L
Lxnxjxhx
Guest
I can't find my post to which I wanted to attach this post, but I think this post is general enough to apply to several not-really-technical but difficult-to-settle issues on this Forum.
A politician says "I support the American Way", a bank robber says "I support Law Enforcement" and a headline reads "Woman kills grizzly with penknife."
According to a book on data compression the amount of info in a sentence is proportional to how unexpected it is.
The purpose of this book was for people to make better data compression software, but I think this statement has much wider application.
By this standard, the first sentence has almost zero information, but it still has value to the politician because it makes it seem that he really did say something. It's like junk food.
The value of using this standard to evaluate what you read and hear is that you don't waste time even processing the zero-info, misleading, "filler" statements that some people make.
If there's anything left over after it passes through this filter, it might be useful.
A politician says "I support the American Way", a bank robber says "I support Law Enforcement" and a headline reads "Woman kills grizzly with penknife."
According to a book on data compression the amount of info in a sentence is proportional to how unexpected it is.
The purpose of this book was for people to make better data compression software, but I think this statement has much wider application.
By this standard, the first sentence has almost zero information, but it still has value to the politician because it makes it seem that he really did say something. It's like junk food.
The value of using this standard to evaluate what you read and hear is that you don't waste time even processing the zero-info, misleading, "filler" statements that some people make.
If there's anything left over after it passes through this filter, it might be useful.
