The computer keypad is mightier than the sword?

I guess Amnesty is predicated upon the power of the pen - and now the computer keypad. (And I'm posting this here, of course, because these are all tools of information.)

This also gives me an excuse to plug a current Amensty campaign say no to 42 days

PS. As I said previously, partial quotations are a crime against context, and the context of the original is significant here:

True, This! -
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! - itself a nothing! -
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! - Take away the sword -
States can be saved without it!

From Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1839

Wise words of Solomonoff

I've been reading some of the work of Ray Solomonoff, having come across him in the context of Kolmogorov complexity/algorithmic information, and I like this (from The Discovery of Algorithmic Probability, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 55, 73-88 (1997)):

From Freud I got the idea of the unconscious mind: that
there were things going on in one's brain that one did not
have direct access to. Poincaré, made it clear that much of
his serious problem solving occurred in his subconscious,
and I felt this was very common in problem solving of all
kinds in the sciences and the arts.

This view was one important reason for my later rejection
of "expert systems" as a significant step toward artificial
intelligence. Expert systems were (at best) expressions of
peoples' conscious thought, which was, I felt, a very small
fraction of human problem solving activity.

Other implications: Memory is what you invent to explain
the things that you find in your head. Over the years, the
"facts" in this paper will be gradually revised as I reread my
research notes.

Explanations that people give for their own behavior are
not to be taken too seriously - including discussions in this
paper.

Financial crisis

I don't know I've anything significant to say about it, except to make the obvious point that money is information. It always has been, but more than ever it's obvious today. Money is numbers on spreadsheets and databases - bits stored in computer memory.

And, therefore, understanding money requires understanding information.

Dretske's definition of knowledge: and atoms

Dretske (Knowledge and the flow of information, CLSI 1999) page 86

K knows that s is F = K's belief that s is F is caused (or causally sustained) by the information that s is F.

Dretske argues that this is a better definition of knowledge than the 'traditional'

Knowledge is justified true belief

You have to take Dretske's definition together with his definition of information.

Consider the atomic theory of matter. Now, in what follows, you have to accept all sorts of 'suspension of skepticism', and it really needs reams of footnotes and caveats, but I think it does provide a valuable insight.

Did Democritus know that matter is structured into atoms?

Democritus did NOT know, on either definition. Although the belief was true, it was not justified because he didn't have any (modern, scientific) evidence. Similarly, Democritus's belief was not caused by the information that matter is structured into atoms

Did Rutherford know that matter is structured into atoms?

Yes, on both definitions. The belief was true, and it was justified by the experimental evidence - which was the information from his experiment.

Did a student of Democritus know that matter is structured into atoms

This I think is the key one, because I think on the 'justified true belief' a student of Democritus did know. That is, if we are going to allow anyone to learn anything 'second hand', from a teacher, then we must allow the possibility that a student of Democtritus is justified in believing his teacher. But, he does not know anything of the sort in Dretske's definition, because he did not receive the information that matter is structured into atoms.

Do I know that matter is structured into atoms?

Well, yes, I think I do know that, on both definitions. Except, of course, that anyone who knows me knows that I'm a skeptic of all knowledge (especially, dogmatic scientific statement), but I did say above that there were all sorts of caveats and footnotes needed, and Dretseke does discuss the position of the skeptic

Magna Carta

What is the significance of the Magna Carta, and where does it (the significance) come from? And especially the famous clauses (still valid today, though thought by some to be under threat in the name of national security):

(39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
(40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

72 words, 361 bytes (zips to 330), and more than* 800 years of context.
* because the context that led up to the granting of it in 1215 is as much part of its context as what happened since then.

(The full document, from the translation on the British Library site, is 4,537 words = 25,078 bytes, zips to 9,229 bytes.)

The ozone hole - information and data

In the New Scientist, an article about how NASA failed to spot the ozone hole.

The story has lots of strands, but picking out one element:

According to Pawan Bhartia, who was processing the satellite data [what the computer software collecting the data] did was "flag it up" - identifying it as unreliable. The computer, he told New Scientist, then substituted "fill values" that it thought more likely. The effect was [...] the "unreliable" data was buried and the researchers had no reason to think anything was amiss.

One of the standard things my children have been taught at school - one the things they'll get marks in the course-work for - is recognising spurious data points in graphs that you should disregard. Usually that's right, of course ("of course"? or "I suppose"?), but also risks throwing out the most important data - the data that actually gives the most information. Someone once told me that among the data that Millikan found, and disregarded, in his wonderful oil-drop experiment were some measurements that returned a value of 1/3 that of the charge of an electron - ie the charge of a quark! I don't think anyone seriously believes he'd isolated a quark (my understanding is that it isn't possible), but wouldn't that have been nice!

Dretske, and Schrödinger's cat

Dretske p69

It is silly, of course, to think of s's probably being B as itself a condition of s that we could receive information about, as something that could have a conditional probability of 1 and that therefore qualify as the informational content of a signal.

But maybe it would not be silly if s were a quantum mechanical system. We could receive the information that Schrödinger's cat is probably dead, and that could indeed be something that could have a conditional probability of 1?

("The King is probably dead: long live the King!" Where was that from? I've feeling it was in Blackadder, or did I imagine it?)