Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.
Post History
[Does] information content scale linearly with length, regardless of topic? Information content pretty clearly doesn't scale linearly with length. I used to joke that The Scarlet Letter author...
Answer
#1: Initial revision
by
Michael
·
2024-03-06T21:05:07Z (9 months ago)
> ### [Does] information content scale linearly with length, regardless of topic? Information content pretty clearly doesn't scale linearly with length. I used to joke that The Scarlet Letter author wrote everything at least three times, so you only needed to read 30% of the words to understand what was happening.[^hawthorne] Consider this extremely contrived "information:" ``` AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ``` Rewriting it as "20 As" loses no information, and it's lots shorter. But only the context determines what the effect of shortening it further to "As" might be. > ### Can you summarize any explanation? No. At some point, there will be a case "where the information loss is catastrophic" as you put it. Determining the catastrophic case is the tricky part. Catastrophic for what? If you're making a tire for a wheel that is 1 meter in diameter, the tire's inner edge needs to be π meters, or 3.14159… meters. How important the extra digits are depends on your tools, the stretchiness of your tire material, and so on. > “…the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” _Albert Einstein, 1933_ [^hawthorne]: Literature fans: Please don't hate me. Instead, suggest a Unicode character to wear in penance.