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khafra comments on Open Thread: April 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Help me, LessWrong. I want to build a case for
These phrasings should mean the exact same thing. Correct me if they don't.
Elaboration: Most people readily agree that most information is good most of the time. I want to see if I can go all the way and build a convincing argument that all information is good all of the time, or as close to it as I can get. That misuse of information is problem about the misuser and not the information ("guns don't kill people"). Specific cases include: endangered species (DNA is best stored in living organisms), viruses (all three kinds), forbidden books, child pornography and other shocking information, free speech, Archive.org, The Rosetta Project, research on race.
Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.
One thing you may want to address is what you mean by "gather and preserve information." The maximum amount of information possible to know about the universe is presently stored and encoded as the universe. The information that's useful to us is reductions and simplifications of this information, which can only be stored by destroying some of the original set of information.
In other words, "information" in this case might be an unnatural category.
Yes. CannibalSmith's usage sounded to me somewhere indeterminately in between the information theoretic definition and the common meaning which is indistinct but similar to "knowledge." My request for clarification assumes the strictly information theoretic definition isn't quite what he wanted.
My mom complains I take things too literally. Now I know what she means. :)
Seriously though, I mean readable, usable, computable information. The kind which can conceivably turned into knowledge. I could also say, we want to lossly compress the Universe, like an mp3, with as good a ratio as possible.