Thanks for pointing that out; I had interpreted that 'know' in the same sense as the "know" in 'carnal knowledge'.. information derived from maximally-direct contact. The wikipedia description certainly seems somewhat self-referential. I might have committed QED since I'm clearly an 'indirect realist'.

Also the scientific picture involves information being transmitted along a chain. so long as the transmission is accurate, the information is more or less the same at each stage, so there is no stage that is more informative than the others.

Do you intend to imply that the transmission -is- accurate -> non lossy? Even within the context of executing a single experiment, I'd have to disagree.