will often find gaps of random information. These are the parts you later find very hard to remember because they didn’t help you understand anything.

These are usually the points you describe as: “I don’t get how this fits” or “I don’t see how I can use this.” This problem can even lead to more serious issues that I may write about later. Floating information affects your ability in information retention and makes it very hard to make sense of pieces that are often important.

Biological explanation

If I randomly told you the answer is “spinner”, you could link it to a spinning wheel by name or by characteristics you have heard of before. this is why it is always useful to ask yourself: what do I already know that looks similar to what I’m trying to understand right now? Recently, I learned that there is a biological explanation for this. It relates to how neurons in the brain become connected after long periods of practice. The way I imagine it is this: floating information represents a neuron with very weak connections or non. The more information you learn and link to it later, the more connected vertices this neuron gains. The more connections it has, the harder it becomes to forget.

The solution

The solution is simple. Search for what is relevant and helps you link new information to what you already know. Leaving information floating for even a week can make you forget it.

Sometimes this means understanding the historical context of the information, why it exists, and what problem it was created to solve. This applies whether the field is philosophy, engineering, art, or anything else. When I asked whether MacPorts is similar to pip, my brain was working like a KNN algorithm. I decided to call this K-Nearest-Neuron.

My brain was desperately trying to use previous knowledge to understand the unfamiliar weird thing in front of me. This is the generalization ability that humans naturally have.Of course, this ability can sometimes lead to problems of “perception versus reality”, but this is not the time to discuss that.