Society · Coordination
CommunicativeRedundancy
Redundancy in communication is inefficient for one message or interaction but efficient for a space in which many interactions keep taking place
Definition
Mechanism
Measured on a single exchange, saying more than strictly necessary wastes capacity: a sports report that calls the same player 'the England international', 'the 20-year-old' and 'Real Madrid's top scorer' repeats itself. Measured across the ongoing space of exchanges, the overlap pays: each variation reminds the reader of background facts, disambiguates through context, and gives PeripheralHitchhiking information a vehicle to travel on. In a cell, an apoptosis channel with less than one bit of ChannelCapacity wastes signal for one cell but smooths the response of the population. The value lies in overlapping, non-identical repetition, in line with MetaModularity, not in identical copies, which only guard against loss. Machine languages that demand one fixed reference per referent are efficient per message and poor at this.
Invariants
- Efficiency is judged at the level of the whole space of interactions, not one interaction
- The repetition overlaps but is not identical
- The benefit depends on interactions continuing over time
Risks
Failure modes
Stripping communication to the minimum per message and losing the context and peripheral information it carried
Equating it with identical backups, which add no new information
Adding repetition where the interaction is one-off, so the cost is never repaid
Relationships
Builds on
References
Infrastructure
The maximum rate at which information can be reliably transmitted through a channel, given its noise
Mind
A body plan that holds many overlapping but non-identical models of the same problem, ready to instantiate whichever fits
Unplanned but necessary information travels on top of regular primary communication
Nothing in this library builds on this pattern yet.