4 ms·
> 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 expl
by 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 agoThis seems relevant: https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/cybinfo/cybinfo.html https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/cybinfo/cybi...
- nanna 6y agoShannon 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