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Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

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Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#161

Post by chiefalchemist »

FB is missing three significant differences. 1 - Consuming video is time consuming. There is no quick scan for key words etc. If you're locked in on video X there's no scrolling on, etc. Your experience, in a way, stops. 2 - Video is passive. Reading takes engagement. Those will effect the brain very differently. 3 - Video is not conversational. It's traditional top down broadcasting.

Sure FB might become more video but that doesn't mean it's going to result in the same attachment to the product, at least for adults.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#162

Post by kofejnik »

jsemrau wrote: post #160
kofejnik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first, I thought 'Yeah me too, text is so much more efficient', but then I realized something. Maybe it's only me, but for learning more complex things video lectures work wonders for me, probably because they force me to slow down and process information calmly and in order; while with text, I tend to hastily jump all over the place, skipping the more boring bits and missing important things.

Opposite anecdotal evidence. I am terrible in following video lectures. But listening to audio books works wonders.

not really opposite imho, the point is 'explained slowly and methodically', seeing professor's face is completely optional

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#163

Post by cheez »

kalleboo wrote: post #80

How much Facebook browsing is done discreetly in school, at work, in meetings, on public transport, when waiting for someone? Will video work in these situations? I doubt they'll be able to replace their current text with video. It sounds more to me like they're looking at the bigger ad dollars YouTube is getting and want to absorb their market. The only way for Facebook to grow now is to get out of the "friends and…

But they already have Instagram don't they?

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#164

Post by 8note »

sandworm101 wrote: post #146
gumby wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that suggests that once born, an individual could have all of their genes removed, and be perfectly fine, other than not being able to pass on traits to a new individual.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#165

Post by kwhitefoot »

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 there are no dialects in Finnish? I remember my Norwegian teacher telling me the same ludicrous thing 30 years ago when I moved to Norway.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#166

Post by 8note »

Tharkun wrote: post #113
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…

> 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.

meaning is a nice convention to signify that something works well for some use case.

like, you didn't intend to type anything, it was just a series random processes that resulted in some text, but by convention, it's nice to say that you meant to write something.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#167

Post by sandworm101 »

8note wrote: post #164
sandworm101 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that suggests that once born, an individual could have all of their genes removed, and be perfectly fine, other than not being able to pass on traits to a new individual.

Yes. Genes and DNA are not the same thing. DNA is a means of recording and passing along genes. And alien organism that doesn't use our system of DNA/RNA could still possess genes. So it is theoretically possible to remove all manifestations of genes and have the organism continue to function.

This is not very far fetched. Much of our DNA is used for a short time during development and then effectively turns off for the rest of our life. Taking that DNA away might go unnoticed.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#168

Post by abrie »

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…

This comment is a personal anecdote. People respond to text in different ways. But they respond to visual motion more predictably. That has been my observation over the course of a year while experimenting with writing an electronic book. The book began as an Android app; and when shown to an audience the general response was one of disinterest. They'd read a few lines and stop, then comment on the photos. Maybe this was because the book was bad, but to me it seemed people did not want to read a lot of text. Perhaps the content was boring? I don't know. In an attempt to promote the work, I generated an auto-scrolling screencast of the book --- which resulted in (slightly) more interest. Consequently I've shifted to converting the book from an Android app to an autoscrolling mp4. It's a work in progress, and I'm prone to unrealistic optimism, but maybe this is a step toward a format for future written works [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afXzziwURRU

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#169

Post by Gravityloss »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #165
Natanael_L wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 there are no dialects in Finnish? I remember my Norwegian teacher telling me the same ludicrous thing 30 years ago when I moved to Norway.

There are, like in most other places. What's usually written is the so called "general language". You can also speak that in a formal setting.

It's like in English, if you say "y'all" and write "ladies and gentlemen", you understand that those might mean roughly the same thing but are different words. It's not a spelling issue.

This is an important but hard to articulate distinction. Ask more if it's unclear...

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#170

Post by Gravityloss »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #159
Gravityloss wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English pronunciation writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste. For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating. Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.

Finding that common ground would mean switching from our current system of somewhat-arbitrary spelling to a different but very similar system of mostly-arbitrary spelling. It imposes the same memorization burden on everyone and the benefit is slightly more predictable pronunciation within each of a set of officially-blessed dialects. That ground gets lost over time regardless; there is a reason predictable pronunciat…

Good points, but I disagree. Decoding and encoding becomes a lot harder, if vowels change depending on consonants coming after them, or something else even further down the line. (I'm not a linguist.)

It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.

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