Thanks to @General_Effort@lemmy.world for the links!
Here’s a link to Caltech’s press release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior
Here’s a link to the actual paper (paywall): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
Here’s a link to a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
Because it’s a Techspot article, of course they deliberately confuse you as to what “bit” means to get views. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) seems like a good introduction to what “bit” actually means.
Which is exactly what bit means.
Which is not bits, but the equivalent 1 digit at base 10.
I have no idea how you think this changes anything about what a bit is?
The external storage data and shannon are both called bits, exactly because they’re both base 2. That does not mean they’re the same. As the article explains it, a shannon is like a question from 20 questions.
Wrong. They are called the same because they are fundamentally the same. That’s how you measure information.
In some contexts, one wants to make a difference between the theoretical information content and what is actually stored on a technical device. But that’s a fairly subtle thing.
A bit in the data sense is just an element of the set of booleans. A bit in the entropy sense is the amount of information revealed by an observation with two equally probable outcomes. These are not the same thing because the amount of information contained in a bit is not always equal to one bit of entropy. For example, if a boolean is known to be 0, then the amount of information it contains is 0 bits. If it is known that the boolean is equally 0 or 1, then the information content is 1 bit. It depends on the prior probability distribution.
In some contexts, a bit can refer to a boolean variable, a flag. In other contexts, it may refer to the voltage at a certain point, or any number of other things. But when you are talking about bits/s then it’s a measure of information.
Yes, but as you know, this implies that the information is already available. You can use that knowledge to create a compression algorithm, or to define a less redundant file format. That’s very practical.
We can also be a bit philosophical and ask: How much information does a backup contain? The answer could be: By definition, 0 bits. That’s not a useful answer, which implies a problem with the application of the definition.
A more interesting question might be: How much information does a file contain, that stores the first 1 million digits of the number π?
I don’t see how that can be a subtle difference. How is a bit of external storage data only subtly different from information content that tells the probability of the event occurring is ½?
It’s a bit like asking what is the difference between the letter “A” and ink on a page in the shape of the letter “A”. Of course, first one would have to explain how they are usually not different at all.
BTW, I don’t know what you mean by “external storage data”. The expression doesn’t make sense.
That is a fair criticism.
Did you actually read it?
Because it’s not:
Which is exactly what bit means.
Which is not bits, but the equivalent 1 digit at base 10.