[FRIAM] hidden

[Steve Smith]

glen -
> I'd like to avoid your (more accurate) use of holography in talking about this "holographic principle". While the technical details of actual holography are interesting, it adds noise to the idea I'm offering. (Again, I don't believe this idea, myself. I'm offering it as a rewording of what I heard EricC say.) So, I'm offering an analogy to the Bekenstein bound or the holographic principle in physics. I probably should never have used that word "holographic". I'm regretting it, now.

sorry if I wet-noodled you here, not exactly my intention...

I understand/accept that, but am looking into the parts of the
metaphor/analogy/model that *are* apt.  I also admit that I forgot that
you don't subscribe to the idea yourself, but are rather trying to
acknowledge it for the sake of improved discussion.   The part I *think*
you want to preserve is perhaps is that of lossless dimension reduction,
and a part-whole relation (where any small part/sampling of the
whole-ogram yields *some* information about the whole target)?
> On 5/19/20 11:16 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> These are all examples of selecting or valuating transformations
>> (letter-scrambles and elisions) based on the relative entropy yielded in
>> a secondary lexicon?
> I haven't, yet, invoked entropy in my attempt to reconstruct privacy from the bare concept of hidden with which I started this thread. I did invoke it earlier, in other threads, because I *do* think it will apply with higher order forms of privacy. But for "privacy through obscurity" all we need is the combinatorial explosion.
And I think the corner of this I was trying to pry up was that
"obscurity" is relative.   If you don't know that I encoded my message
using a specific edition of the 1933 Berlin Phone Book which was
*hashed* by a specific mode of cutting away the binding and shuffling it
(precisely according to a particular algorithm (which for example, might
include first removing the fibonacci-numbered pages), then the apparent
entropy of my encrypted message is HUUUGE! but if YOU DO know those
"keys" then bam!  you have zero relative entropy.... you know
*precisely* what the *text* of my message contains, even if I may have
obscured it further by including idiomatic and anecdotal coding that is
shared (presumably only by the sender and the receiver).   While I don't
know this to be the case, the Native American code-talkers (in
particular the well known Navajo) could have added another layer of
obscurity to their communications by using idioms from their culture and
religion and maybe even personal relations.
>> thus something like entropy relative to the target domain of some model
>> or another?
> Not yet, no. You *could* argue that a particular target, like Frank, could be identified and attacked via the class inferred from that particularity. In principle, I think this is what therapy does. It's definitely what industrial espionage is about. Some cute girl moves into the apartment next to the young engineer with a newly minted yellow badge and she proceeds to *decrypt* the engineer. She would definitely use some conception of entropy relative to the "young engineer" domain.
>
> But we don't need that for privacy through obscurity.
Not to beg this issue much further, but I guess in your example, I was
thinking that the young engineers working at the quantum-time-tunneling
laboratory might well keep their secrets obscure from the cute girl
simply through the use of shared idioms (amongst the engineers) which
she is not privy to by virtue of not being a young man nor an
engineer.   Another type of obscurity?
>> And there IS an art to plausible ambiguity, [...]
> Yes. In an adversarial co-evolution, it's relatively easy to exploit privacy for some gain. And a skilled hacker will be able to eliminate implausible decoders based on implausible results they generate. But, like with the above, adversarial systems imply targets. And this lowest order privacy doesn't need that for its justification.
yes, a bridge beyond, if not too far, built of the pales that we went
beyond (to coin or abuse a sillygasm).   I do believe that
encryption/decryption (even as a sport?) is intrinsically adversarial
co-evolution.  However, I think it the context this discussion arose
from, perhaps what you are seeking/suggesting is the opposite (or a
complement to) of this.   I think we are perhaps discussing the
qualitative scatter-gather that happens as we have experiences,
differentiating and specializing language to the point of mutual
obscurity (tower of Babel allegory?).  I know that some of my
good-intentions to fill in blanks and stitch between disparate bits ends
up being effectively distracting and divisive (disruptive?).   I do
believe in coherence which leads me to want to tangent on the metaphor
of LASEing which of course would just muddy the aethers more.
>> And you aren't even invoking quantum computing, which throws a whole
>> other wrench into, no?
> Well, I did by implication. QC simply exploits time/space tradeoffs, at least for my purposes, here. And by "With enough time/resources, ..." and the "etc.",
I suppose I haven't yet accepted that QC is qualitatively the same as a
universal computer (archetypical von Neuman machine)...   or the
equivalence (by construction) of nDmState CA by n'Dm'State (where n'<n
and m'>m).  TANSTAAFL suggests that in space-time trades they
might/must/should-oughta be the same, but I don't think that's a done
deal yet?
>  I tried to imply QC along with all the other issues surrounding computational power limitations. We don't really need QC to puncture privacy through obscurity. Targeting will suffice. Frank can't be obscure if we can surveil him in particular ... like some psychodynamic stalker.

I apologize for being the tangenter that I apparently am... or apologize
for the effect of it on the conversation... BUT...  I think when it
comes to the adversarial co-evolution you were not (yet) talking about,
I think Alan Kay's "best way to predict the future is to invent it" is
part of the strategy of various flavors of con-men which is to plant a
tiny seed in the mark's head and then fertilize it and water it until it
becomes the mark's own idea about the future (hopes and fears).   One
way to come to a "common understanding" is to bully or manipulate others
into sharing your own (or some variant of it).

- Steve