Improving the Signal to Noise Ratio - Revisited

Additional thoughts about signals and noise that have been rattling around in my brain since first posting on this topic.

At the risk of becoming too ethereal about all this, before there is signal and before there is noise, there is data. Cold, harsh, cruelly indifferent data. It is after raw data encounters some sort of filter or boundary, something that triggers a calculation to evaluate what that data means or whether it is relevant to whomever is on the other side of the filter, that it begins to be characterized as "signal" or "noise."

Since we're talking about humans in this series of posts, that filter is an amazingly complex system built from both physiological and psychological elements. The small amount of physical data that hits our senses and actually makes it to our brains is then filtered by beliefs, values, biases, attitudes, emotions, and those pesky unicorns that can't seem to stop talking while I'm trying to think! It's after all this processing that data has now been sorted according to "signal" (what's relevant) and "noise" (what's irrelevant) for any particular individual. Our individual systems of filters impart value judgments on the data such that each of us, essentially, creates "signal" and "noise" from the raw data.