The Hierarchy of Knowledge

In a conversation, my advisor categorized human knowledge with the following hierarchy:

wisdom     

insight

knowledge

information

data

Each set of data comprises noise and signal. Information can be abstracted from data. But in a broader sense, information has been quantified with entropy by Shannon. 

Knowledge sits above information. For example, Schroedinger's equation (plus the information of boundary conditions) itself contains little information. Yet by solving it, we can obtain the information of the electron inside Hydrogen atom. 

Beyond knowledge, there is insight and wisdom, which are particularly important for researchers. But they are also very difficult to quantify.

With the hierarchy of knowledge, one may also find out the corresponding intellectuals:

thinker

scholar

teacher

analyst

labour

Fig. 1, After WWII, the number of scientific publications doubles in about every 25 years. If knowledge is measured by the number of scientific publications, then human knowledge increases 15 times in one century.  (Data from World Bank, World Development Indicators.  Scientific and technical journal articles refer to publications in the following fields: physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, clinical medicine, biomedical research, engineering and technology, and earth and space sciences.)