Thoughts on Cognitive Filtering
I’m currently working on two main projects at the moment (both in stealth), but one is in information theory and the brain, and the second is in personal relationships. Serendipitously, it has gotten me to think about information entropy and how it relates with interpersonal relationships, which inspired this post. Information lies on a spectrum of being low-entropy or high-entropy. Take for example, this string of text: aaaaaa This information is low entropy because you can easily predict the next letter, which is likely just another a. This text, however, has slightly higher entropy: aabbcc It’s slightly harder to predict, but still doable. Meanwhile, this text has a very high entropy: 1gF!%sA It is impossible to predict. In a more realistic setting, a sentence like “The sky is blue” is low entropy. It’s something you could have predicted, because your mental model of the world is that the sky is, well, blue. Unfortunately, most conversations and ideas are low-entropy. For starters,