QS PRN

About meetings

“All meetings are about finalizing meeting protocols.”

Is there a something different from Claude Shannon’s law to describe the ratio between actual discourse and discussions about the discourse? For instance, the time spent discussing meeting procedures rather than getting on with it. It’s different from noise.

See pp. 28-32 of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, United Stated War Department, Strategic Services Unit. 

Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Explained

Claude Shannon first proposed the information theory in 1948. The goal was to find the fundamental limits of communication operations and signal processing through an operation like data compression. It is a theory that has been extrapolated into thermal physics, quantum computing, linguistics, and even plagiarism detection. 

There is this law called Hofstadter's Law which says it always takes longer than you think it's going to take. Even when you think it's going to take a long time. Even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account. 

Currently reading countless scholarly articles, peer-reviewed journals, and books. Many of them discuss the nuances between theory and practice.

My thinking: the distinction between theory and practice is a wonderfully descriptive metaphor for life.

"Measure twice—cut once" works in theory, but...

...in theory, everything works. In practice, things fall apart. And, then it becomes a cycle. Practice sometimes fails. When it does, we theorize.

Measure three times. 

Cut twice. 

Return to Home Depot.

We ask questions to understand outcomes and clarify. Sometimes, those questions are framed in the simplest terms. 

Standing in the lumber aisle at Home Depot, with the question "What went wrong?" begging for an answer. Eventually, if we ask enough questions, or the right questions, we arrive an new theories...that are put back into practice.