Essay 2

Essay 2: Signal to Noise Ratio

When I was five years old my family moved to Japan for a few years. I had never heard anyone speaking another language and, when I heard some speaking Japanese, it sounded to me like random noise. I thought (remember I was five years old) that you could make any series of random noises and it would mean something to somebody who spoke Japanese. Yes, I do realize how silly that was. But hang on. Amazing insights come from the most unexpected places.

You might ask if I thought the same about people who spoke other languages. In fact, nothing remotely like that ever occurred to me. At five years old I did not have that kind of probing intellect.  And, as an aside, I wonder what amazing questions I am not asking now that will seem obvious in the future. Nonetheless, there is an important point to be made now that I have developed cognitive skills of abstracting and analogy.

When you don't know enough about a phenomenon you cannot separate the signal from the noise. This requires a little explanation. The signal versus noise dichotomy comes from the transmission of information. Think of getting bad reception on the radio or on the TV. The signal is what you are supposed to receive. The noise is whatever interferes with it. Another very similar situation is what you experience when you are at a party or in a noisy restaurant. You are trying to talk to the person next to you but both of you have a hard time hearing what the other one is saying (signal) because of all the background noise. What they are saying is the signal and the background hubbub is the noise. This is particularly a problem if you do not hear well and/or wear a hearing aid. Hearing aids become more expensive as they do a better job of handling the signal to noise problem.

Perhaps you were trying to talk to someone with an accent, or worse yet someone with an accent wearing a face mask. If the accent is mild enough, you may be able to understand them (lots of signal not much noise). If their accent is very heavy the signal to noise ratio will be lower and you might have trouble hearing them. The higher the signal to noise ratio, the easier it is to interpret the signal correctly.

Now let’s consider a slightly different situation. You have an appliance that makes an odd noise now and then. If you are not familiar with the appliance, it is just noise. However, as you become more familiar with the appliance, you realize that the noise means something. Perhaps it is a washing machine switching cycles. Or maybe it is your refrigerator dumping ice in the ice tray. This ties back to the initial point that unfamiliar sounds are just noise. Once you become familiar with them, they are meaningful sounds.

Let’s dig a little deeper into noises becoming meaningful sound.

You are again at a noisy party talking with two friends whom we will call Good Buddy (who you know well) and New Friend (whom you have just met). Both speak clearly. The drinks are flowing and the three of you are arguing politics and one upping each other in sports and conquests. All three of you are jolly and joking around. You know Good Buddy well. So, whatever he says, you have a pretty good idea what he really means. You don’t know New Friend very well. So, it is hard for you to sort out what he means and what he doesn’t mean. In this case, the context and knowledge of the person makes it easier to separate signal from noise.

Now, to get to the point. There are many reasons why the country is so divided. But the reason why it only seems to get worse is the low signal to noise ratio of the information that travels back and forth. Each side simply does not understand the other, nor do they have any desire to.  They don’t understand the context. And, in many cases, they don’t understand the language either because words mean different things depending on which side is using them. With such a low signal to noise ratio we tend to fill in the meanings with biases we have about what those people are like. The less you understand the context of a message the more likely you are to misinterpret its contents and meaning. So, when people ask - “what do we need to do to get past this divisiveness?” - the answer is stop beating each other over the head with counterproductive, low signal to noise ratio rantings, and try to understand each other a little better.

This essay is 800 words. And the recording is about 6 minutes long.

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