Tim Harford: belief

Transcript context

…Claude Shannon — overrated or underrated? I think he’s still underrated. Unlike someone like Alan Turing, I think a lot of people still don’t know who Claude Shannon is. One of the remarkable things about Shannon — he wrote these two papers in information theory: one discussing the transmission of information and sharing that if you did it in the right way, you could always guarantee perfect transmission; one showing that you could apply Boolean logic to electrical circuits, and this is how machines are going to be thinking. Both of these papers are basically perfect. They create an entire subject. They answer every interesting question in that subject, and they close the book, and that’s really remarkable achievement. I think he’s underrated for that. I think he’s possibly also underrated by fans of Shannon, who are frustrated that he spent most of the second half of his life noodling around, building wearable computers, trying to cheat the casino at Las Vegas, and juggling, and sending in weird poems to journals, rather than actually analyzing things, and just seemed to behave in a very, very frustrating way, and never really settled down, and ride off the back of his fame. But I wonder whether that isn’t just part of it. You can’t have the brilliance without this person who’s constantly exploring. Somebody said that Shannon had this unbounded intellectual courage — he would just launch into projects that would terrify most people, with no knowledge of whether he would be able to solve the problem. But it struck me that the thing about Shannon — he was happy to do something and then just drop it — there’s no intellectual courage there if you don’t feel any compulsion to continue if something has served its purpose and you just stop. Tony Blair — overrated or underrated?…

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