As school ends for the summer vacation in Finland, people typically sing a particular song ("suvivirsi" ~ "summer psalm"). The song is religious, which makes many people oppose the practice, but it's also a nostalgic tradition, which makes many people support the practice. And so, as one might expect, it's discussed every once in a while in e.g. mainstream newspapers with no end in sight.
As another opinion piece came out recently, a friend talked to me about it. He said something along the lines: "The people who write opinion pieces against the summer psalm are adults. Children see it differently". And what I interpreted was the subtext there was "You don't see children being against the summer psalm, but it's always the adults. Weird, huh?"
I thought this was obviously invalid: surely one shouldn't expect the opinion pieces to be written by children!
(I didn't say this out loud, though. I was pretty frustrated by what I thought was bizarre argumentation, but couldn't articulate my position in a snappy one-liner in the heat of the moment. So I instead resorted to the snappier - but still true - argument "when I was a kid I found singing the summer psalm uncomfortable".)
This is a situation where it would have been nice to have the concepts "kodo" and "din" be common knowledge. If the two different worlds are "adults dislike the summer psalm, but children don't mind it" and "both adults and children dislike the summer psalm", then you'd expect the opinion pieces to be written by adults in either case. It's not kodo, it's din.
I don't think this example is captured by the words "signal" and "noise" or the concept of signal-to-noise ratio. Even if I try to squint at it, describing my friend as focusing on noise seems confusing and counter-productive.
"Noise" suggests randomness, which is what it means when talking about transmission lines and radio reception and s/n ratios. The intention of "din" seems to be more "something that at first glance looks like evidence for a thing but on closer looking is seen to be not causally entangled with it", as in Olli Järviniemi's example. Kodo is what is truly entangled with the thing.
These are not things to be put in a ratio like the radio engineer's signal and noise, but to be separated from each other and the din dismissed as irrelevant to the question at hand.
Signal feels overloaded to me and kodo seems like a much more narrow concept.
"I've got pretty good cell signal." "The elite spend a lot of time virtue signalling." "The castaways used smoke signals to get rescued." "Careful configuration is required to prevent signal interference between network nodes." "I think there's a pretty good signal in the polling data." "Ted's not actually being mean to me, he's just counter-signalling."
I'd basically agree that kodo is a subcategory of signal, in the same way that chicken is a subcategory of bird. The narrower concept is useful. Kodo is closer to signal if you just think of it in the sense used by The Signal and the Noise, though there's at least a bit of distinction in my head. There are weaker and stronger signals, which make you more or less confident in (say) which candidate might win based on the poll. As contrast, a poll that was good kodo might tell you either the conservative party is going to win in a landslide or your poll sucks. "Polls say the conservative party is 60% to win" is a signal, but it isn't kodo.
Noise and din seem more like synonyms, though both are kind of defined by being opposites. Noise is everything not signal, din is everything not kodo? I kinda wish din didn't sound like an English word but figured it made more sense to write it up as it was in the lecture.
I mean this is a summary of a talk I didn't see so I want to reserve some judgement. But at the same time I just can't imagine being in a situation where I don't want to use the word signal because the other person might think I'm talking about cell signal, so instead I bust out "kodo"
In general, I think we should be pretty wary of taking basic ideas and dressing them up in fancy words. It serves no purpose other than in-group signaling.
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2I think context clues do usually make the difference between signal as in cell signal vs. kodo clear. I'm less confident that context will usually make the difference between signal as in signal and the noise vs. kodo clear. Most conversations I have with other people where I'd want to use it, I expect they won't have this concept and it's not worth pausing whatever conversation we were having to explain kodo.
(Like, prior to me writing this up I think there were maybe a hundred people in the world who'd heard these terms used this way, because there were maybe a hundred people who'd heard the lecture.)
A concept can still be useful in my own head even if the people I talk to don't have that concept. Affordance, update, modularity (especially in code), these are all ideas I don't talk about directly except with specialists but I have in my thoughts when it's relevant. And one way to get other people to have a concept is to give a talk on it, or to write an essay about it on LessWrong.
Take modularity in particular: at some point in a good Intro To Programming class someone should explain the idea of modular code and why you should try to make your functions neat and compartmentalized, once in a while when talking to another programmer one of you might say 'oh, I want to refactor this to be more modular', but when you're talking to your non-technical boss or client you probably don't want to use that word. Is modularity a basic idea? Maaaybe? Depends on your frame of reference I guess. Does it serve a purpose other than in-group signaling? Yes! A programmer who doesn't have the concept will write "worse"[1] code.
That doesn't make a convincing argument that this idea in particular is worth a jargon slot, but taking ideas and assigning specific words to them is useful.
- ^
Yes I'm asserting a broad and fuzzy quality of better or worse to code, I'm confident a jury of a dozen software engineers would back me up here.
So, are “kodo” and “din” just “‘signal’ (specifically as used in the phrase ‘signal to noise ratio’)” and “noise (for example, as used in the phrase ‘signal to noise ratio’)”, respectively?
Hmm, but you say:
Kodo is closer to signal if you just think of it in the sense used by The Signal and the Noise, though there’s at least a bit of distinction in my head. There are weaker and stronger signals, which make you more or less confident in (say) which candidate might win based on the poll. As contrast, a poll that was good kodo might tell you either the conservative party is going to win in a landslide or your poll sucks. “Polls say the conservative party is 60% to win” is a signal, but it isn’t kodo.
… but I don’t understand the distinction, or what “kodo” means, then. (The poll example is unenlightening; I can’t map the word as you are using it there to any concept I am aware of.)
It seems like the neologism is mostly capturing the meaning of signal from Shannon's information theory (which "signal and noise" points towards anyway), where you frame things by having yes/no questions you want to have answered and observations that answer your questions are signals and observations that do not are noise. So if you need to disambiguate, "signal (in the information-theoretic sense)" could be a way to say it.
