Signal feels overloaded to me and kodo seems like a much more narrow concept.
“I’ve got pretty good cell signal.” “The elite spend a lot of time virtue signalling.” “The castaways used smoke signals to get rescued.” “Careful configuration is required to prevent signal interference between network nodes.” “I think there’s a pretty good signal in the polling data.” “Ted’s not actually being mean to me, he’s just counter-signalling.”
I’d basically agree that kodo is a subcategory of signal, in the same way that chicken is a subcategory of bird. The narrower concept is useful. Kodo is closer to signal if you just think of it in the sense used by The Signal and the Noise, though there’s at least a bit of distinction in my head. There are weaker and stronger signals, which make you more or less confident in (say) which candidate might win based on the poll. As contrast, a poll that was good kodo might tell you either the conservative party is going to win in a landslide or your poll sucks. “Polls say the conservative party is 60% to win” is a signal, but it isn’t kodo.
Noise and din seem more like synonyms, though both are kind of defined by being opposites. Noise is everything not signal, din is everything not kodo? I kinda wish din didn’t sound like an English word but figured it made more sense to write it up as it was in the lecture.
I mean this is a summary of a talk I didn’t see so I want to reserve some judgement. But at the same time I just can’t imagine being in a situation where I don’t want to use the word signal because the other person might think I’m talking about cell signal, so instead I bust out “kodo”
In general, I think we should be pretty wary of taking basic ideas and dressing them up in fancy words. It serves no purpose other than in-group signaling.
I think context clues do usually make the difference between signal as in cell signal vs. kodo clear. I’m less confident that context will usually make the difference between signal as in signal and the noise vs. kodo clear. Most conversations I have with other people where I’d want to use it, I expect they won’t have this concept and it’s not worth pausing whatever conversation we were having to explain kodo.
(Like, prior to me writing this up I think there were maybe a hundred people in the world who’d heard these terms used this way, because there were maybe a hundred people who’d heard the lecture.)
A concept can still be useful in my own head even if the people I talk to don’t have that concept. Affordance, update, modularity (especially in code), these are all ideas I don’t talk about directly except with specialists but I have in my thoughts when it’s relevant. And one way to get other people to have a concept is to give a talk on it, or to write an essay about it on LessWrong.
Take modularity in particular: at some point in a good Intro To Programming class someone should explain the idea of modular code and why you should try to make your functions neat and compartmentalized, once in a while when talking to another programmer one of you might say ‘oh, I want to refactor this to be more modular’, but when you’re talking to your non-technical boss or client you probably don’t want to use that word. Is modularity a basic idea? Maaaybe? Depends on your frame of reference I guess. Does it serve a purpose other than in-group signaling? Yes! A programmer who doesn’t have the concept will write “worse”[1] code.
That doesn’t make a convincing argument that this idea in particular is worth a jargon slot, but taking ideas and assigning specific words to them is useful.
So, are “kodo” and “din” just “‘signal’ (specifically as used in the phrase ‘signal to noise ratio’)” and “noise (for example, as used in the phrase ‘signal to noise ratio’)”, respectively?
Hmm, but you say:
Kodo is closer to signal if you just think of it in the sense used by The Signal and the Noise, though there’s at least a bit of distinction in my head. There are weaker and stronger signals, which make you more or less confident in (say) which candidate might win based on the poll. As contrast, a poll that was good kodo might tell you either the conservative party is going to win in a landslide or your poll sucks. “Polls say the conservative party is 60% to win” is a signal, but it isn’t kodo.
… but I don’t understand the distinction, or what “kodo” means, then. (The poll example is unenlightening; I can’t map the word as you are using it there to any concept I am aware of.)
It seems like the neologism is mostly capturing the meaning of signal from Shannon’s information theory (which “signal and noise” points towards anyway), where you frame things by having yes/no questions you want to have answered and observations that answer your questions are signals and observations that do not are noise. So if you need to disambiguate, “signal (in the information-theoretic sense)” could be a way to say it.
Signal feels overloaded to me and kodo seems like a much more narrow concept.
“I’ve got pretty good cell signal.” “The elite spend a lot of time virtue signalling.” “The castaways used smoke signals to get rescued.” “Careful configuration is required to prevent signal interference between network nodes.” “I think there’s a pretty good signal in the polling data.” “Ted’s not actually being mean to me, he’s just counter-signalling.”
I’d basically agree that kodo is a subcategory of signal, in the same way that chicken is a subcategory of bird. The narrower concept is useful. Kodo is closer to signal if you just think of it in the sense used by The Signal and the Noise, though there’s at least a bit of distinction in my head. There are weaker and stronger signals, which make you more or less confident in (say) which candidate might win based on the poll. As contrast, a poll that was good kodo might tell you either the conservative party is going to win in a landslide or your poll sucks. “Polls say the conservative party is 60% to win” is a signal, but it isn’t kodo.
Noise and din seem more like synonyms, though both are kind of defined by being opposites. Noise is everything not signal, din is everything not kodo? I kinda wish din didn’t sound like an English word but figured it made more sense to write it up as it was in the lecture.
I mean this is a summary of a talk I didn’t see so I want to reserve some judgement. But at the same time I just can’t imagine being in a situation where I don’t want to use the word signal because the other person might think I’m talking about cell signal, so instead I bust out “kodo”
In general, I think we should be pretty wary of taking basic ideas and dressing them up in fancy words. It serves no purpose other than in-group signaling.
I think context clues do usually make the difference between signal as in cell signal vs. kodo clear. I’m less confident that context will usually make the difference between signal as in signal and the noise vs. kodo clear. Most conversations I have with other people where I’d want to use it, I expect they won’t have this concept and it’s not worth pausing whatever conversation we were having to explain kodo.
(Like, prior to me writing this up I think there were maybe a hundred people in the world who’d heard these terms used this way, because there were maybe a hundred people who’d heard the lecture.)
A concept can still be useful in my own head even if the people I talk to don’t have that concept. Affordance, update, modularity (especially in code), these are all ideas I don’t talk about directly except with specialists but I have in my thoughts when it’s relevant. And one way to get other people to have a concept is to give a talk on it, or to write an essay about it on LessWrong.
Take modularity in particular: at some point in a good Intro To Programming class someone should explain the idea of modular code and why you should try to make your functions neat and compartmentalized, once in a while when talking to another programmer one of you might say ‘oh, I want to refactor this to be more modular’, but when you’re talking to your non-technical boss or client you probably don’t want to use that word. Is modularity a basic idea? Maaaybe? Depends on your frame of reference I guess. Does it serve a purpose other than in-group signaling? Yes! A programmer who doesn’t have the concept will write “worse”[1] code.
That doesn’t make a convincing argument that this idea in particular is worth a jargon slot, but taking ideas and assigning specific words to them is useful.
Yes I’m asserting a broad and fuzzy quality of better or worse to code, I’m confident a jury of a dozen software engineers would back me up here.
So, are “kodo” and “din” just “‘signal’ (specifically as used in the phrase ‘signal to noise ratio’)” and “noise (for example, as used in the phrase ‘signal to noise ratio’)”, respectively?
Hmm, but you say:
… but I don’t understand the distinction, or what “kodo” means, then. (The poll example is unenlightening; I can’t map the word as you are using it there to any concept I am aware of.)
It seems like the neologism is mostly capturing the meaning of signal from Shannon’s information theory (which “signal and noise” points towards anyway), where you frame things by having yes/no questions you want to have answered and observations that answer your questions are signals and observations that do not are noise. So if you need to disambiguate, “signal (in the information-theoretic sense)” could be a way to say it.