Issue 7  April 27 2021

In 1948 Claude Shannon published his Mathematical theory of communication. This paper is cited as the beginning of what we now call information theory, the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information.

Dr. Shannon's research leads to a handful of axioms, two of which are as follows:

1. An event with probability 100% is perfectly unsurprising and yields no information.
2. The less probable an event is, the more surprising it is and the more information it yields.

Put those together and we have the concept "information is surprise". This topic came up during a recent podcast and has been on my mind ever since. The world today is an endless stream of data transmitted and received, most of which is what we call "noise". And we often talk about how to get a signal through the noise.

To me, the signal has meant action. For example, I don't want to receive an alert unless some action is required on my part. If no action is needed, don't send an alert, just log the data for review later.

When I start thinking about information, and surprise, it alters my views on data collection, curation, and consumption.

I see the current world, where every piece of data, every possible metric, is collected and analyzed. Everyone hoping to find gold with data mining, or find a signal through the noise using machine learning.

I also see a new world, where only information is collected and analyzed.

Both worlds are looking for insights, or answers to questions regarding root cause and such. But the current world results in the common scenario of providing an answer we already knew. And if we already know the answer, then there's no surprise, and thus no information exchanged. Just noise. And useless pie charts.

The new world, built only upon information, and surprise, leads to better answers. The new world leads to information being exchanged.

That's the end goal we should all work towards.