Is there a known etymology for these? Also, what do people think of as the existing native-sounding pair closest in meaning to this pair?
My guess would be that “din” is an abstraction of English “din” as in “noise”, and “kodo” might be via Japanese “鼓動” (kodō) = “beating” (especially including for heartbeats).
Kodo here is definitely a reference to "Kōdō" (random Knuth). I believe Duncan has written in the past about taking up perfume/tasting comparison as a hobby, hasn't he?
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I got these words from a Duncan Sabien lecture and kept wanting to link to them. Since Duncan hasn’t written them up as an essay yet, I’m doing it with permission; I’ll update with a link to his version if he ever writes it. [Update: He wrote it. It should be free to read by early May.]
I think it’s traditional to say all mistakes are mine when writing up someone else’s ideas. I’m not that greedy though, so lets say I get half the mistakes for anything I misunderstood and Duncan can keep half the mistakes for anything he taught wrong. =P
Short version: Kodo is what would be different, and din is what would be the same.
I.
The world is real.
You’re in the world. It’s a certain way, and that’s true. You can perceive the world to some degree.
As I type this I’m sitting at my desk, and a water bottle is a bit to my left. It’s red, which I can tell because I can look at it with my eyes and see the colour. The water is cool, which I can tell by putting my hand against the side and feeling the temperature with my palm. The water bottle is a real physical object and my senses are at least somewhat connected to the real physical world.
I say all this as a prerequisite. If your position is that all is solipsistic imagination or that we can never really know how the universe is or something along that line, I'm not going to try to argue with you here. I'm just asserting the world is real and moving on.
II.
Kodo is what would be different.
It's the test, the discriminator. If you're not sure what world you're in, whether the water is hot or cold, whether the water bottle is red or blue, the kodo is the information that tells you the answer, or at least hints.
You reach out to touch the water bottle, and your hand feels hot; that sensation is kodo for the temperature of the water. If the water was cold, your hand would feel cold. You run a survey of a hundred random homes and half of them have televisions; the survey responses are kodo for whether most people have televisions. If basically nobody had TVs, you wouldn't have that many people saying they had TVs in the survey. You go to look at the haunted house after midnight, and see a glowing figure walking through walls; that's kodo for whether ghosts exist.
An important note: Kodo distinguishes what's going on. It rules some possibilities out. Even if a piece of kodo doesn't completely convince you of a conclusion, it narrows what might be happening.
Take the water bottle. It is possible that the bottle is very well insulated and also the bottle has been sitting in the sun. In that case, the outside of the water bottle might be warm, but the water inside is cold. Totally possible, totally consistent with the bottle feeling warm to my touch. I might say to you, "hey, the bottle feeling warm is kodo for the water being warm, the bottle feels warm, so the water is warm." Then you might think for a moment and say "wait, what if it's just well insulated?" Sure.
But the possible options have narrowed a lot here. We're not talking about some abstract probability of water temperature. We are instead ruling out a lot of specific ways the world could be. We're not talking about what subjectively sounds convincing to you. We're talking about what would have to be observably a particular way.
If you see a glowing figure walk through walls in the so-called haunted house, you still might not believe in ghosts. But you do have some kodo that rules out "nothing weird is going on, it's all rumours."
Seek kodo.
III.
Din is what would be the same.
Din does not discriminate. Din is the pointless question, the flood of noise and static in the signal. Din just happens either way, you know?
You ask a hostile foreign power if they assassinated your military commander. You ask a convicted embezzler if they have yet more money hidden away. You check the oven thermometer in the middle of baking dinner when asked if it's a hot day outside.
The answers are just Din. Empty noise, meaningless symbols, divorced from the real world. They'd say that anyway.
My water bottle has numbers written on it, measuring how much water is there. There's ounces and there's milliliters. (And yes, the scale is off. Pretend that part's right.) Based on that, am I American or Canadian?
Din! Canadians and Americans both use both in different situations, so it's not at all weird for a water bottle to show milliliters and ounces. It's not evidence for either of those really, it barely rules anything out other than I have a water bottle.
Many properties of the world are irrelevant to a question. I've got a deck of cards on my desk, is that din for whether I'm Canadian? Yes, Canadians and Americans both use pretty much the same poker decks. I've got a bright red bandanna on the desk, but that's also din for my nationality. My passport, now that's not just din.
Notice din.
IV.
Now words people speak, those are interesting.
Some people are careful and honest, being clear when talking about what they observed vs what they inferred, only telling you what they remember actually happening. Other people will fabricate details or entire events from whole cloth, whether because they don't track it carefully in their own head or out of a planned effort to deceive.
But kodo is about what gets ruled out.
If I tell you that last night I saw a ghost, this translucent green figure that glowed and walked through the living room door of the old haunted house down the street, no I'm not joking I swear it happened, then what world are you in?
Maybe I saw a ghost. Maybe I saw something that looked like a ghost but wasn't, a really good prank set up by someone else. Maybe I'm full of it and I spent last night dreaming up this story for some reason. Maybe the door just squeaked and the wind blew a curtain and I panicked and my brain filled in the rest. Maybe you go back there with me tomorrow night and you see the ghost too and it tells you it talked with your great grandfather in the afterlife, telling you things it should have no way of knowing.
Some people's words are better kodo. If they tell you they saw a ghost, many possibilities are erased. They wouldn't lie for no good reason.
Some people's words are basically din. If they tell you they saw a ghost, that doesn't even rule out much about what sentence will be next out of their mouth.
V.
Kodo is what would be different.
Din is what would be the same.
There is always at least a little kodo.
There is always at least a little din.
Separate the kodo from the din.