Re:The Bandwagon – Claude Shannon (1956) [pdf]
by Isamu on Thursday February 15, 2018 @05:31PM
(#16388368)
Thing is, reasonably smart people fall for this same mistake over and over.
I think Claude hits on the issue here - it is the general unwillingness to go back to the actual math and work through the narrowness of its implications.
Instead we start with a popular prose explanation and then argue our points from our understanding of that.
We barely notice when we are using the ambiguity and wiggle room in the prose explanation to argue something that is unsupported by the math.
Basically only the most generic points that you can make about any new technology (e.g. this will not solve every single problem, this is commonly misunderstood and misapplied) will still make sense. We should focus our attention on the specific claims made about the specific new technology being critiqued, rather than the things someone can always say.
(This observation is actually an application of information theory - if the points being made are 100% predictable then they contribute no negentropy :)