Information is food
TED简介：我们如何消化信息？在TED@SXSWi上，技术员JP Rangaswami探讨了我们与信息的关系。他的见解令人吃惊却十分犀利：我们应以对待食物的方式对待信息。
演讲者：JP Rangaswami
片长：08：09
中英文对照翻译
I love my food. And I love information. My children usually tell me that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other. (Laughter)
我热爱食品，我也热爱信息。我的孩子们常常对我说我看起来显然更像个吃货。（笑声）
But what I want to do in the next eight minutes or so is to take you through how those passions developed, the point in my life when the two passions merged, the journey of learning that took place from that point. And one idea I want to leave you with today is what would would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food?
不过在接下来的八分钟里，我会向大家介绍这两个爱好是如何发展的，它们合二为一的时刻，以及此后我的学习旅程。今天我想把下面这个问题留给你们：如果像看待食物那样看待信息，你的生活会有什么样的改变？
I was born in Calcutta — a family where my father and his father before him were journalists, and they wrote magazines in the English language. That was the family business. And as a result of that, I grew up with books everywhere around the house. And I mean books everywhere around the house. And that's actually a shop in Calcutta, but it's a place where we like our books. In fact, I've got 38,000 of them nowand no Kindle in sight.
我出生在加尔各答（印度城市）我的父亲和祖父都是记者，他们用英语为杂志写文章。这就是我家的家族产业。因此，我小时候家里全是书。真的是堆满了，就像这样。这其实是加尔各答的一家商店，不过光顾那里的都是爱书人。事实上，我现在一共有三万八千本书而且没有Kindle（亚马逊出品的电子书）。
But growing up as a child with the books around everywhere, with people to talk to about those books,this wasn't a sort of slightly learned thing.
我成长的时候身边全是书和喜欢讨论书的人，这对我的影响很大。
By the time I was 18, I had a deep passion for books. It wasn't the only passion I had. I was a South Indian brought up in Bengal. And two of the things about Bengal: they like their savory dishes and they like their sweets. So by the time I grew up, again, I had a well-established passion for food. Now I was growing up in the late '60s and early '70s, and there were a number of other passions I was also interested in, but these two were the ones that differentiated me. (Laughter)
我十八岁的时候就对书籍有着深深的依恋，读书不是我唯一的爱好。我来自印度南部，在孟加拉长大。孟加拉人有两大爱好：他们喜欢美食和甜点。所以我长大之后，对美食的爱好根深蒂固。我成长在六十年代末七十年代初，也有不少其它兴趣，但这两个爱好让我与众不同。
And then life was fine, dandy. Everything was okay, until I got to about the age of 26, and I went to a movie called "Short Circuit." Oh, some of you have seen it. And apparently it's being remade right nowand it's going to be coming out next year. It's the story of this experimental robot which got electrocuted and found a life. And as it ran, this thing was saying, "Give me input. Give me input."
随后我的生活一帆风顺。一切都挺好的，直到我二十六岁那一年。我看了一部名叫《雷霆五号》（Short Circuit）的电影。哦，你们好多人都看过。现在这部电影正在被重拍明年上映。故事的主人公是这个实验机器人，它触电之后通了人性。在影片中，它一直说：“我要信息输入。我要信息输入。”
And I suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing. Energy came to it in some form or shape, data came to it in some form or shape. And I began to think, I wonder what it would be like to start imagining myself as if energy and information were the two things I had as input — as if food and information were similar in some form or shape.
我突然意识到，对于机器人来说，信息和食物是一个东西。能量以某种形式或形态进入它的身体，数据以某种形式或形态进入它的身体。我开始思考，我在想，既然食物和信息从某种程度上来说十分相似，那么我们能否将能量和信息统一视为输入呢？
I started doing some research then, and this was the 25-year journey, and started finding out that actually human beings as primates have far smaller stomachs than should be the size for our body weight and far larger brains.
我从那时起开始从事相关的研究，到现在已经二十五年了，我最早的发现就是若以体重为标准，身为灵长类动物的人类胃很小，大脑却很大。
And as I went to research that even further, I got to a point where I discovered something called the expensive tissue hypothesis. That actually for a given body mass of a primate the metabolic rate was static. What changed was the balance of the tissues available. And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue. And what transpired was that people had put forward a hypothesis that was apparently coming up with some fabulous results by about 1995. It's a lady named Leslie Aiello.
深入研究之后我发现了一种名为昂贵组织的假说，这种假说认为：对于一定体重的灵长类动物来说，新陈代谢率是一定的。不同的是体内各种组织的平衡。而人体内两种最为昂贵的组织是神经组织和消化组织，因此人们提出了一个假设，1995年的时候这个假设衍生出了不少精彩的成果。这些成果背后的功臣是一位名叫Leslie Aiello的女士。
And the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other. If you wanted your brain for a particular body mass to be large, you had to live with a smaller gut.
相关的论文显示，胃和大脑，不可兼得。在体重一定的情况下，如果你希望拥有更大的大脑的话，就只能拥有一个比较小的胃。
That then set me off completely to say, Okay, these two are connected. So I looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food and said, So we were hunter-gathers of information. We moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information.
