“Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant.”

Part One, Entropy, Randomness, Disorder, Uncertainty, p. 55
Fortune's Formula (2005)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant." by William Poundstone?

William Poundstone33

American writer 1955

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Part One, Entropy, Claude Shannon, p. 15
Fortune's Formula (2005)

“The real core of communication is what information theory's founder, Claude Shannon calls "meaning." And meaning is not covered in information theory.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Brace Yourself: The Five Heresies
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

“A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.”

Charles Lamb Last Essays of Elia

Poor Relations.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 29.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“Lack of comfort means we are on the threshold of new insights.”

Lawrence M. Krauss (1954) American physicist

“... the most important questions and insights and goals are unpredictable.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

email sent to David Brown, 1 January 2020, quoted in [Freeman Dyson - Science and Religion (151/157) (comments section), 27 July 2016, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwoVrSICaTA] (published by Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People)

“Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information' itself, nor even addressing the question of the meaning of the message.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 4, Counting Bits, The scientific measure of information, p. 28