“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.”

— Hannah Arendt

Last update Aug. 21, 2025. History

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Hannah Arendt 85

Jewish-American political theorist 1906–1975

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Context: It is probably dangerous to use this theory of information in ﬁelds for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it. In psychology, at least in the psychology of communication, it seems to ﬁt with a fair approximation. When it occurs that the learnability of material is roughly proportional to the information content calculated | by the theory, I think it looks interesting. There may have to be modiﬁcations, of course. For example, I think that the human receiver of information gets more out of a message that is encoded into a broad vocabulary (an extensive set of symbols) and presented at a slow pace, than from a message, equal in information content, that is encoded into a restricted set of symbols and presented at a faster pace. Nevertheless, the elementary parts of the theory appear to be very useful. I say it may be dangerous to use them, but I don’t think the danger will scare us off.