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Always bet on text (2014)

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Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#111

Post by JohnLocke4 »

smj-edison wrote: post #12

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…

I think the obvious thing to do here is to say "Always bet on symbolics".

What separates text from images is that text is symbolic while images are visceral or feelings based. In the same way, text comes in short when it comes to the feeling you get when seeing an image. Try to put in to text what you feel when you look at Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech or a crappy 0.5MB picture of your daughter taken on an iPhone 3. Hard isn't it? Visual and symbolic are not isomorphic systems.

Examples of symbolic systems like text are sheet music and Feynman diagrams. You would be hard pressed if you tried to convey even 2KB of sheet music in a book

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#112

Post by godelski »

inciampati wrote: post #87
godelski wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in any science should also make this argument clearer. Data as text is hard to read and communicate. Even explanations of results. But graphs? Those are worth a thousand words. They communicate so much so fast. There's also a lot of skill to doing this accurately and well, just as one can say about writing. A whole subfield of computer graphics is dedicated to data visualization because it's so useful. Includ…

It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.

I think you're reaching. Justifying the answer you want rather than the answer that is.

No, graphs do not need come from text. I've frequently hand generated graphs as my means of recording experimental output. This is a common method when high precision is not needed (because your uncertainty level is the size of your markers). But that's true for graphs in general anyways.

Importantly, graphs are better at conveying the relationship between data, rather than information about a single point. (something something - Poincaré ;)

Besides, plots aren't the only types of graphs. Try network graphs.

Besides, graphs aren't the only visual communication of data.

I'll give you an even more obvious one: CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret. So much so that everyone is going to retranslate it into a picture. Hell, I'll draw on paper before even pulling up the software and that's not uncommon.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#113

Post by godelski »

tsimionescu wrote: post #104
inciampati wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.

No, you do not need to, and will not generally be able to, describe everything that a graph conveys in text. Graphs can give you an intuitive understanding of the data that text would not be able to, simply by virtue of using other parts of the brain and requiring less short term memory. If a graph can be replaced with 5 pages of text, that doesn't mean that you get the same information from both - you're likely much…

A word is worth a thousand images. Wait...

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#114

Post by awesome_dude »

dwattttt wrote: post #105
awesome_dude wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, text wins hands down at sharing the ideas of one person, with many, across space and time. I can read the thoughts of a philosopher who lived on literally the other side of the world, several thousand years ago. I'm unsure of, but would love to know, any other medium capable of that

And what of histories great artists? You can take a walk through a gallery and see many things people wanted to express, reading the artists textual description of it won't invoke the same ideas in you.

You're right, and they do say a painting is worth a thousand words

My only counter would be - when you and I look at them do we get the same words (but I suppose you could also argue that for a book, poem, etc)

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#115

Post by jcgl »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #109

From an information theory perspective, "Always bet on text" is a plea for symbolic efficiency. It argues that while binary or visual formats might have higher bandwidth, they often have lower meaning-per-bit for the complex, abstract logic that runs civilization. Text is the most entropy-resistant, highly-compressible, and universally-decodable format we have ever invented.

This doesn’t track for me. How can text have lower bandwidth but higher meaning-per-bit? How does that jibe with entropy resistance (in an information theoretic sense)?

Text seems worse to me. First of all, binary encodings are a superset of text encodings. But less abstractly, binary enables content-transparent compression and error correction.

Like other commenters have pointed out, the downside of binary is needing sufficient tooling. Depending on the domain, that can indeed be a downside. But if that critique isn’t relevant for a given context, it’s extremely unlikely that plaintext (ASCII?) is superior.

Text seems more like the answer to a plea for lowest common denominator of tooling.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#116

Post by cricalix »

beej71 wrote: post #50
socketcluster wrote: post #9

I've also become something of a text maximalist. It is the natural meeting point in human-machine communication. The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency. You can store everything as a string; base64 for binary, JSON for data, HTML for layout, CSS for styling, SQL for queries... Nothing gets closer to the mythical silver-bullet that developers have been chasing since the birth of the industry.…

I've moved away from DOCish or PDF for storage to text (usually markdown) with Makefiles to build with Typst or whatever. Grep works, git likes it, and I can easily extract it to other formats. My old 1995 MS thesis was written in Lotus Word Pro and the last I looked, there was nothing to read it. (I could try Wine, perhaps. Or I could quickly OCR it from paper.) Anyway, I wish it were plain text!

I poked this - the 96 installer from Archive didn't play nice with wine. However, dosbox plus win3.11 and some ingmount commands worked just fine. So yes, you could export to plain text or similar.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#117

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #73
smj-edison wrote: post #12

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…

Working in any science should also make this argument clearer. Data as text is hard to read and communicate. Even explanations of results. But graphs? Those are worth a thousand words. They communicate so much so fast. There's also a lot of skill to doing this accurately and well, just as one can say about writing. A whole subfield of computer graphics is dedicated to data visualization because it's so useful. Includ…

[deleted]

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#118

Post by crvdgc »

> But let's hit the random button on wikipedia and pick a sentence, see if you can draw a picture to convey it, mm?

The inverse is also difficult. Pick a random 15 second movie clip, how to describe it using text without losing much of its essence? Or can one really port a random game into a text version? Can a pilot fly a plane with text-based instrument panel?

Text is not a superset of all communication media. They are just different.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#119

Post by groundzeros2015 »

smj-edison wrote: post #12

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…

The missing ingredient you mentioned is the coach. You can pay a private math tutor to watch you solve math and engineering problems and give you direction a long the way. Few families do that.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#120

Post by inciampati »

godelski wrote: post #112
inciampati wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.

I think you're reaching. Justifying the answer you want rather than the answer that is. No, graphs do not need come from text. I've frequently hand generated graphs as my means of recording experimental output. This is a common method when high precision is not needed (because your uncertainty level is the size of your markers). But that's true for graphs in general anyways. Importantly, graphs are better at conveyin…

> CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret.

Fascinating example for me. I do CAD... using text! My only experience with it is programmatic in openscad. We check the visualization, but only on output of the final product. For me it's dramatically easier to work with. That may be a personal defect but it's also consistent. Underneath the rendering is always data, which is text, markup, but strings of fundamental data.

And in science it's not a stretch at all that numbers come first. I'll argue you're reaching. Today no one is drawing their numbers from experiments directly on a graph. They record them digitally. In textual form typically, and then render them visually to obtain generic understanding. But also there, in the end, your conclusions (per tradition) need to be point estimates with error bounds expressible in concise textual terms. You may obtain them from looking at images but the hard truth is numerical, digital, textual.

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