@naomarik has the right of it, it seems to me. Any "ambassador" is just more data, and would, by his logic, require further ambassadors, and so on.

i feel like we're missing something, however, since i can't believe that Alan would be unaware of such a gaping hole in his logic

Yeah

i think the problem is that rich says data == information, while alan considers data to be just noise

however, i do think that data only becomes information when you can interpret it

for example, projects like SETI are a perfect example how valuable data is: you have a lot of data, but as long as you cannot interpret it, you cannot derive any information from it

i do however agree that alan was just trolling when he said "data is a bad idea"

i thought it might have been trolling until i found his other comments below

well, more of a "thought experiment" than trolling

So David Lewis argued (treating his argument very casually here) that human linguistic acts get meaning essentially as a tool of coordination --- you can interpret my words only in view of some assumptions (like that I take them to represent true facts about the world) that allow us to coordinate our behavior. (See also Donald Davidson.) I wonder if there might be similar arguments for computational data---that which confers meaning on data is whatever allows other systems, and/or humans, to actually cooperate using it

(My philosophy of language is very very rusty though)

i think you're hinting at the difference between information and exformation, @gowder ... information is all that is in your message, exformation is all that allows others to correctly interpret your message. for example, if you look at this example: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/14/exclamation/ you see a correspondence in which a publisher asks a writer ?, and the writer responds with !. without any additional exformation (for example, knowing the previous exchanges between them), it is useless.

anyway, i think this whole discussion between alan and rich is just a misunderstanding about semantics. they simply don't agree on the definition of data, which is not that interesting a discussion to have, imho.

http://www.luna-lang.org/

that looks like an interesting language