True, but you have shown us enough of your front ground to leave an impression.

I guarantee that my background is more working class than yours. I am a tradesman with no academic training and I come from four generations of Irish navies who lived in the slums of Huddersfield. — Punshhh

And yet we let you post here on equal terms, to show how open hearted and fair-minded we are. :rofl:

There is a relation for sure. I don’t believe Dawkins even mentions propaganda in the chapter on memes does he? — I like sushi

I think he invented the term mainly to explain religion to himself. I should have said 'superstition', rather than propaganda, as a better contrast with 'knowledge'. Anyways, it 'explains' the selfish institution trying to survive in the culture. Or something.

Likewise, corporations are not selfish (they literally aren't persons) and do not try to survive or help their shareholders to multiply. — Nils Loc

Curious comparison. Dawkins wants to explain human behaviour in terms of attributes of particles of human make-up that entirely lack such behaviour. Whereas you are objecting to explaining the behaviour of the whole (corporation) in terms of the actual behaviour its parts, (people). It seems a more reasonable project.

I see a big difference. I see inanimate things as fundamentally reliable, and living things as fundamentally unreliable. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. The way I would put it is that things are indifferent, whereas people at least, maybe animals, can be benevolent or malevolent. But if you are saying you trust things more than people, then you yourself are using the same term and making a comparison in the same terms. As you say the weather is also unreliable, but we don't tend to personify it as folks used to, though we still talk about angry skies or cruel sea.

Therefore, memes, such as knowledge, — Pinprick

Memes as conceived by Dawkins are not knowledge but propaganda. We are vital to their survival not the other way round. But it was never a great analogy in the first place, and Dawkins made a habit of taking his own analogies literally as he notoriously does with 'The Selfish Gene'. Obviously genes are not selfish, and do not try to survive or multiply. They are bits of chemical. And memes are bits of sentence. Don't get too excited.

Quantity of information depends on the question — Isaac

Bizarre! I cannot continue this discussion, because I have no idea what you are referring to. Where is the uncertainty in the content of a text? What is the question and how does it determine the content of a text? Alas, I do not want answers to these questions, I merely lay them before you as tokens of bafflement. I do not think you can reduce my uncertainty.

The total count of books has become relevant, their content less so. — Isaac

I sort of get you, but then I just think you've changed the subject without changing the object.
I was talking about the written information, not the logistics of the library. Print books do not inform the blind very much, but blind people do not wipe out the information in them either. They remain as they were. Those who are illiterate cannot get at the information in books, but the information is there still. The books can be scanned, processed by an OCR program and vocalised by an artificial text reader. And then the information can be made available to the blind and the illiterate and even the auditor. And if you do that for a thousand books that are all the same, you will have wasted a deal of your own time and energy. Do it for a thousand different books and you have an audio library. Hurrah.

When I were a lad, there was none of this internet thing, we used to get all our information from books. The little local library would have a few hundred books, big university libraries thousands. Thing was, the books were nearly all different. There might be more than one copy of the most used books, but the amount of information available was counted by the number of different books. A library with a thousand copies of only one book would not be a repository of much information, in fact it would only have one book's worth. Is this controversial?

The problem is, how do we introduce a lockdown in the carehomes, to flatten the peak? We can't, because they were already adopting the maximum measures they could adopt and the death rate keeps accelerating. — Punshhh

Maximum measures? I think not.

1. Test care workers.

2. Do not send recovering patients back into care homes.

3. Do not leave residents with symptoms in place to spread the illness.

4. Provide the proper equipment not the PPE for a down-graded non serious infection.

5. Take steps to eliminate carers moving between care homes because they are so badly paid they need 3 or 4 jobs.

6. Have as many as possible live on site during the emergency.

7. Maybe ask someone with more expertise than me to suggest other measures, because these are just the blindingly obvious things that haven't been done.

What information does the above disordered post contain that isn't possessed by your ordered post? — Harry Hindu

Useless information. Like the most of your posts. Again, I have already gone into this. However, information that looks as useless as this can be useful information that has bee encrypted. I have also mentioned this in passing.

