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On the suggestion of my AI assistant, I'm reading Yuval Harari's "Nexus". Here's its summary of how the author defines information:
In "Nexus," Yuval Noah Harari defines information as something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network. Unlike the naive view, which sees information primarily as an attempt to represent reality, Harari emphasizes that information's defining feature is connection rather than representation. Information can take many forms, such as music, DNA, or stories, and its primary role is to connect and form networks, rather than merely represent preexisting realities.


Essentially, he says that information is a graph or more precisely, it comprises edges of a graph. Therefore, we can represent it as a homset of all arrows in the graph and apply the Yoneda Lemma to understand the power structure of information.
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“Propaganda does not provide information that is meant to be believed by the people it is addressing. Propaganda mostly provides signals of in-group loyalty.

To be effective at this, propaganda often has to be implausible. Information that is true is believable on its own. But propaganda has to be so patently false and far-fetched, so exaggerated and misleading, that repeating it sends the right signal to other people: the signal that one feels committed to a certain group.

Propaganda provides the masses with traits that allow them to recognise each other. But beyond this, fighting propagandistic falsehoods with the truth actually reinforces the signal’s reliability by implicitly telling people who want to prove themselves faithful precisely what not to say. Propaganda acts as a badge to express which group we belong to.


--- Hanno Sauer. “The Invention of Good and Evil”, 2024.
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On the other hand, if business cycles are caused by unanticipated shifts in the entire pattern of tastes and technologies across sectors, we might call that uncertainty noise. I believe that these shifts are significant for the economy as a whole because they do not cancel in any meaningful sense. The number of sectors in which there is a match between tastes and technology varies a lot over time.

When it is high, we have an expansion. When it is low, we have a recession.

...the diversity in a more complex economy means that a single crop failure or demand shock cannot have such a devastating effect; but on the other hand, the specialization in a more complex economy means that when there is a mismatch between tastes and technology, it is costly to move skills and machines between sectors to correct the mismatch.
...
Unanticipated shifts in tastes and technology within and across sectors is what we call information in discussing financial markets.

Noise. Fisher Black, 1986.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04513.x
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04513.x
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“We can no longer be satisfied with the old stimulus/response model, according to which animals (and other organisms) passively respond to prior, incoming stimuli, and learn by means of conditioning (or associations among these stimuli). For this is only one part of the story. In addition, and much more importantly, biological entities are active reality-testers. They are always busy “probing the environment with ongoing, variable actions first and evaluating sensory feedback later (i.e., the inverse of stimulus response)”. Rather than just responding to stimuli, they exhibit ongoing activity that is self-generated, and only secondarily modulated by stimuli. Output tends to come first.”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”
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  1. Cities of China* — 626m cameras to 1.43bn people = 439.07 cameras per 1,000 people
  2. Hyderabad, India — 900,000 cameras for 10,801,163 people = 83.32 cameras per 1,000 people
  3. Indore, India – 200,000 cameras per 3,302,077 people = 60.57 cameras per 1,000 people
  4. Delhi, India — 449,934 cameras for 22,547,000 people = 19.96 cameras per 1,000 people
  5. Singapore, Singapore — 109,072 cameras for 6,080,859 people = 17.94 cameras per 1,000 people
  6. Moscow, Russia — 214,000 cameras for 12,680,389 people = 16.88 cameras per 1,000 people
  7. Baghdad, Iraq — 120,000 cameras for 7,711,305 people = 15.56 cameras per 1,000 people
  8. Seoul, South Korea — 144,513 cameras for 9,988,049 people = 14.47 cameras per 1,000 people
  9. St. Petersburg, Russia — 75,000 cameras for 5,561,294 people = 13.49 cameras per 1,000 people
  10. London, England (UK) — 127,423 cameras for 9,648,110 people = 13.21 cameras per 1,000 people.
https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/
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“Yet no nanocomputer or other complex circuit was built for a decade and a half. [32]  We had the devices. What we do not have, still, is simply the infrastructure that macroscopic technology takes for granted: the ability to sort and test parts; to cut and join materials; to create frameworks that can hold devices in designed relationships, and the ability to place parts into such frameworks.”

J Storrs Hall. “Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past.”
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“The one area where progress continued most robustly — Moore’s Law in computing and communications —was the one where energy was not a major concern. ”

J Storrs Hall. “Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past.”
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How did the third little pig know that a brick house was going to work against the wolf?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Little_Pigs

I can't find any source that would describe or at least hint at the process of obtaining the crucial knowledge and related skills. It's one of those "obvious" things that come from perfect hindsight.

upd: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41386323

The pigs mother told them to build sturdy houses that would protect them against the wolf. The story doesn't say how she knew, nor suggests that their family home was made of brick.
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As Vincent Wang reminded me, ChatGPT leapfrogged GPT3 in performance by introducing reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune its outputs as an interlocutor, and RL is the machine learning approach to “solving agency”. It is a form of agency never seen before, because it is successful and can “learn” and improve its behaviour without having to be intelligent to do so. It is a form of agency that is alien to any culture in any past, because humanity has always and everywhere seen this kind of agency — which is not that of a sea wave, which makes the difference, but can make nothing but that difference, without being able to “learn” to make a different or better difference —as a natural or even supernatural form of agency.
...

