Information does two things. It moves, and it gets acted on. When information moves — from a book to your eyes, from a server to your laptop, from one person's mouth to another person's ears — the unit is the bit. One binary distinction. Shannon formalized this in 1948: how to measure information in transit, how to encode it efficiently, how to transmit it reliably through a noisy channel. The bit is the same whether it travels over fiber optic cable or is carried by a pigeon. What varies is the speed and reliability of the channel, not the nature of the bit. When information gets acted on — when you read the book and understand it, when the server processes a request, when the listener parses the sentence and decides what to do — the unit is the op. One irreducible transformation by one processor. The op is the same whether the processor is a CPU executing an instruction, a surgeon making an incision, or a person reading a sentence. What varies is how long each op takes and how many are needed, not the nature of the op. Together, bits and ops cover everything information does. Shannon formalized movement. A companion framework HOWL-INFO-14-2026 formalizes action. This paper uses both to explain how people learn new domains and how what you already know accelerates what you learn next.
Geoffrey Howland (Mon,) studied this question.