Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
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Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#2Funny timing. Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcast had an episode about Shannon. He sounds like a fun guy to have been around.
https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-fritterin-aw...
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#3From what I understand, before Shannon showed up no one knew how to calculate the Channel Capacity of a medium and how to deal with noise in the medium.
So people just yelled louder or yelled repeatedly to get things across with better reliability. And when channel capacity was exceeded with everyone yelling too much, no one knew it had exceeded and lot of energy and time was wasted with increasing errors in the system.
Doesn't that feel like a repeat with whats happening in social media and news media these days? Or is it just different things.
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#4From what I understand, before Shannon showed up no one knew how to calculate the Channel Capacity of a medium and how to deal with noise in the medium. So people just yelled louder or yelled repeatedly to get things across with better reliability. And when channel capacity was exceeded with everyone yelling too much, no one knew it had exceeded and lot of energy and time was wasted with increasing errors in the syst…
I think it’s a different thing but an interesting analog. In conventional information theory you can add another channel. I guess the social media metaphor is like crowded wifi or if I’m being clever alohanet... question is, how do we add another channel here?if you’re talking about social discourse rather than a physical medium are we talking about the necessity of class hierarchy? Is this what the Tower of Babel was about?
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#5From what I understand, before Shannon showed up no one knew how to calculate the Channel Capacity of a medium and how to deal with noise in the medium. So people just yelled louder or yelled repeatedly to get things across with better reliability. And when channel capacity was exceeded with everyone yelling too much, no one knew it had exceeded and lot of energy and time was wasted with increasing errors in the syst…
> Doesn't that feel like a repeat with whats happening in social media and news media these days? Or is it just different things.
Maybe. It can feel like this, but applying mathematical models to social phenomena is tricky. You have to map formal parameters to fuzzy, poorly understood factors. How do you define, precisely, what is a "channel" on a social network? What is "signal", and what is "noise"? People can and do prove anything by using slightly different (or inconsistent) definitions here, getting the numbers to line up just like they want them to.
My understanding is that a better way to approach such mapping would be to shove in probability distributions in place of hard-to-map exact parameters - abstracting away choices and measurements lets you see the wider context here. This pushes the problem to defining the appropriate distributions, but I think that's more tamper-proof. Unfortunately, the results may come out next to useless - e.g. probability distributions so wide you could sail a carrier strike group through them.
I'd love to know what's considered the correct, robust approach to such problems.
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#6Funny timing. Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcast had an episode about Shannon. He sounds like a fun guy to have been around. https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-fritterin-aw...
The timing is a little less funny if you know that I listened to the podcast shortly before finding the IEEE article.
The podcast was great! I would think that many on HN would find it interesting.
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#7'shannonigans'
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#8Funny timing. Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcast had an episode about Shannon. He sounds like a fun guy to have been around. https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-fritterin-aw...
The timing is a little less funny if you know that I listened to the podcast shortly before finding the IEEE article. The podcast was great! I would think that many on HN would find it interesting.
There's a passable movie called "the bit player" currently on amazon and I guess elsewhere.
I'd never heard of him, and that's embarrassing, but he probably prefers it that way :-).
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#9Shannon was awesome. It seemed like after he wrote his groundbreaking information theory paper he did whatever the hell he wanted for the rest of his life in Cambridge. Made all kinds of contraptions and devices.
Re: Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory (2016)
#10I recommend reading "A Mind at Play", a biography about Shannon. I found it to be a decent read. Funnily enough, I knew about him more through the unicycling community than I did through computer science. It wasn't until a few years ago when I realised what sort of impact he had on the world.