Signal-to-noise ratio: Difference between revisions

Signal-to-noise ratio (view source)

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 ::{{author|W. Edwards Deming}}
-At the foot of Deming’s fashionable quote, one can lay a great deal of responsibility for the dogmatic madness our age.
+If we accept that the information content of the universe, through all time and space is, if not exactly, then ''as good as'' infinite,<ref>This assumes there is not a finite end-point to the Universe; by no means settled cosmology, but hardly a rash assumption. And given how little we have of it, the universe’s total information content ''might as well be'' infinite, when compared to our finite collection of mortal data. Even the total, ungathered-by-mortal-hand, information content generated by the whole universe ''to date'', not even counting the unknowable future, is as good as infinite.</ref> and the data ''homo sapiens'' has collected or generated to the point of reading is necessarily finite, even if we’ve lost quite a lot of it along the way, then it follows that the total value of [[data]] in which W.Edwards Deming would have us trust is, mathematically, ''as good as nil''. ''[[There is no data from the future]]''.
-For if we accept the information content of the universe, through all time and space, is infinite,<ref>This assumes there is not a finite end-point to the Universe; by no means settled cosmology, but hardly a rash assumption. And given what we know, the universe’s total information content ''might as well be'' infinite, when compared to our finite collection of mortal data. Even the total, ungathered-by-mortal-hand, information content generated by the whole universe ''to date'', not even counting the unknowable future, is as good as infinite.</ref> and the data homo sapiens has collected or generated to the point of reading is finite — this is necessarily so, even if we’ve lost quite a lot of it along the way — then it follows that the total value of [[data]] in which Deming would have us trust is, mathematically, ''as good as nil''. ''[[There is no data from the future]]''.
+And that is before considering its quality. If 90% of all gathered data originates from the internet age,<ref>Eric Schmidt said something like this in 2011, and it sounds [https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2011/02/07/eric-schmidts-5-exabytes-quote-is-a-load-of-crap/ totally made up], but let’s run with it, hey?</ref> so a good portion is cat videos and hot takes on [[Twitter]] — so fairly ''shite'' data, even on its own terms. Have you ''read'' Twitter?<ref>[[Get off Twitter]], okay? For all of our sakes.</ref>
-And that is before considering the quality of the [[data]] we have managed to gather. If 90% of all data originates from the internet age,<ref>Eric Schmidt said something like this in 2011, and it sounds [https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2011/02/07/eric-schmidts-5-exabytes-quote-is-a-load-of-crap/ totally made up], but let’s run with it, hey?</ref> so a good portion is cat videos and hot takes on [[Twitter]] — so fairly ''shite'' data, even on its own terms. Have you ''read'' Twitter?
 But leave the banality of our age to one side — we don’t need it to make out the argument. It would hold even if every hot take on Twitter were an incandescent pearl of unique genius.