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Always Bet on Text (2014)

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Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#181
post #45
post #17

If we agree that a picture is worth 1000 words, then... Given the current state of information technology, I agree that we are most efficient at processing text. However, that can change pretty quickly. Storage mechanisms similar to DNA can make the difference between text and multimedia irrelevant. It will happen because nature already does that.

Storage hasnt really been the bottleneck for a long time. A terabyte stores a lot of pictures.

I am talking about efficient use of available space. A terabyte may store a lot of pictures, but if we can achieve the data density of DNA, we may be able to process (store, transmit, transform...) far more amount of data far more quickly. Then text vs multimedia will become irrelevant.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate how text is most powerful (in which aspect anyway? define powerful) and most effective (surely it isn't or text wouldn't be the prime example for stuff that's good to compress).

He would have to use words for that... Could you help him showing some image of "powerful" and "effective"?

Right after you provide an image that's as effective as the text of the First Amendment.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason human knowledge develops so fast is the existence of text. If we rely on visual in 3D we will be the same as other animals. Apparently now we are behaving badly since we are consuming videos and pictures rather than text. I believe text is superior because of its abstraction, when you read, you are creating alongside the author.

Re: history. I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples of this. But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing. History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as a peripheral media. It was mostly use…

> We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing.

This comes up a lot in Bible scholarship.

Many modern people assume the words of Jesus, for example, were lost to a game of telephone before being written down years later in the form we have today.

But conveying the teachers words with true fidelity to what he said was very important to a rabbi's students, and they had a culture and techniques to make sure they did this with high reliability.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#185

Apples and oranges. The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. Try to express that logo in text, English language and in all its details with 723 characters, so you are able to reproduce a pixel perfect representation. Not even possible with 4000 characters anyway. Don't bother. Text will be ambiguous, unless you describe every single detail. If the target is to communicate "Tw…

>Nothing of this is actually true, period. Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using something other than what amounts to a text file? If not maybe that's an even truer seal of irony.

> Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using something other than what amounts to a text file?

Could you kindly present me your comment without using all these inferior non-text technologies involved on my side to read it off my screen? That's the irony, if anything.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#186
There is a well known fact in the field of psychometrics: human general intelligence g can be modeled as two relatively independent sub-factors: verbal intelligence and spatial intelligence. Other sub-factors, if any, are way more speculative.

As a human being, it is quite possible to have verbal intelligence higher than spatial intelligence, and indeed I know some people with verbal tilt and some other people with spatial tilt. These people tend to think & approach problems differently, while having different strengths and weaknesses. Naturally, similar people cluster together, and some professions (e.g. lawyers, journalists, writers, programmers) are more amenable to verbally tilted persons, while other professions (mechanical engineering, airplane piloting, architecture) are amenable to spatially tilted persons.

Looking around via this lens, discerning cognitive styles inherent in design of the human experience is enlightening. One can see that our physical and social, educational environments and governing institutions are designed with one cognitive style in mind at the expense of the other: and this privilege goes to verbal cognitive style.

Let me offer a different perspective: to a person with higher spatial and weaker verbal cognition, this environment looks physically simplistic, tasteless, sometimes outright boring, often suffocatingly so. Utilitarian safety & simplicity prevailing over beauty and shape-being, denying the inhabitants possibilities of space meaningful by itself. Letters, words, strings of words are everywhere, starting with high-school where the recent historical trend of increasing verbalization of curriculum continues, and on to adult life where verbally intensive professions pay more and command significantly more power (note how in the aforementioned occupation list the second one contains less status-worthy & more specialized occupations). Limitless possibilities of rendered worlds on megapixel screens collapse into a flat-designed abstract hellscape of recursively composed words and menus. The brain of the child - a pinnacle of neuroplasticity - adapts, as relentless march of critical developmental periods continues, unnecessary white matter pathways wither away, while economically useful ones are potentiated and strengthened for the forthcoming endless competition with similar human beings, similarly shaped. The best and brightest in this game of words become lawyers and career politicians, movers and shakers of our world; but are they truly our best, and do they truly imagine the referents of their symbols ? Are we led by seeing or blind ?

Much could be said about benefits of verbal thinking, endless composability (to some, vacuous, denying interesting constrained structure) of syntax & grammar & semantics, and rightly so. Yet one wonders, which avenues of thought, of being, both alone and together as a people, were not taken. How a civlization of prevailing gestalt could look like ? Confronted with this state of affairs, one wonders, if "Always betting on text", pedal-to-the-metal, more-of-the-same is really going to bring us somewhere at all ?

If you, dear reader, have some latent spatial/geometrical imagination which was pushed away by economically profitable word manipulation engines that grew through you, maybe you too wonder about this question.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain text is simple, elegant and has open-standards - it traces its origins back to telegraph codes that we have been using for hundreds of years - and still forms the basis of most of the internet now. So I am inclined to agree with the statement "text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period".

Please elaborate how text is most powerful (in which aspect anyway? define powerful) and most effective (surely it isn't or text wouldn't be the prime example for stuff that's good to compress).

[deleted]

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#188

The gist of what he's saying is pretty sound, but he should have gone deeper. For a deeper argument on the importance of "text", the written word, exposition - I recommend reading Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death . People here are suggesting that images/video are superior, but there's the cliche, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Well, which thousand words? Do they convey the same thousand words to you as th…

You can teach someone to paint or take photos, with text. You can't teach someone to write with paintings, or with text-less video.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#189

Apples and oranges. The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. Try to express that logo in text, English language and in all its details with 723 characters, so you are able to reproduce a pixel perfect representation. Not even possible with 4000 characters anyway. Don't bother. Text will be ambiguous, unless you describe every single detail. If the target is to communicate "Tw…

Plain text is simple, elegant and has open-standards - it traces its origins back to telegraph codes that we have been using for hundreds of years - and still forms the basis of most of the internet now. So I am inclined to agree with the statement "text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period".

By that same argument/logic you might as well argue cave paintings are superior over text. It traces back probably over 50000 years and is still universal today and doesn't even require understanding of a specific language - and it still forms the basis of most of society now. (art, painting, photographs, graffiti, ...)

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#190

Apples and oranges. The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. Try to express that logo in text, English language and in all its details with 723 characters, so you are able to reproduce a pixel perfect representation. Not even possible with 4000 characters anyway. Don't bother. Text will be ambiguous, unless you describe every single detail. If the target is to communicate "Tw…

> The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. The article was written in 2014. Worth remembering when nitpicking the text of an article.

Do PNG files reduce in size over time?
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