Facebook is wrong, text is deathless • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#141

Post by collinmanderson » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

mrob wrote: post #78

Theodores wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script. 'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the pag…

Television is always slow paced, because it has to be comprehensible to people with a wide variety of language skills. Youtube, and most other video player software, has a speed setting with pitch correction. I watch everything at 1.5x speed which brings standard TV slow pacing up to natural fast-paced conversation speed. The majority of people here should have no problems understanding 1.5x speed. I don't watch live…

I use 2x speed for YouTube videos. It takes some practice, but you can generally pick up almost all of what was said.

Other elements can be sped up entering this into the javascript console:

document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 2

(There are also browser extensions that can do the same thing.)

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#142

Post by gumby » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 6:49 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #130

gumby wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 --…

> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize. They ar…

My point was not to claim that they're all unique, simply that they are all learnable.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#143

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 6:50 PM UTC

Natanael_L wrote: post #137

thaumasiotes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is. What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have sym…

So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language. The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.

> So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish.

Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#144

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #142

thaumasiotes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize. They ar…

My point was not to claim that they're all unique, simply that they are all learnable.

They're not all learnable. The common character 赢 is infamous -- among Chinese in China -- for being difficult to remember. And there are much worse ones.

What do you mean by "learnable"?

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#145

Post by pixelmonkey » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 6:55 PM UTC

It's interesting to consider how painful a "video-only Wikipedia" would be to use. If the point is to distract, then video is certainly at an advantage. If the point is to communicate or inform, then certainly text is the winner.

I guess that explains FB's hope for a rise of video content.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#146

Post by sandworm101 » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #138

sandworm101 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Evolution is not random. Mutation may be random, but feature selection is based on a rule. (2) There is a goal: species survival. (3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).

Species survival? Gene reproduction you mean. The organism is simply a way for the gene to propagate itself. Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

I disagree with Dawkins. If genes were the unit for evolution, we wouldn't exists. We would all just be bacteria spewing out copies of genes, with the planet buried in a pile of tiny protein chains. Genes are the servants of the species. They are a tool used by species to pass on traits, or even to acquire traits from other species. Genes are inert absent a species using them.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#147

Post by tremon » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

Johnny555 wrote: post #120

Tharkun wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> structures meant for "Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.

I think pretty much everything in your body is specialized and is "meant" for something. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to get your heart to replace your pancreas or kidneys. And you can't replace your lungs with brain tissue. Sure, doctors can transplant a toe to replace a thumb or a heart blood vessel with a vein from a leg with great success, but it's doing pretty much the same function, just in a di…

you can't replace your lungs with brain tissue

No, but the brain can replace brain tissue for one task with brain tissue for another task. It's called neuroplasticity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity#Treatment_of_b...

I agree with the GP, if there's one characterization that applies to the brain, it's "versatile".

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#148

Post by adrianratnapala » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 7:17 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #130

gumby wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 --…

> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize. They ar…

"Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#149

Post by tremon » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 7:21 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #123

thaumasiotes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck". Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.

>> There was no point at which brains stopped evolving. Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.

More like five thousand years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A#Chronology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_script#History

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#150

Post by tremon » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #59

Theodores wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script. 'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the pag…

Yeah I did a few " in 60 seconds" videos and the two lessons I learned from that? (1) They take hours and hours and hours of work to make. (2) Your script for the video must not contain more than 50 words, so you can say very little. (The above comment is 49 words)

I read the above comment in less than ten seconds.