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Comment by glial

I felt like I finally understood Shannon entropy when I realized that it's a subjective quantity -- a property of the observer, not the observed.

The entropy of a variable X is the amount of information required to drive the observer's uncertainty about the value of X to zero. As a correlate, your uncertainty and mine about the value of the same variable X could be different. This is trivially true, as we could each have received different information that about X. H(X) should be H_{observer}(X), or even better, H_{observer, time}(X).

As clear as Shannon's work is in other respects, he glosses over this.

parent glial 2 years ago

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