What is Shannon information theory channel capacity?

Shannon information theory channel capacity is a concept in personal epistemology: When you cannot get the information you need to proceed the information flow is the constraint.

Example: You are a product manager ready to finalize next quarter's roadmap. The data you need lives in three places: customer churn reasons in the support team's Zendesk instance, usage analytics in a data warehouse only the engineering team queries, and competitive positioning notes in a sales deck that was last updated six months ago. You email three people. One replies in four days with a CSV you cannot parse without context. One replies in nine days with a dashboard link that requires access you do not have. One never replies. Three weeks pass. Your roadmap is late — not because you lacked the judgment to prioritize features, not because you lacked the time to build the document, but because the information you needed to make defensible decisions was scattered across systems, owned by people with other priorities, and delivered in formats that required translation before use. The bottleneck was never your planning skill. It was the information pipeline feeding your planning process.

This concept is part of Phase 48 (Bottleneck Analysis) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for bottleneck analysis.