Toby Ord on the two senses of how many bits a photograph can communicate
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-07
Philosopher Toby Ord discusses his short piece with Ryan Greenblatt and bubblingcreek about two distinct senses of "communicating information" via photography. A counterexample: photographing four Bitcoin seed phrases on paper clearly conveys 512 bits — more than 340 — under the common-sense meaning. Ord agrees there is a sense in which that is true, but notes you cannot communicate 512 freely chosen bits with a single photo; the debate contrasts everyday vs. controlled senses of information transfer, arguing one is neglected.
More from Research
- New tendon-based robotic hand designs trained with PPO to learn one-armed catch — _krishna_murthy · 2026-10-23
- Google QuantumAI and Kaggle launch $150K verifiable quantum circuit compilation competition — JFPuget · 2026-10-23
- Diffusion LLM bias rankings shift with sampling configs, persist after debiasing — Bollegala · 2026-10-23
- Aggregating lab tokenizers reveals ~994 tokens stable across Google, DeepSeek, Meta, Anthropic — kalomaze · 2026-10-23
- Researcher uses Grok to hunt LLM-driven UAE bot network on X with self-written prompts — FlorianGallwitz · 2026-10-23
- Dev converts Qwen3-0.6B into a MoE model: quality drops and no speed gain at this scale — Bayliner1980 · 2026-10-23