At least, that's how Shannon defines it. — Isaac

Well I am not the statistician round here, But Shannon was dealing with distinguishing signal from noise. And indeed the way to do that is by repetition. Each repetition of my sentence can be seen as further confirmation that I did not accidentally write "blind" when I actually meant "bland". But the repetition or the 'order' in the message distinguishes it from noise, it does not add information. in a noisy channel one sacrifices bandwidth (information density) for clarity. However, if you got the information the first time, you get nothing new from my saying over again.

Why call this "trust" though? — Metaphysician Undercover

Hume calls it 'habit'.

Surely, if I say I trust that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, it doesn't mean the same thing as when I say that I trust you to deliver what we agreed upon. — Metaphysician Undercover

I suppose you are saying that the sun has proved more reliable than me in the past. :sad: Or is there another difference? Every day the sun rises, and the postman delivers. I can imagine a theory or two of physics and psychology/biology that would lead me to have more confidence in the sun than the postman. But as to it not meaning the same thing to say I trust them both, I don't see it.

That was a longish post for me. How much information did it convey? My feeling is that repeating myself does not add to the information. But If anyone disagrees, then I refer them to the two wiki pages I linked to earlier, where there is a formal and quantitive argument laid out with references.

You still haven't come close to showing how the disordered image has more information than the ordered one. If anything, you have shown the opposite. — Harry Hindu

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Why don't you show exactly what is the information that is missing from the ordered image that exists in the disordered image. — Harry Hindu

Because I already have. About as clearly and graphically as could possibly be.

To make it intuitive, to the extent there is order, there is repetition, and whenever there is a repetition, it can be abbreviated to 'and so on'.

Repetition gives the same information twice. Repetition gives the same information twice.

=

Repetition gives the same information twice. *2

Information density is the measure of disorder. Information in this example is not the pixels, but the arrangement of the pixels, not the things, but the arrangement of things. — unenlightened

Come back when you know how to read., No, actually, don't. Just stop chasing me from thread to thread with your vacuous contrarian nonsense.

I could see a taxonomy of trusts identifying negative and positive aspects to trust in each embedded context to which a form of trust applies, but I suppose the simple answer to the conundrum is that we should selectively, critically, and appropriately apply trust/mistrust. Selectively, in that we eschew a naive mistrust of everything and accept that trust is sometimes both good and necessary. Critically, in that when we do apply mistrust, we do so in accordance with reason. Our mistrust should be warranted. — Baden

Thanks, that's a very helpful clarification. Certainly as one grows up, one is likely to uncover the frailties of even the most benign parent, so that one no longer trusts their infinite wisdom on all things, while continuing, hopefully, to trust their benevolent orientation towards their offspring.

To relate all this to the philosophical tradition, Hume's scepticism declares that there is no reason to expect the world to continue in the orderly causal way that it has in the past; but we trust that it will. Such is the base level of trust that as it percolates upwards to other people and expects decent people to carry on being decent, and rogues to carry on being rogues, becomes what one might think of as a natural conservatism. "every day as sure as the clock, somebody hears the postman's knock."

Agriculture, the necessary foundation of civilisation, is only possible if the peasant trusts both that the seasons will follow their usual succession and that one's neighbours will allow ones cabbages to come to fruition. "Good faces make good neighbours.", not because neighbours cannot climb fences, but because they clarify which are my cabbages, and which are my neighbour's.

And if I cannot trust all my neighbours, or at least the raiding parties from far away, of Vikings or American oil-men, then I need to trust policemen and armies and the local warlords to protect my cabbages, because i have to eat, and I have to sleep.

So if I am a peasant in North Korea, or an abused child in Essex, life is shit, no one can be trusted, and the outlook is pretty damn poor. This does not demonstrate that trust is unnecessary.

I wonder, respectfully, what difference it makes to you? For myself, I do not expect to be performing or witnessing miracles, so what I have from the Gospels is an illustration of how to live. Love your neighbour, heal the sick feed the hungry, don't be greedy, and so on. The truth of this is not a matter of history, but of human nature.

It seems unlikely that the whole existence of Jesus is made up and equally unlikely that every word of the Gospels is gospel truth. If one buys into the divine Son of God and died to Redeem us doctrine, well that's another matter, but I'm not clear that there is strong evidence in the gospels or anywhere for that.

