Entry 42 of 44
Noise
noise — uproar, brawl; perhaps nausea or noxia (harm)
Old French / Latin
From Old French noise: din, disturbance, brawl. Origin disputed — possibly Latin nausea (seasickness, disgust) or noxia (harm). In twentieth-century signal processing: the unwanted component of a transmission. Root concept: what interferes with the message you meant to send.
Established meaning
In information theory, noise is defined relative to a chosen signal. Change the definition of the message and yesterday's noise becomes the message. 'Noise reduction' is therefore never a neutral hygiene. It is a decision about what is allowed to count.
AI industry deployment
OpenAI reported an 84% reduction in 'alert noise' alongside the 11,353 findings. Noise is the residue the detector is trained to discard. False positives, over-reported severity, the knock that does not match the rule — all eligible to be named noise and thrown away.
Semantic gap
The right to name the residue
Noise is what the receiver refuses to hear. The word licenses deletion of whatever fails the detector. If the residue is a person, a pattern of extraction, or an opening the company would rather not treat as signal, calling it noise is not measurement. It is deafness with a metric attached.