Signal and Noise

Signal is the pattern that carries meaning. Noise is everything that interferes with its transmission — the static on the line, the distortion in the channel, the randomness that corrupts the pattern. Shannon formalized the distinction in 1948 with a theorem so elegant it barely seems to need proving: the capacity of any channel to transmit information is finite, and that capacity is reduced by the noise the channel introduces. The art of communication engineering is the art of maximizing the ratio of signal to noise within the constraints of the channel. Wiener extended the framework into a moral register: an amplifier carries whatever signal you feed it, noise or pattern, carelessness or care. The question at the center of Segal's Orange Pill — 'Are you worth amplifying?' — is the question of what signal-to-noise ratio you bring to the human-machine loop.