Have you come across either Maurice Nicoll's writing on the New testament, or Robert Graves' King Jesus, the latter a heretical retelling of the gospel story as a mytho-magical attempted coup that went wrong? The former is a very measured spiritual reading of the esoteric meaning of the Gospels.

For example, for any given volume in a state of disorder, in order to be truly random, there must be substructures of a definable size which are actually ordered. If randomness is completely average, you end up with a large scale average distribution, which ends up in fact being ordered, not disordered. — Pantagruel

Indeed so. I gave the example of black pixels on the left and white pixels on the right as an ordered arrangement A chequerboard configuration would be an example of an ordered mixed distribution.

There's a whole statistical mind-fuck for measuring the degree of disorder.

And yet, by the magic of non-referential communication and with years of training, Mrs un knows how many sugars I Like in my coffee. And if it is not too esoteric for your philosophy, you will reach the same understanding as soon as I confide that I like 1 teaspoonful. In this context, 1 serves as an instruction not to repeat an action.

Wait, hang on. Does repeat refer?

"The" does not refer to anything. Is this a problem?

My physics teacher used to say 'a number means nothing until you state your units.'

The solution is that 'the' does not refer until you say "solution".

"1" does not refer. "1 sugar in my coffee" refers as much as anything because the units have been specified.

Hurrah for physics.

I am old enough to remember when the UK kept applying to join the EEC as it then was, and DeGaulle (the ungrateful bastard) kept saying "Non." He was famous for it and well resented for it by the peasantry and chattering classes alike.

Hard to be both completely wrong and a complete hypocrite — Baden

Oh no it isn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb8AGuD2uOI

Potential information is being confused as actual information here. — Harry Hindu

Come back when you have the faintest idea what we're talking about. I won't be holding my breath.

Hint: an image is what it is. It has no potential, and the information content cannot change except by the destruction of the image.

Philosophers agree about almost everything. That shit smells, that the sky is blue, that Trump is an idiot, that murder is wrong, that the egg predates the chicken, and so on.

All that goes without saying; so we talk about, what is uncertain, what is disagreeable, what is just too complicated, and that is called philosophy.

Some economists believe that CEOs have become very stable geniasses who more than deserve a pay rise.

When were these good old days? — Hanover

My rose tinted spectacles take me back to the fifties in the UK. But even quite recently, The prime minister resigned when he called a referendum and lost it.

People don't always get what they need, and then there are consequences.

This assumes that karma controls the world. I'd love to think that North Korea will fall due to the falsehoods and propaganda it imposes on its citizens. — Hanover

You may have to wait, but it is not a magic justice system I am proposing but the bite of reality. Perhaps you can fool all of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool a virus, you cannot fool the climate, you cannot fool reality with propaganda.

For example, the UK government recently downgraded the status of Corona virus:

As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid

This has not changed the virus, but it has changed the legislated protection that health workers are entitled to. So it helps the virus spread. There is no question but that a regime can kill millions of its citizens. Governments can and do betray their citizens, and parents can and do betray their children. And people die when they do, because ... wait for it ... people are dependent, and people need to trust each other.

Less of the 'us' there good buddy, and less of the 'them' too.

If there was a conspiracy, then it could be exposed and defeated. But the case is worse than that. The enemy is within, it is in all the fake friendship, all the fake unity, all the fake flag waving and sacrifice for the nation, all the glorious economic necessity and fake freedom enforced at gunpoint and so on and on. You cannot tell the truth yourself, but recite this trope about Russians on autopilot. It is exactly your lack of trust that leaves you open to such exploitation. Perhaps there are Russians sowing discontent, There are certainly plenty of Americans and Europeans doing so too.

Why are so many of the world's leaders complete turnips? It's not because there is a grand conspiracy of turnips to take over the world, it's because people prefer pleasant bullshit to truth.

You are cursed to have no peace and find no meaning until you think one kind thought. This truth is just the truth. But in telling you, I have made it harder for you.

So you tell me, Unenlightened: how much trust vs distrust is in the world, — Harry Hindu

I am telling you, Harry. I started this thread for that purpose.

Imagine for a moment that no one ever told the truth. There would be no trust at all in what anyone says.
No one would bother listening or having any regard for anything anyone says, and the language would be useless and fall into disuse. Language only has functionality if on average, people tell the truth most of the time. Even lies only work if mostly people tell the truth.

