A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Rob Goodman

Claude Shannon was smart and introduced the information age. He had worked much in industry and pioneered ideas useful for transmitting information across phone networks. He helped understand the redundancy of data and how information can be compressed, error corrected and used to communicate across distances. It was a very practical field with some rigourous underpinnings. He was also a "character" with interesting social skills. He married his first wife because they liked the same music. He had general "I understand the world better than traditionalists" outlook.  I had a read a few Shannon books before, and didn't realize I had actually read this one before. This one felt a bit slow.

Too Much Information: Understanding What You Don’t Want to Know

Today we live in a time of abundant information. A single click or tap can get us anything we want to know. But does knowing make our lives better? There are many government initiatives out there that make that assumption. However, they often don't stand up to the results. 

Sometimes the act of reporting can trigger a reaction, even if unjustified. Labeling items as to whether or not the contain GMO ingredients makes it appear that GMO ingredients are harmful and should be avoided. However, most research shows them to be perfectly fine for humans. Other labeling has encouraged change that is helpful (such as trans-fat labeling.)

In some cases, the results can have very different behaviors. Putting calories to the left of food on menus instead of to the right causes different behaviors. The general result of calorie labeling also differs by groups. For some people (often the poor), the labeling encourages seeking out larger calorie counts to get more "food for the buck". Some people may have the discipline to use the calories to reduce consumption. Others may become more stressed out over it and eat more.

Providing information requires effort. The costs involved with producing the information need to be balanced with the benefit received. Government requests a great deal of information. How much of this is really needed? Are there alternatives to collecting it? Many social programs are means tested. In order to reduce misallocation of funds, huge amounts of information are required. This ends up excluding some of the people that are most in need. Would we be better off just accepting that some non-deserving people would receive benefits in order to ensure access to all those in need. (And even better yet, why not just allow everybody to take advantage?) Information requirements is both intentionally and unintentionally a huge barrier to entry.

Excessive disclosures can be useless. (Who pays attention to the multitude of privacy policies?) They can also encourage the opposite behavior. A doctor that discloses an interest in a certain treatment may thus unwittingly encourage the patient to select that treatment. The patient feels an obligation to support the doctor with that treatment. The doctor now feels relieved from conflict of interest concerns. Is this really what was intended by disclosure?

We as individuals and society need to focus on information that provides us benefit. We also need to realize that we are biased to what we have. Could are lives be better with less?

A Mind at Play

A Mind at Play deifies Claude Shannon as a renaissance-type genius who is able to make contributions to any field he desires, yet is likely to leave his greatest ideas unfinished. You would have a tough time finding any criticism in this work. He grew up a tinkerer in small-town Michigan. He was super smart, and was great at understanding and applying math. He was also able to pick up domain knowledge of other fields and made great contributions to genetics research (that were only recently "rediscovered"). However, his primary contribution was the theory of information transmission. Alas, only briefly discusses what this theory is, leaving us wondering why he is so important. (Though this may be in part because it seems so obvious today.) He made some of the earliest "thinking machines", such as a "maze running mouse" and chess computers. He lived to see the dawn of the information age, but was suffering from Alzheimer's at the time and was thus barely able to comprehend it.
While I found the book to be a excessively laudatory, I did enjoy the descriptions of the time at Bell Labs. Having a bunch of people turned lose at doing whatever they wanted seems to be one of the advantages of monopolies. Any research that could be tangentially related to phone company business was fair game. The huge number of innovations that arose from Bell Labs validates its value. Imagine if we allowed more researchers the freedom to investigate ideas rather than spend endless hours writing grant proposals or helping the companies short-term bottom line? We see some of that with the big tech companies like Google and Facebook these days. Alas, a lot of the innovation today is in the small startups, and that funding is driven by the ability to appease the venture capitalists.

The Organized Mind

Today we have easy access to orders of magnitude more information than we could process. How to best utilize the wonderful computer that is our mind? We may get hoodwinked into thinking we can multitask, but that usually just means we are doing a whole bunch of things poorly. True work happens when we can get into a flow state that is unimpeded by other thoughts. However, creative solutions often happen when we let our mind wonder off on its own. Sleep is an important part of the equation and serves as the "sorting" time where our brain processes and organizes everything. Without enough sleep, our brain will not remember or work as well as it should.

