Hello, everyone. Welcome to the March 26th, S.B. Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Various things come to mind whenever I start the intro for the AMA, because when I do an intro for a regular episode of Mindscape, I can just talk about what we're going to talk about in the episode.

But the AMAs cover everything, so I

sort of randomly pick things, sometimes affected by the state of the world. The state of the world right

now is pretty bad in various ways, as I am saying these words into the microphone. So instead of

talking about that, I thought I would just mention one of the various things on my mind

from a kind of research point of view. I don't like to talk too much about the research that I'm

doing that's ongoing because when research is in progress, you never know when it's going to

end up and you say one thing and then a month later it turns into something else. But we're close to finishing

a paper that I'm a co-author on. It's actually a big team of eight people led by Fernando

Rosas at Sussex. And it's kind of a review article more than an original research article,

but it's about what information means, the concept of information,

because information theory, the use of information is very common.

It's a hot topic in various circles, but it means different things in different contexts.

So we thought it would be useful to clarify that.

So under Fernando's guidance, we are identifying basically four different faces of information.

The engineering face where you talk about how information is contained in messages that you communicate with,

and you want to do that effectively in the good old Claude Shannon way of thinking about things.

But there's also a statistical face where

you're not thinking about messages necessarily, but just kind of like the theory of information

to study the dependence or interdependence of many different variables that you can use to

assess the organization of systems or something like that.

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