Similarly, society only has functionality if on average, people cooperate most of the time.

So there has to be more trust than distrust in the world or society would collapse. I think society is close to collapse right now. So I am telling you, and anyone who is prepared to listen, that we all need to trust, and need the truth to be told, and need to cooperate, or we will not survive. Like the boy who cried 'Wolf' we will be eaten by wolves if we do not cooperate and tell the truth, because wolves do cooperate and tell the truth, and that makes them stronger than they are as individuals.

Contains the least information of all — StreetlightX

Unless it happens to be the code that opens the vault at Fort Knox.

Actually the third picture contains a quite staggering amount of information, it's just (most probably) useless information. But never mind the quality, feel the width.

I'm not making this stuff up. People have been theorising for a while and I am right at the shallow end here.

The point is that you have assumed the capacity to judge between information and disinformation — Metaphysician Undercover

No. the point is that I do not at this point distinguish information and disinformation because that is a matter of interpretation, not of information itself.

But if all the rocks were precisely the same size and not ordered, then their arrangement contains no information because it’s by nature disordered. — Wayfarer

No. this is exactly the opposite of what I am saying. A disordered system contains more information than an ordered one. Your intuition is the opposite because the information it contains is boring. Each pebble has its location in relation to the others, but because there is no order or pattern it looks superficially just like any other disordered arrangement - nothing special.

To illustrate, there is a test for photographic memory that separates a patterned picture into two pictures both of which are pseudo-random. The pattern is only revealed to those who can superimpose one picture onto the other in their mind.

This is completely subjective, because what constitutes "information" is dependent on the defining terms. If the arrangement is set up with the intent to deceive, then what you are reading as "information" is really disinformation. And the whole concept of "information", under this precept becomes completely unsupported because of the possibility that you are wrongly interpreting what is there. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are informing me of something, but you are wrong. What you offer as information is disinformation. But being wrong does not change the number of words you have written, any more than calling what I have written 'subjective' changes the information I have given.

But what I have explained informally can be found with more rigour by those who are interested.

Information increases as order decreases.

For example:

Imagine a square of 100 * 100 pixels each of which is either black or white.

The complete information contained in this arrangement can be represented as a binary string reading left to right line by line top to bottom 10,000 bits.

But if there is order, the information can be compressed, and the more order there is, the more it can be compressed.

For instance:

All the pixels on the left half are black, and all the ones on the right half are white. A program to generate this pattern can be written in very much less than 10,000 bits.

To make it intuitive, to the extent there is order, there is repetition, and whenever there is a repetition, it can be abbreviated to 'and so on'.

Repetition gives the same information twice. Repetition gives the same information twice.

=

Repetition gives the same information twice. *2

Information density is the measure of disorder. Information in this example is not the pixels, but the arrangement of the pixels, not the things, but the arrangement of things.

This why the same information can be pixels on my screen and completely different pixels on your screen.

For example, is Trump a great big fat liar of grander proportions than we've ever known such that we need to rethink where we are and thereby return to our purer state? Or, have our leaders always been big fat liars, but we're just now more leery? I think it's the latter really, as I think about leaders the world over and throughout history. — Hanover

I agree our leaders have always been big fat liars, but I disagree we are more leery. Au contraire, we are much less leery; our leaders can now tell blatant lies that everyone can see are blatant lies, then contradict themselves, and then accuse their critics of being liars. In the good old days, they didn't usually get caught out, but if they did they were booted out. Well perhaps that was never the universal tradition, I'm not sure.

No, it was the rule. Even the priest had to be moved to another parish once he'd been caught buggering the choirboys a few times.

After all, I just want to be treated as I'd like to be treated myself. The rest, as they say, is commentary upon that. — Hanover

What you need is one of those lamps with a genie in it. P'raps Jeff Bezos will lend you his?

or at least that is what this "left-leaning" forum has led us to believe. — Harry Hindu

Harry, I'm really struggling to make sense of your posts. What have you been led to believe? It is almost as if you are saying that because there is a lot of distrust in the world, there cannot also be a lot of trust. Is that what you are saying? Do me a favour and try and put it simply and clearly, and without the political jibes.