A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Sony & Rob Goodman

Information is divorced from content. This was one of the fundamental insights leading up to Shannon’s work. Information is not about what you send, it’s simply about what you can send, or the set of things you can send. This is kind of amazing to me: developing the technologies that have given us so many platforms for expressing our weirdness and individuality was only possible by ignoring all of that stuff in the first place. Only by ignoring the thing in communication that we actually care about (the content) we’re we able to make the advanced needed to allow for the communication of that exact thing. Wild.

Information is the reduction of uncertainty.

I think one of the big takeaways from this book is the power of a highly abstracted, simple, yet well specified model. The work on information theory was the end of a long process of problem solving through greater and greater abstraction. People often speak of refining ideas, but to me this implies digging deeper, gathering more ideas, becoming more specific. The other process that comes to mind is ridding something of impurities which is relevant here, but the overwhelming sense I get is one of zooming out. Rather than intimately understanding all of the details and minutiae involved in transmitting human communications, Shannon instead made the problem as generic as imaginable. Everything binary. About four moving pieces. The content of a message is completely irrelevant. I think I have historically underappreciated the power of abstraction, feeling like I need to know all the details of something before being able to think about it. Perhaps it’s a result of a memorization-heavy primary and secondary schooling, perhaps it’s constitutional, but whatever the reason it invites a sort of consumption paralysis. Instead of learning with an eye to identifying the essence or core of something in order to evaluate it or use it as a way of thinking about the world, I get stuck trying to grasp all of the details. I insist on reading a book from front to back, inspecting each row of a dataset, weighing every argument for and against, taking one idea and finding all of the exceptions, then finding all of the exceptions to the exceptions. The result is that I end up like one of the wise men learning every ridge of the elephant’s toenail. Instead of hoarding bits and pieces of information to pile up and collect dust in the corner, abstraction and simplification to get to the core of an issue is like building a multi purpose tool. It provides you with a lightweight, manageable price of equipment that can then be put to use. In that way it’s more of a production focused way of approaching the world. When you have a tool you can use it to form hypotheses, experiment and build things.

So Shannon is a good reminder that sometimes it’s okay to see the forest for the trees.