Equation 17 · The Bandwidth of Culture: Transmission Fidelity to 2100
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
the share of newly circulating content, at time t , that is machine-generated rather than human-originated. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
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Symbol s_t
the share of newly circulating content, at time t , that is machine-generated rather than human-originated.
subscript
The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.
How to interpret it
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What the article says around this equation
where is ordinary human-to-human transmission fidelity, is the fidelity of a machine-mediated re-emission — empirically lower per the tail-collapse result above — and 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 moves, and it is that question the scenarios below are actually scenarios about.
For background, read the article’s source list.
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