Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week, I want to revisit one of the main language characters we visited a few months back, Claude Shannon.
It’s somewhat odd calling Shannon a language character. I was first introduced to his world reading about lifespan and longevity. His work was used as an analogy to demonstrate a point, even though he did do some work in genetics.
Shannon was a mathematician, an engineer, a teacher, and a tinkerer. He is considered the founder of the modern technology age. He did work in World War II on code breaking, and on communication, but he was not a language person in the way we typically think about language.
Shannon was more concerned with the idea of transmitting and receiving messages, more so than actually constructing them. (As language folks tend to obsess over).
Shannon’s breakthrough work was the mathematical theory of communication, which broke down sending information digitally. I’m not a mathematician. Most of the original work (which I purchased) is gibberish to me. But, I can understand the concept, and it is profound in its breakdown of communication to an elemental level.
I talked about one of the aspects of his world in a post from last November (Noise). But this week I wanted to talk about uncertainty.
Shannon starts with the idea of flipping a coin. The outcome is either head or tails. This communicates to us a binary choice. The answer to the question, what happened in the coin flip, can be be expressed as a binary digit or ‘bit, one of two options.(yes the bit you are familiar with if you’ve used any computer technology in the last 40 years is Shannon’s idea from the 60’s)
Shannon quickly noted though, that the coin flip is perfectly random, unless the coin is weighted. In which case one outcome is more likely than another.
He then went on to show (all of this mathematically of course) that most of our communication is very heavily weighted. Because of our rules of grammer, syntax, phonology, and morphology, the next letter and the next word is highly dependent on the one that precedes it.
This was a highly useful realization and skill when Shannon was working in cryptography as a code breaker, but I think it means a lot to us as everyday communicators.
“for the vast bulk of messages, in fact, symbols do not behave like fair coins. The symbol that is sent now depends, in important and predictable ways, on the symbol that was just sent: one symbol has pull in the next.”
“As Shannon showed, this model also describes the behavior of messages and languages. Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple*” “Because you’re completely aware of those rules, you’ve already recognized that ‘pineapple’ is a transmission error. Given the way the paragraph and the sentence were developing, practically the only word possible in that location was ‘word’ “
So much of what we say is predetermined, by custom, by ritual, by routine. When it is time to actually say something outside the norm, it is easy to falter. To struggle to find the right words.
As I mentioned earlier, Shannon was an engineer. He was concerned with designing a system to effectively and efficiently transmit messages. In pursuit of solving that problem, he taught us a valuable lesson about constructing messages.
“what does information really measure? It measures the uncertainty we overcome. It measures our chances of learning something we haven’t yet learned. Or, more specifically, the amount of information something carries reflects the reduction in uncertainty about the object”
“Why doesn’t anyone say XFOML RXKHRJDFJUJ? Investigating that question made clear that our “freedom of speech” is mostly an illusion: it comes from an impoverished understanding of freedom. Freer communicators than us, free of course in the sense of uncertainty and information, would say XFOML RXKHRJDFJUJ. But in reality, the vast bulk of possible messages have already been eliminated for us before we use a sentence or write a line.”
If information reflects the reduction in uncertainty, that should be one of, if not the primary focus of our communications. Especially those novel ones that break from ritual and routine.
Think about 20 different people practicing basketball individually on a court. There are bound to be some collisions, some balls bouncing off each other at the rim, and maybe even some injuries. An aviation training area can be very similar. Multiple individuals, in a confined area, with different agendas.
In aviation, we make position reports both procedurally in certain airspace, and in high volume uncontrolled areas. Those reports need to resolve a lot of uncertainty in order to avoid disaster. A good formula is who you are, where you are, and what your intentions are.
If you know John is working on 3 pointers from the corner, and Phil is practicing layups, you can now decide how and where you want to practice, without disturbing, or being disturbed by, the fellow ballers. A tremendous amount of uncertainty has been resolved. That is valuable information. Much more concrete and actionable than, John and Phil are playing baskstball.
This, of course, is a task much easier said than done. To make all, or even most, of our messages precise enough to overcome the maximum amount of uncertainty, requires a novel concept. Thinking before we speak.
What information do I have? What information does the receiver of the message need. What do they expect to hear? What uncertainty needs to be overcome?
There is no shortage of uncertainty in our world. Overcoming even a small amount of it will lead to happier humans. And I’m sure there is serenity to be found along the way.
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.