这种观点让我确信食物和信息一定有关联。因此我把信息当成食物，研究了它的生产过程。我的结论是，我们都是信息的捕猎者和采集者。后来我们逐渐成为培育信息的农民和生产者。
Does that really explain what we're seeing with the intellectual property battles nowadays? Because those people who were hunter-gatherers in origin wanted to be free and roam and pick up information as they wanted, and those that were in the business of farming information wanted to build fences around it,create ownership and wealth and structure and settlement. So there was always going to be a tension within that. And everything I saw in the cultivation said there were huge fights amongst the foodiesbetween the cultivators and the hunter-gatherers. And this is happening here.
这是否能解释今天的知识产权斗争呢？因为信息捕猎者和采集者，希望能自由自在的获取他们想要的信息，而那些从事信息生产的人希望用栅栏保护他们的产品，建立所有制，积累财富，形成体系，达成协议，因此两者的关系总是有点紧张。在食物生产中，生产者和捕猎者以及采集者之间一直都有诸多冲突。信息范畴也是如此。
When I moved to preparation, this same thing was true, expect that there were two schools. One group of people said you can distill your information, you can extract value, separate it and serve it up, while another group turned around and said no, no you can ferment it. You bring it all together and mash it upand the value emerges that way. The same is again true with information.
我发现信息和食物在处理环节上也有相似之处，而且都有两种风格。一些人认为可以提炼食物的精华，将食物的价值从原料中提取和分离出来，然而呈现在餐桌上，但是另外一部分人不同意这种做法。他们认为要把原料混合在一起才能体现食物的价值。信息也是如此。
But consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable. Because what I began to see then was there were so many different ways people would consume this. They'd buy it from the shop as raw ingredients. Do you cook it? Do you have it served to you? Do you go to a restaurant? The same is true every time as I started thinking about information.
但摄入环节更加有趣，因为我发现人们摄取食物和信息的方法实在很多。我们可以在商店里购买原材料、自己做饭、吃现成的或者下馆子。信息也是这样。
The analogies were getting crazy — that information had sell-by dates, that people had misused information that wasn't dated properly and could really make an effect on the stock market, on corporate values, etc. And by this time I was hooked. And this is about 23 years into this process.
这个类比真是贴切无比——信息也有保质期，误用过时新闻可能对股票市场和企业市值等造成影响。至此我已经彻底沉迷其中不可自拔了。这差不多是在我进行了二十三年的研究之后发生的事情。
And I began to start thinking of myself as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction, docu-dramas, mockumentaries, whatever you call it. Are we going to reach the stage where information has a percentage for fact associated with it? We start labeling information for the fact percentage? Are we going to start looking at what happens when your information source is turned off, as a famine?
这时我开始想，我们逐渐开始将现实和虚构混合在一起，发展出了纪录剧情片，伪纪录片，名字并不重要。在未来的某个阶段，我们会不会给信息标上一个事实比例呢？用事实比例来标记不同的信息？如果信息的源头被阻断在信息饥荒中，又会发生什么呢？
Which brings me to the final element of this. Clay Shirky once stated that there is no such animal as information overload, there is only filter failure. I put it to you that information, if viewed from the point of food, is never a production issue; you never speak of food overload. Fundamentally it's a consumption issue.
这也是我最后想探讨的一个问题。Clay Shirky曾经说过世界上不存在信息过载，只有过滤失败。我认为，如果从食物的角度思考，信息的问题不在于生产；没有人会说食物过剩。从根本上说，这是一个摄入的问题。
And we have to start thinking about how we create diets within ourselves, exercise within ourselves, to have the faculties to be able to deal with information, to have the labeling to be able to do it responsibly. In fact, when I saw "Supersize Me," I starting thinking of saying, What would happen if an individual had 31 days nonstop Fox News? (Laughter) Would there be time to be able to work with it?
我们必须开始思考我们如何用合理的饮食习惯和身体锻炼帮助身体处理消化各类信息，确保信息得到准确有效的标记。事实上，我看《大号的我》(Supersize Me)的时候就在想，如果一个人连续看三十一天不眠不休的看福克斯新闻会怎么样？（笑声） 他会有时间消化这些信息吗？
So you start really understanding that you can have diseases, toxins, a need to balance your diet, and once you start looking, and from that point on, everything I have done in terms of the consumption of information, the production of information, the preparation of information, I've looked at from the viewpoint of food. It has probably not helped my waistline any because I like practicing on both sides.
这样你就会明白你可能会得病、中毒，你需要平衡你的饮食，一旦开始这样想，从那个时刻开始，与信息有关的事情信息的摄入、信息的生产、信息的处理，我都从食物的角度去思考。这可能让我的腰围愈发可观，因为无论是信息还是食物我都喜欢亲身实验。
But I'd like to leave you with just that question: If you began to think of all the information that you consume the way you think of food, what would you do differently?
最后，我还是希望将这样一个问题留给你们：如果从食物的角度看待你接受的所有信息，你会做出怎样的改变？
Thank you very much for your time.(Applause)
谢谢大家。（掌声）
