The Human Use of Human Beings — Wiener (excerpt)

A short third-party commentary on Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), plus one Wiener quotation — clipped from a local reading app. Its subject is information and originality, and it explicitly notes that "today's LLMs corroborate" Wiener's point.

Provenance: this is secondary — a modern commentator's gloss containing a single quoted Wiener sentence, not Wiener's primary text. Treat the framing as the commentator's and only the quoted sentence as Wiener's. We still do not have Wiener's primary work in the wiki.

Summary

Two claims, ~75 years apart, fused:

1. Wiener's information-theoretic aesthetics — Wiener "makes a clear link from information theory to aesthetics, showing us that clichés literally contain less information than the innovative, heterodox, and idiosyncratic speech we associate with great artists." (i.e. predictable language is low-information; originality is high-information.)
2. Modern corroboration — the commentator notes the simple n-gram language models of Wiener's day were "too primitive to fully bear out this theory, but today's LLMs corroborate it perfectly."
3. Wiener's warning about purposeless communication (direct quote): "When there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of becoming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet." — a proto-critique of what we'd now call influencers / content-for-its-own-sake.

Key claims

• Cliché = low information. Predictable, conventional language literally carries less information than original expression. (Clichés Carry Less Information)
• LLMs make Wiener testable. Modern language models, by modelling probability over text, operationalize the cliché-vs-originality distinction Wiener could only assert.
• Purposeless communication degrades value. Communication produced for status rather than need loses communicative value ("priest of communication").

What this source does not do: it never discusses control, feedback, or steering. So despite being from the canonical cybernetics companion volume, it does not ground Communication and Control Are Intertwined (whose claim is the communication⇄control coupling). See that seed for the verdict.

Connections

• Clichés Carry Less Information — the concept this source introduces.
• Slop — Wiener's "cliché = low information" is a ~1950 antecedent of "visible sameness repeated ad nauseam."
• AI Commoditizes Expertise — the information-theoretic root of "demand for difference."
• What's Scarce When Execution Is Cheap — this source is the third pillar of that synthesis.
• Norbert Wiener — the figure quoted; primary works still unread.

Source

• Original: raw/The Human Use of Human Beings — Wiener (excerpt).md (clipped from a local reading app; not a public URL).
• Quoted work: Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950).