---
title: "Information Has Six Imperfections and None Can Be Eliminated"
date: 2017-10-21T11:47
author: Julien Reszka
description: "Every edge in a reasoning cycle carries imperfect information. The six forms cannot be removed, only redistributed. Policy determines the redistribution."
keywords: ["AI", "engineering", "learning", "decision-making", "alignment"]
canonical: https://julienreszka.com/blog/information-has-six-imperfections-and-none-can-be-eliminated/
---

# Information Has Six Imperfections and None Can Be Eliminated

Every edge in a reasoning cycle carries imperfect information. The six forms cannot be removed, only redistributed. Policy determines the redistribution.

Every edge in a reasoning cycle carries imperfect information. This is not a failure of implementation. It is a structural property of any system that processes and emits information. The architecture models six irreducible forms.

Input imperfections (what corrupts information as it arrives):

- **Uncertainty**: the input is incomplete; which branch is true is unknown. Formal equivalent: entropy H.
- **Conflicts**: contradictory signals pull in incompatible directions; too much information with opposing magnitudes. Equivalent: KL divergence.
- **Noise**: the signal is present but buried in irrelevant variation; generalisation is hard. Equivalent: signal-to-noise ratio.

Output imperfections (what corrupts information as it is emitted):

- **Disorder**: the output lacks structure; elements are not organised into coherent relations. Equivalent: high Kolmogorov complexity.
- **Constraints**: the output is over-constrained; competing requirements limit what can be expressed. Equivalent: Lagrange multipliers.
- **Redundancy**: the output repeats itself; over-specified and poorly encoded. Equivalent: 1 - H/Hmax.

These six cannot be eliminated. They can only be redistributed around the cycle. Institutional policy is precisely the mechanism by which this redistribution is determined:

1. **Radical policy** (overfitting): suppresses noise and uncertainty by force, generating disorder and constraints downstream.
2. **Primitive policy** (underfitting): ignores imperfections, which accumulate until the system collapses.
3. **Moderate policy** (fitting): accepts a stable, bounded level of each imperfection: the constitutional equilibrium.

The institutionalisation consequences follow from which policy governs a domain:

- A radical policy produces totalitarianism: coercive over-constraint propagates into adjacent domains.
- A moderate policy produces constitutionalism: imperfections are acknowledged, distributed, and bounded.
- A primitive policy produces anarchism: unmanaged imperfections accumulate and cascade outward.

---

**Actionable insight:** Map each stage of your reasoning pipeline to one of the six imperfections: uncertainty, conflicts, noise, disorder, constraints, redundancy. Reducing one without tracking where it goes means it reappears downstream under a different name.

## Key figure

**6** — Forms of information imperfection: three corrupting input flows, three corrupting output flows

*Source: Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, 1948*

## Myth vs reality

**Myth:** Better algorithms eliminate information imperfections

**Reality:** No algorithm removes imperfection from a cycle. It redistributes it. Suppressing noise upstream generates disorder or constraints downstream. The total burden is conserved.

*Source: Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, 1948*