We have decoupled the ability to act successfully from the need to be intelligent, understand, reflect, consider or grasp anything. We have liberated agency from intelligence.

Luciano Floridi, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00621-y
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What makes it the case that something counts as a form of cognitive success? For instance, why think that knowing the capital of Pakistan is a cognitive success, rather than just another cognitive state that an agent can occupy, like having 70% confidence that Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan? Not every cognitive state enjoys cognitive success. Knowing, understanding, mastering—these are cognitive successes.

[e.g]...we describe a person as “knowing” something as a way of signaling that her testimony with respect to that thing is to be trusted.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/


Machines can now be trained to generate information traditionally associated with cognitive successes by humans. Today, we know relatively well what kind of cognitive success is achievable for a majority humans. We are still in the beginning of the process of building cognitively successful computers. We simply don't know what they are capable of when trained by a small number of highly successful humans.
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Twitter is fucked up. They are pushing Musk's tweets into my notifications even though I don't follow him and I explicitly marked his tweets "to see less often." This is happening across the entire platform. What a waste.
...pushing Musk’s tweets at times this week to the top of users’ feeds, where they appeared under a section labeled “For You.”


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-reinvents-twitter-for-the-benefit-of-a-power-user-himself/ar-AA17yLJZ
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Ответы волка на вопросы Красной Шапочки были новой информацией, но не новым знанием. Знание появилось только после того, как он ее съел.

После начала войны у нас не стало намного больше информации о России. Но прибавилось огромное знание о ней. Информацию можно было игнорировать, а знание - нет. The asymmetry between past and present knowledge is dramatic.

В определенной степени это относится к переходу from Google to the so-called generative AI.
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Под функцией понимается поступок действующего лица, определенный с точки зрения его значимости для хода действия.

I.Постоянными, устойчивыми элементами сказки служат функции действующих лиц, независимо от того, кем и как
они выполняются. Они образуют основные составные части сказки.
II. Число функций , известных волшебнойсказке, — о г р а н и ч е н о .
III.Последовательность функций всегда одинакова.
IV.Все волшебные сказки однотипны по своему строению.

-- Пропп, Морфология Сказки, 1928.
Read more... )

Most popular fairy tales have very little magic in them. They are way too short to use all the functions and their sequences identified by Propp.
In any case, where it does take place information sharing or advice involves providing a known solution to a known problem.
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According to the Grimm Brothers, the Wolf opened TLRRH's eyes so that she could appreciate the beautiful world around her:

...he said, "Little Red Cap, just look at the beautiful flowers that are all around us. Why don't you go and take a look? And I don't believe you can hear how beautifully the birds are singing. You are walking along as though you were on your way to school. It is very beautiful in the woods."

Little Red Cap opened her eyes and when she saw the sunbeams dancing to and fro through the trees and how the ground was covered with beautiful flowers...

https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm026.html


BTW, neither the Perrault's, nor the Grimm's version of the tale has a parental warning about the Wolf. It appears the parents were not aware of the imminent danger awaiting the little girl on her way to grandma. They were as naive as TLRRH herself.
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Similarly much-touted financial sanctions have led to a bigger role for state-owned banks which, unsurprisingly enough, are also filled with KGB veterans. If anything, further sanctions wouldn’t just fail to hurt Mr Putin’s war cabinet, they would secure its members' place as the top beneficiaries of Russia’s deepening economic autarky. The same logic is true of domestic politics: as the country descends into a near-permanent state of siege, the security services will be the most important pillar of the regime. That further cements the hard men’s grip on the country.

After two years of covid-induced self-isolation for Kremlin bosses, there is a clear tendency toward tunnel vision and a dearth of checks and balances. Russia’s interests are increasingly becoming conflated with the personal interests of the people at the very top of the system.

-- Alexander Gabuev, Feb 19th, 2022.

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/02/19/alexander-gabuev-writes-from-moscow-on-why-vladimir-putin-and-his-entourage-want-war


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They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the
old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once rapunzel said to her, tell me, dame gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than
the young king's son - he is with me in a moment. Ah. You wicked child, cried the enchantress. What do I hear you say. I thought I had separated you from all the world, and yet you have deceived me.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/
--- Rapunzel. Grimm's Fairy Tales.

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Even though vaccinated people can catch and in some cases spread Covid-19, data suggest vaccines provide protection against infection and transmission. In Santa Clara County, Calif., the recent seven-day average of daily cases among vaccinated people was roughly 6.8 per 100,000 people on Aug. 4; the case rate among the unvaccinated was nearly four times higher.









https://www.wsj.com/articles/highly-vaccinated-states-keep-worst-covid-19-outcomes-in-check-as-delta-spreads-wsj-analysis-shows-11628328602

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