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Comment by chisquared | Hacker News Reader

Skimmed through some of the chapters. Was disappointed to find no references to Shannon's theory of communication, or to some ideas about the economics of information (e.g. moral hazard, adverse selection).

That's probably just a function of my personal interests, though.

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I've not gone through all the chapters, but in Chapter 3 - Data, information, knowledge, Shannon's theory is mentioned [0].

>> Entropy is a measurable physical property of a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. For example, the sequence of letters aaaaa has low entropy, conceptually, as it is the same letter appearing multiple times; it could be abbreviated to just 5 a’s. In contrast, the sequence of letters bkawe has high entropy, with no apparent pattern, and no apparent way to abbreviate it without losing its content. Shannon’s view of information was thus as an amount of information, measured by the compressibility of some data.

[0]: https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/foundations-of-inf...

Yup, noted in my comment below [1]. Thanks for the pointer though!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26939479

No reference to algorithmic information theory either, or Kolmogorov. All the interesting aspects of information are missing.

Imagine the eager young minds' disappointment upon learning that, in fact, information theory has nothing at all to do with the thinly veiled radical feminist agenda the author has apparently substituted for the curriculum of the course.

Instead of skimming genius use the index.

Sorry, these websites-as-books are still foreign to me :)

There are indeed references to Shannon. Still nothing about the other stuff, though.

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