Shannon–Weaver Model (Claude Shannon 1948; Warren Weaver 1949)

The engineering skeleton every later model reacts to: information source -> transmitter/encoder -> channel (+ noise source) -> receiver/decoder -> destination. Weaver's popularization added the three levels of communication problems: A technical (accuracy of symbols transmitted), B semantic (precision of meaning conveyed), C effectiveness (does the meaning change conduct).

The actual math — entropy, channel capacity, noise — lives at shannon-entropy; the diagram itself carries no meaning by design: "the semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem."

Transfer. Agent pipelines live almost entirely at Level A — tokens transmitted faithfully — and assume B and C follow for free. They don't. A perfectly decoded paragraph can be semantically empty (B fail) or read-then-ignored (C fail). And "noise" for agent content is not bit errors: it's the reader's competing tabs, prior slop fatigue, and distrust of machine text. Optimize for B and C; Level A has been solved for you.

Kin: models, schramm-model, shannon-entropy, redundancy, anti-mid