Information Theory Quotes

“When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.”
― Richard Hamming

“For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Information can only be acquired in two ways: by choice or by chance.”
― Joey Lawsin, Originemology

“There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-"scientific' narrative method of the professional historian.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventions in the crucible of a competitive marketplace. It is an economics that accords with the constantly surprising fluctuations of our lives.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“An example of how a viral transmission is different than normal information transmission can be illustrated thusly: if information were spread in a memetic fashion, it would infect a subject, and, were the information's traits conducive to the information's survival, then the subject would accept the idea. This is strongly contrasted with information theory, in which the information is accepted based on how useful it is to an individual, e.g. the idea is accepted because it helps the subject survive if they accept it. Viruses, being obligate parasites, do not always help their host (in this case, the subject) survive.”
― Idav Kelly, The Leprechaun Delusion

“Without the physical world, Ideas will not exist.”
― Joey Lawsin

“Even when money seemed to be material treasure, heavy in pockets and ships' holds and bank vaults, it always was information. Coins and notes, shekels and cowries were all just short-lived technologies for tokenizing information about who owns what.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Representation is a process of informational triangulation. Its aim is the specification of distal stimuli. It achieves that aim by corralling the output of multiple information channels integrated at their point of confluence. The integration process, in short, disambiguates individual information channels via the mutual constraints each channel provides others. The specificity won thereby falls on a continuum from the highly unspecific (simple transducers, little integrative depth) to the highly specific (subtle transducers, manifold integration).”
― Dan Lloyd, Simple Minds

“When a robot [AI] trains on propaganda, it repeats the propaganda.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“The war on bias assumes gatekeepers have no biases of their own and ignores the fact that bias is a valuable survival technique that will never go away.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“Confabulation, or hallucination, is ubiquitous in AI/GPT output already. Efforts to correct this by self-learning algos and back propagation are unlikely to solve the problem because they add to the complexity of the system as a whole, which increases the likelihood of emergent ghosts. The difficulty is that duplicity is hard to detect unless you're a subject matter expert in the topic or you conduct your own research to test its accuracy. This begs the question — if you have to be a subject matter expert to spot the flaws in AI/GPT output, what good is the system in the first place?”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy