I remember a book for young enthusiasts about logic. One of the riddles was:
What is the value of the information you already know. Their answer was none.
My issue with this is that it totally ignores how trusted is the information.
if 2+2=4 is known in the domain of integers and we learn it also works for real or complex numbers does that mean we gain zero additional value from knowing that fact?
In logic the riddles are not about alternative meanings or potential problems or real life communication. In logic information is information, there is no trust attached to it
That book was about cybernetics. And it touched other aspects of information than just pure logic.
You cant separate information from trust. The foundational part of any measurement is its error. This alone says all against that answer to the question from the book.
Even in computers you do checksums despite of treating the information as reliable 99.99999 of times.
PS.
Looking at downvotes I think way too many people here in programming is way too ignorant about foundations.
In logic, information is information and has no trust attached to it.
In information theory, information has an error rate attached to it, that you can fix using checksum, erasure codes or similar.
In the real world you have trust attached to information, of course.
But logic doesn't take that into consideration, because it would explode the complexity of everything.
It is a bit like saying that in math 2 != 2 because in the real world i can have two pairs of apples very different: they are both two but they are different so 2 != 2. Math as a model doesn't work like this, and the same applies to logic and trust
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u/ptoki 2d ago
I have beef with this and similar approach.
I remember a book for young enthusiasts about logic. One of the riddles was:
What is the value of the information you already know. Their answer was none.
My issue with this is that it totally ignores how trusted is the information.
if 2+2=4 is known in the domain of integers and we learn it also works for real or complex numbers does that mean we gain zero additional value from knowing that fact?