Word: shannons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This reasoning is an example of what philosophers call the fallacy of equivocation: what Shannon and Wiener, inventors of information theory, meant by "communication" is not what Moles has in mind. However, trying to apply a theory in new domains is fair game, so we proceed...
Moles first presents a derivation of Shannon's H-formula for information content which does not live up to its claim to being non-mathematical. (How could one derive a mathematical expression non-mathematically?) He then applies the formula to a few examples. He ignores recent statistical findings that in estimating H from relative frequencies some correction must be made for sample size; but that doesn't really matter because of his relative frequencies are drawn out of thin air. Instead of actually calculating H with his few real relative frequencies, he rounds them off and lumps them together, saving...
...admitted that, when the original French edition appeared in 1958, it was quite fashionable to dash cybernetically about. After a sufficiently loud and long obeisance to information theory (sufficiently loud and long to attract financial support and publication), it seemed not to matter what profit came from applying Shannon's H-formula to any kind of relative frequencies, real or imaginary. It was no fault of Shannon's that, by the end of the Fabulous Fifties, the H of his formula stood most often for Hooey...
After all the press hosannas over President Johnson's eloquent voting-rights speech to Congress, Commonweal's Washington Correspondent William Shannon weighed in with a sharp and sober warning: "President Johnson is running what may be termed the rhetoric risk. He likes to promise everybody something and to dream aloud, admittedly more often in the language of the Snopes family than of Aristotle, about the wonderful future that is acoming. As a Texan and an heir to that state's neoPopulist traditions, he is a natural master of the America-is-agreat-big-wonderful-barbecue school...
Will L.B.J. be able to produce what he has promised? Shannon has his doubts. Johnson's "programs are designed to evade rather than confront the hard issues. He believes in consensus, not conflict. The barbecue school of politics is not based on any belief in redistributing wealth or disturbing anyone's existing privileges; rather, it presupposes there is enough meat, and gravy too, for everyone at the tables." Johnson's small-scale proposals on health, education and poverty are tied to a "neverending economic expansion," writes Shannon. If the economy falters or fails to expand very fast...