Is a photo only 42 bits of information? Ord and Greenblatt debate compression of reality
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-07
Responding to Toby Ord's claim that a photograph carries only 42 bytes of information, Ryan Greenblatt argues that 'pointing into our universe' via time and space is cheating: allow the same for text and you can represent extremely long environment-generated sequences with very few bytes.
Ord concedes that under such a scheme only a tiny fraction of gibberish long sequences truly carry small information. A high-quality debate on information theory and the compressibility of the real world.
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