5 ms·

It's amazing how successful Shannon's followers were and continue to be at depicting him as the 'father of the information age', by means of the erasure of Norb

by nanna 6y ago

It's amazing how successful Shannon's followers were and continue to be at depicting him as the 'father of the information age', by means of the erasure of Norbert Wiener. Ronald Kline's The Cybernetic Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age The Information Age charts this historical boundary work in fascinating detail. https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/cybernetics-moment https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/cybernetics-moment

randompwd 6y ago
> by means of the erasure of Norbert Wiener Is it not possible for you to sum it up here? What's with the tease. Articulate why and post a sentence or two explaining it. edit: and in your bio, you have "my PhD on Norbert Wiener", ffs
- nsajko 6y ago
  This seems relevant: https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/cybinfo/cybinfo.html https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/cybinfo/cybi...
- nanna 6y ago
  Shannon was Wiener's student and they both published their equivalent mathematical theories of information simultaneously - Shannon as an article split into two parts published Summer and Autumn 1948, and Wiener in Cybernetics in Autumn 48 too. They presented talks at a conference where they used the concept in spring 1947 (Von Neuman presented on the computer). Wiener claimed that his concept of information predated this by months to a year. Regardless they both came at it from different but complimentary angles - Shannon from cryptography (securing Roosevelt and Churchill's line), Wiener from time series and neural nets. For all intents and purposes it should be called the Shannon-Wiener theory of information. This said, Von Neumann considered information theory to originate in Leo Szillard's work from the 30s (Maxwell demon analogy), but that's a bit of an outlier position as it's quite obtuse. Wiener is partly written out because his communication theory (a term Shannon, like Wiener used as a synonym for information theory, but which has come to identify Wiener in distinction to Shannon) was considered too philosophical. His accounts for things which cannot necessarily be measured and tested objectively - the quantity of meaning, as opposed to cliche, in a sentence, for example. Cybernetics also suffered a huge fall out of fashion in the US during the second half of the '50s, even though it's ideas spread everywhere. The coining of 'artificial intelligence' in Dartmouth to escape the cybernetic baggage of 'learning machines', the invention of hci, personal vomputer, the internet, for example. It re-emerged in the late 60s as 'second order cybernetics', with a focus especially on organism, but by this point the computer world had long disassociated itself from the organic and the social, in the sense found in Wiener's cybernetics. As Bateson, Mead and Stuart Brand put it, many of the original figures from the circles of Wiener and Shannon 'went off into input-output'. Computer science.[1] Follow from this the popular, commercially-driven jargons of 'information technology' and 'information revolution' of the 1960s, which reduced Shannon and Wiener's rich concept to a catch-all for anything vaguely related to digital computers, and Shannon comes out a much simpler founding father than Wiener. If you've read this far I'd suggest you now go and read Kline's brilliant Cybernetic Moment ;) [1] http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm
glial 6y ago
I have never heard before about such a contention. Both Shannon and Wiener were geniuses IMO with very pivotal contributions.
the_decider 6y ago
I agree with this sentiment. "Dark Hero of the Information Age" https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics/dp/0465013716 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics... lays out how both Weiner and Shannon created information theory independently but Weiner took it further; incorporating feedback as a way of lowering the entropy and helping lay the path for today's ML revolution. The book goes on to lay out how Weiner's growing popularity in the Soviet Union and socialist views (he feared automation leading to unemployment) led to the blacklisting of his contributions within the academic community. Its no wander that the first trained Deep (more than three layers) Neural network with published in a Soviet Cybernetics journal in 1970.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
  You may enjoy one of his books, "The Human Use of Human Beings" https://monoskop.org/images/5/51/Wiener_Norbert_The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/5/51/Wiener_Norbert_The_Human_Us...
- eternalban 6y ago
  TIL. I've always wondered why Weiner is not a geek hero like Feynman and Turing. What I've always admired about Weiner is precisely his sensitivity to the social ramifications of his work and area of research. Rare bird, indeed. (p.s. thanks for book ref.)
ghaff 6y ago
I'm not sure how well either is known to the public, notwithstanding Gleik's book that highlighted Shannon. Personally I'm not sure I'd immediately name one or the other as generally better known. But then I went to school somewhere that had a display about Wiener on a highly-trafficked corridor. Shannon does seem to be in more vogue these days though.
SurfingToad 6y ago
I'm not sure whether I'd agree with that. If you look at Shannon and Wiener using Google's ngram viewer, Wiener has always been more 'popular'. They've been getting closer since the 90s, but it seems absurd to argue that Wiener has been erased in any sort of fashion. If anything, it seems that it's in recent times people have started appreciating Shannon. People have been writing more on Norbert Wiener than on Claude Shannon, and I can only assume that it's mostly in the context of the information age. To make another comparison: Alan Turing outpaced Shannon in 1976 and is now more than twice as 'popular' as Wiener.

