What if the audiences expectations are based on faulty beliefs? In particular some given topic might have a bunch of entrenched assumptions so that there are positions that can’t be expressed without violating expectations. In the very limit if the communication doesn’t violate expectations then it can’t convey information, the Shannon entropy is zero. There are probably multiple kinds of surprise here. The “easy” kind would be if nobody expected anybody to say “the sky is red”. The “hard” kind would be if one means the lowest wavelength kind of light with “the sky is blue”. Exhausting the easy kind can be done relatively effectively and straighforwardly. But when there are conceptual problems then the hard kind of thing is the main source of progress. If you encounter evidence that can’t be handled with your current conceptual palette you must come up with new concepts in order to accomodate reality. Those updates tend to be laboursome but they tend to be the valuable ones.
What if the audiences expectations are based on faulty beliefs? In particular some given topic might have a bunch of entrenched assumptions so that there are positions that can’t be expressed without violating expectations. In the very limit if the communication doesn’t violate expectations then it can’t convey information, the Shannon entropy is zero. There are probably multiple kinds of surprise here. The “easy” kind would be if nobody expected anybody to say “the sky is red”. The “hard” kind would be if one means the lowest wavelength kind of light with “the sky is blue”. Exhausting the easy kind can be done relatively effectively and straighforwardly. But when there are conceptual problems then the hard kind of thing is the main source of progress. If you encounter evidence that can’t be handled with your current conceptual palette you must come up with new concepts in order to accomodate reality. Those updates tend to be laboursome but they tend to be the valuable ones.