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Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

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Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#81

Post by chrisseaton »

sandworm101 wrote: post #76
gumby wrote: post #9

> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…

Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech. I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that e…

> I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read.

Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#82

Post by xorcist »

chrisseaton wrote: post #81
sandworm101 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech. I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that e…

> I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?

Newborns can't swim in the sense that they stay afloat. A baby will drown if dropped in water.

They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned.

It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#84

Post by muddi900 »

sly010 wrote: post #62

A lot of us here works with information for a living. Of course, we prefer the leaner, more information dense medium. Facebook is not a platform to communicate interesting ideas succinctly. I apologize for not coming up a better way of saying this, but Facebook is catering for the not-so-sophisticated. The majority of users probably can't scan/process text very fast. Facebook is TV. It wants to be TV.

Yep. TV was revolutionary for advertisements and marketing. The passive viewing makes us more susceptible to them. TV ad revenue is still 10 times the amount for online ads world wide.

I have always assumed that all social nedia want to be the new TV.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#85

Post by Hoasi »

sly010 wrote: post #62

A lot of us here works with information for a living. Of course, we prefer the leaner, more information dense medium. Facebook is not a platform to communicate interesting ideas succinctly. I apologize for not coming up a better way of saying this, but Facebook is catering for the not-so-sophisticated. The majority of users probably can't scan/process text very fast. Facebook is TV. It wants to be TV.

> Facebook is TV. It wants to be TV.

It's a great comparison. TV, in many ways is an obsolete medium, and yet it is still efficient and remains popular despite the advent of streaming and other media offering.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#86

Post by sbmassey »

To devils advocate, though, what if automatic transcripting of text from video actually worked reliably? You might then get many of the advantages of text in video form: ability to search, copy-paste, fast forward and backward while still seeing what is going on. You would still see the presenters ugly mouth flapping up and down, however, which might be thought a negative.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#87

Post by gumby »

superobserver wrote: post #61
gumby wrote: post #9

> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…

My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition, but there's practically nothing for me to go on other than look into how the deaf process textual representations independent of the kinesthetic and proprioception encodings of semantic features. Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather…

> My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition

The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic.

In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#89

Post by almost »

aout wrote: post #88

"Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language" That's a joke right ?

Deaf people are an obvious example. As are people dealing with content not in their native language. Accents can also be an issue.

And then there are many people who would simply prefer to read something over heating it. Is that really so hard to understand?

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#90

Post by dagw »

aout wrote: post #88

"Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language" That's a joke right ?

I can read faster than most people talk. With text I can go back and re-read the bits I'm having trouble understanding and skim over the stuff I already know. With text the is never a problem with hard to understand accents or people who mumble or speak softly. In fact, thinking about it, text is almost always better to deal with than spoken language.
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