by nanna 6y ago

randompwd 6y ago

> by means of the erasure of Norbert Wiener Is it not possible for you to sum it up here? What's with the tease. Articulate why and post a sentence or two explaining it. edit: and in your bio, you have "my PhD on Norbert Wiener", ffs

nsajko 6y ago
This seems relevant: https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/cybinfo/cybinfo.html https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/cybinfo/cybi...
nanna 6y ago
Shannon was Wiener's student and they both published their equivalent mathematical theories of information simultaneously - Shannon as an article split into two parts published Summer and Autumn 1948, and Wiener in Cybernetics in Autumn 48 too. They presented talks at a conference where they used the concept in spring 1947 (Von Neuman presented on the computer). Wiener claimed that his concept of information predated this by months to a year. Regardless they both came at it from different but complimentary angles - Shannon from cryptography (securing Roosevelt and Churchill's line), Wiener from time series and neural nets. For all intents and purposes it should be called the Shannon-Wiener theory of information. This said, Von Neumann considered information theory to originate in Leo Szillard's work from the 30s (Maxwell demon analogy), but that's a bit of an outlier position as it's quite obtuse. Wiener is partly written out because his communication theory (a term Shannon, like Wiener used as a synonym for information theory, but which has come to identify Wiener in distinction to Shannon) was considered too philosophical. His accounts for things which cannot necessarily be measured and tested objectively - the quantity of meaning, as opposed to cliche, in a sentence, for example. Cybernetics also suffered a huge fall out of fashion in the US during the second half of the '50s, even though it's ideas spread everywhere. The coining of 'artificial intelligence' in Dartmouth to escape the cybernetic baggage of 'learning machines', the invention of hci, personal vomputer, the internet, for example. It re-emerged in the late 60s as 'second order cybernetics', with a focus especially on organism, but by this point the computer world had long disassociated itself from the organic and the social, in the sense found in Wiener's cybernetics. As Bateson, Mead and Stuart Brand put it, many of the original figures from the circles of Wiener and Shannon 'went off into input-output'. Computer science.[1] Follow from this the popular, commercially-driven jargons of 'information technology' and 'information revolution' of the 1960s, which reduced Shannon and Wiener's rich concept to a catch-all for anything vaguely related to digital computers, and Shannon comes out a much simpler founding father than Wiener. If you've read this far I'd suggest you now go and read Kline's brilliant Cybernetic Moment ;) [1] http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm

glial 6y ago

I have never heard before about such a contention. Both Shannon and Wiener were geniuses IMO with very pivotal contributions.

the_decider 6y ago

I agree with this sentiment. "Dark Hero of the Information Age" https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics/dp/0465013716 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics... lays out how both Weiner and Shannon created information theory independently but Weiner took it further; incorporating feedback as a way of lowering the entropy and helping lay the path for today's ML revolution. The book goes on to lay out how Weiner's growing popularity in the Soviet Union and socialist views (he feared automation leading to unemployment) led to the blacklisting of his contributions within the academic community. Its no wander that the first trained Deep (more than three layers) Neural network with published in a Soviet Cybernetics journal in 1970.

GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
You may enjoy one of his books, "The Human Use of Human Beings" https://monoskop.org/images/5/51/Wiener_Norbert_The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/5/51/Wiener_Norbert_The_Human_Us...
eternalban 6y ago
TIL. I've always wondered why Weiner is not a geek hero like Feynman and Turing. What I've always admired about Weiner is precisely his sensitivity to the social ramifications of his work and area of research. Rare bird, indeed. (p.s. thanks for book ref.)

ghaff 6y ago

I'm not sure how well either is known to the public, notwithstanding Gleik's book that highlighted Shannon. Personally I'm not sure I'd immediately name one or the other as generally better known. But then I went to school somewhere that had a display about Wiener on a highly-trafficked corridor. Shannon does seem to be in more vogue these days though.

SurfingToad 6y ago

I'm not sure whether I'd agree with that. If you look at Shannon and Wiener using Google's ngram viewer, Wiener has always been more 'popular'. They've been getting closer since the 90s, but it seems absurd to argue that Wiener has been erased in any sort of fashion. If anything, it seems that it's in recent times people have started appreciating Shannon. People have been writing more on Norbert Wiener than on Claude Shannon, and I can only assume that it's mostly in the context of the information age. To make another comparison: Alan Turing outpaced Shannon in 1976 and is now more than twice as 'popular' as Wiener.