information

• Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
• Next message: mike salovesh: "Entropy, anybody?"
• Previous message: Ralph L Holloway: "Sexual dimoprhism in human brain..."

Mr Hendrickson knows his entropy and his information theories, no doubt about
that. There is no quarrel save for one, and that is that we had no quarrel.
Mr. Hendrickson's use of entropy was never under attack, since there was
nothing inappropriate about it. I might add one thing to Hendrickson's
nice run-down, and that is that social scientists did a good deal of thinking
about the formal identity of information with order (negentropy). Early
enthusiasm quickly faded when it became clear, as Hendrickson pointed out,
that information as a measure and information content--the meaning or
referent of a message--were not the same thing at all. Once information and
meaning get linked in a single sequence of related constructs, information
can be very useful in not just thinking about one's data, but also designing
the research that gets the data. As Danny Yee knows, this is what I spent the
last 20 years doing. But that's another thread.
Mike Lieber

• Next message: mike salovesh: "Entropy, anybody?"
• Previous message: Ralph L Holloway: "Sexual dimoprhism in human brain..."