What’s the most non-boring idea you have heard recently?

I always love the way the founding fathers of information theory, Shannon, Wiener et al., defined information as the resolution of confusion. The amount of information in a message is defined by how much confusion it clears up for the receiver. If you don’t know whether I want beef or lamb for dinner, and I send the message L.A.M.B., it may look like four characters, but it actually only contains one bit of information, which can be compressed down to a 0 or 1. Another similar way of discussing how much information is in a message is how much it surprises the receiver. Maybe I am getting too old and/ or too grumpy, but I feel like a large percentage of what I read these days doesn’t resolve much confusion for me, surprise me, or inform me too much. And I think I am overly sensitive to this issue because I collect ideas. Where others curate collections of fine wines, high-end watches, vintage cars or crocodile-skin handbags, my favourite thing to collect is amazing ideas. Every now and then an idea/ concept/ framework/ way of thinking about things blows me away. One that springs to mind in the last few years is the idea of auto-tyranny by philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In the intimidatingly-titled “Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power" Han suggests that we think we live in a world of freedom in the modern, developed world. In fact, Han argues that whilst for most of history people lived in allo-tyrannies (being tyrannized by others), we now live in an auto-tyranny, in that we tyrannize ourselves – constantly feeling that we are not achieving enough in this world of opportunity. And we are better than others at tyrannizing ourselves. Fascinating. I also try to come up with my own new ideas that satisfy my desire for the non-boring. I was happy recently when I analogized generative AI to language teaching. When teaching a foreign language, we have to teach both accuracy and fluency. I would argue that generative AI is the first technology in history that prioritizes fluency over accuracy. That is one way of explaining GenAI’s hallucinations/ confabulations, and why they keep catching us out. What is the most non-boring idea you have heard recently? #unthink #unask #unlearn