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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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very low entropy walls of text

You mean high entropy as in terrible signal to noise ratio?

Information-theoretic entropy is a measurement of how 'surprising' a message is. A low-entropy wall of text is one where, once you see the first sentence or two - or the poster's name - you pretty much know what all the next ten paragraphs will be.

Maybe I’m using the term wrong? Low entropy as in: very little actual information. Something that could realistically be summarized in a sentence or two, gets expanded into a giant wall.

Entropy means disorder, randomness, chaos, and the like, so "low entropy" would refer to something that is well ordered or well structured. I think most people would interpret that in this context as something that has less "noise" compared to the "signal," since "noise" could be considered to add entropy, due to adding content without adding meaning.

I know LLMs are banned here so mods please don’t ban me for this. Here is what I get from chatGPT when I ask “what does it mean for something to be low entropy in the context of the information it contains?”

In the context of information theory, low entropy indicates that the information content is highly predictable and ordered. Entropy, a concept introduced by Claude Shannon, measures the uncertainty or randomness in a set of data. When entropy is low, the data has less randomness and is more structured, meaning that there is less information content or fewer surprises in the data.

For example, a string of repeated characters like "AAAAA" has low entropy because the next character is easily predictable. Conversely, a string of random characters like "G7d2#k9" has high entropy because the next character is unpredictable. In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.

This is what I mean. Very low information, skimmable (because it’s predictable and repetitive).

I agree that “low information density” would be a better way of phrasing this, it seems like I am using this term wrong. Thank you!

In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.

...Am I crazy, or is this the exact opposite of how the term is used in physics? Like, heat-death is a high-entropy state, right? it's also highly ordered and predictable, right? Did information theory actually flip the sign on the term?

Heat death is high information density though as a description of the state.

Maybe from an information theory perspective, non-information bits are thought of as cold or empty.

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