Re: Edge.org: Jaron Lanier

From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Wed Nov 26 2003 - 16:53:51 MST


On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 13:35, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Shannon's math looks okay to me. More than merely okay. p log (p) is one
> of the all-time "you must instantly recognize this equation" equations.
> If someone is silly enough to think about this equation sequentially, as
> Lanier charges, that's their problem. Shannon's entropy would govern
> Lanier's wished-for internally correlated holography just as thoroughly as
> it governs a temporal sequence of independent symbols.

There is nothing wrong with Shannon's math. It was the over-application
of it to domains where it was not well-suited such that it became
entrenched conceptually. Prematurely calcified meme space.

Imagine a world where COBOL was a pervasive programming language,
functional but definitely suboptimal for many domains for which you
might want to program a computer. Oh, wait....never mind.

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com



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