The Organized mind is primarily a science book that explains how our mind works. It also provides some useful information on how we can maximize the efficiency and use of our mind. There are also some stories shared with Levitin's other books. As a book talking about organization, it at times felt a little disorganized, but still kept interesting.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

The history of information can be a broad topic. Even narrowing it down to "modern" advances in uses of information still leads a lot to cover. This book focuses on the technology and theory that have changed the way that we process process and transfer information. Speech enabled more verbose communication to be shared among people. Different aspects of the language were used to communicate stories over time. Epics like the Iliad relied on a number of verbal clues to allow the bards to relate the tale.

Then came the revolution of writing. This enabled greater spreading of language across time and space. It also lead to a decrease in the abilities of the oral story-tellers. In the process, it also changed the way that we think about the world. Different means were used to record speech, including pictographs, syllabaries and alphabets.

The telegraph was one of the first modern technological advancements that enabled widespread communication. However, this in essence simply mirrored African drummers that were able to "talk" with their drums over great distances. Telegraphs required translation of speech into a digital code of "dots, dashes, short pauses and long pauses". Associated with this codes were different additional codes to "encrypt" and "compress" the information via codebooks or other shorthand phrases.

The telephone started to allow communication with analog signals. This set off a revolution where everybody could use the long-distance communicator without an intermediary. From there, the information revolution took off into high gear and never really stopped, with computers, internet and more enabling rapid communication.

This book covers all the communication and the theory behind it. Information theory, mathematics, biology, computer science and more are all covered. It even "jumps the shark" to talk about "jumping the shark". With a topic as broad as "information" it is easy to meander into all sorts of different areas from DNA to the Enigma machine. A little more focus would have been helpful. At times it can get awfully boring as the author rambles on about some topic. Then it can turn around an start to cover something interesting.

Information Filtering

The corporate computer world is currently all over "Big Data". Companies are collecting all kinds of data. Now they just have to have means of analyzing it in order to help their corporate mission. You can already see how some things are done now. Safeway has a "just for you" programs that offers customized discounts based on an individual's shopping habits. Staples adjusts online prices based on somebody's location and proximity to Staples and competitors' stores. And those are only the cases that get big Wall Street Journal feature articles. There are many other cases that fall under the radar.

There are also many companies struggling to figure out what to do with the data.

But what about individual people?

A few decades ago, the radio pretty much told you what you would listen to. The radio stations played the Beatles. Everyone listened to the Beatles. That was that. If you happened to live close to an indie radio station or indie record store you may get something different. Or you could really scour mail-order catalogs or friends with demo tapes. It took significant effort to find anything unique.

Today, you can turn on Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, or even iTunes and find millions of songs. Finding many obscure artists is not the problem. Filtering through the mass of obscurity is now the challenge. You almost long for the DJs to tell you what to buy.

Specialization and customization have also made things worse. If you wanted to buy a home computer in the 80s, you chose between the Commodore 64, Apple II, or Atari 800. You might have to hunt around town to try to find the best prices, but you knew what each would do. Now you can choose among windows, macs, linux, ChromeOS, Android and iOS. And then there are near infinite variations of each model. Different retailers may have different model numbers (with retailers often trying to have custom version to prevent people from "showrooming" in their store.) The information is now abundantly available. Filtering it has become a problem. (Just try to say "give me the cheapest computer with a Blue Ray, 4 GB memory and 1TB hard drive - and that doesn't even go in to processor, OS, cores, or whatnot.)

Where does this lead us? Will businesses begin to customize their consumer offerings so well that there is an individual model number for each consumer? So much for shopping around.

Even outside of retail, the information glut has a way of overtaking us. Now you can flip on the internet and catch the outcome of every college football game as it happens. There is no need to worry about which games are televised, or what scores the TV announcer feels are interesting. You get everything. You also get the polls as soon as they are available. No more waiting for the Monday paper to see how your team is doing. But, with this media dominated football, you also start to loose the gameday experience. Saturday afternoon games are becoming endangered. Local teams? Why bother. You can just get everything on TV. But, you can now trash talk with fans all over the nation right as the game is happening. You just have to find the right message board - and there are hundreds. Now just try to filter through all these to find things you really are interesting in. Maybe comment #653 on board #203. Or maybe his Twitter feed is the best place to look. Before, it might be difficult to find somebody interested in an out of town game. Now, its difficult to filter through all the garbage to find the intelligent conversation.

How do you deal with the information overload? How do you focus on what data is really needed, and filter out the garbage? In its infancy Google did a great job of showing the most relevant results. Today, the spammers and SEO-gurus are catching up and sometimes winning. A simple query may return page upon page of "junk" results. Is it time for the "new" search engine to help us finally filter through the glut?