Equation 14 · Part 4 · The Bandwidth of Culture: Transmission Fidelity to 2100

Symbol s_t

\rho_t = \rho_h + (\rho_m - \rho_h)\, s_t, \qquad \rho_m < \rho_h

s_t

What this part means

the share of newly circulating content, at time t , that is machine-generated rather than human-originated.

Its job in the formula

$s_t$ is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

Full expressionSymbol s_tArticle meaning

Where the article explains it

where $\rho_h$ is ordinary human-to-human transmission fidelity, $\rho_m$ is the fidelity of a machine-mediated re-emission — empirically lower per the tail-collapse result above — and $s_t$ is the share of newly circulating content, at time t , that is machine-generated rather than human-originated.

The passage around this formula

…re-ingested rises: $\rho_t = \rho_h + (\rho_m - \rho_h)\, s_t, \qquad \rho_m < \rho_h$ . where $\rho_h$ is ordinary human-to-human transmission fidelity, $\rho_m$ is the fidelity of a machine-mediated re-emission — empirically lower per the tail-collapse result above — and $s_t$ is the share of newly circulating content, at time t , that is machine-generated rather than human-originated. This decomposition does one useful piece of work: it turns “will culture’s transmission fidelity fall this century” into the answerable, if still hard, empirical question of how $s_t$ …

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Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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