Always Bet on Text (2014)

> assuming we treat speech/signing as natural phenomenon -- there are no human societies without it -- whereas textual capability has to be transmitted, taught, acquired

I’ve been watching videos of pets (dogs, cats) being “button trained”—being taught to use (primitive, non-syntactic) language by making associations between things/acts/emotional states and the pressing of one or another audio-playing buttons that has been placed on the floor.

It has very much driven home the point for me, that “spoken language” is actually not something inherent and instinctual to humans (or to any species); but rather is a technology. It’s just a technology that’s rather simple to learn, if you have the right underlying hardware acceleration (e.g. a cerebral cortex)—and, crucially, a teacher. For other intelligent mammals, apparently the teacher is the only component they’re missing!

Language is a technology that humans in particular find very intuitive—at least at a young age when our brains are malleable—but not one we inherently start with. We absorb it easily if we’re immersed in a society where everybody uses language from birth. But in situations where that’s not true (feral children, some very broken homes) we don’t.

In a world where every human being instantly had all entrained structure in their neocortex erased, such that we were “reduced” to being upright hairless apes with the capacity for language but no knowledge of it, I don’t think we’d just instantaneously come up with the idea of language and begin attempting to develop languages to communicate, the way modern people instantly try to develop a creole of the languages they do know, when stuck in a situation with people who share no common language with them.

The idea to associate concepts with specific mouth-noises—and to condition others to use those same mouth-noises for the same concepts, to facilitate transmission of thought—might randomly arise in a few people, but it’d need to catch on and spread from there, just like any other technology. It would either need to be observed and copied, or actively taught.

And I hypothesize that that is what happened (pre)historically: at some point, there were several memetic “waves” spreading increasingly-technologically-advanced (e.g. syntactic, expressive) forms of language across human populations with brains already structurally amenable to them. Of course, each wave would only be a struggle to the generation that pioneered it; the next generation, being immersed in that new, more-complex language form from birth, would find it similarly intuitive.

(This makes me wonder whether we’ve yet hit the “limits of linguistic expressiveness” for our current brain size, such that we’d need to unlimit e.g. average skull diameter at birth to let us get any fancier with language; or whether we’ve still got some, ah, “headroom” left.)

These are not jobs but positions of power; the assumption that success in securing them is indication of merit in the sense of producing best outcomes for society at large, or even this specific firm or department in isolation, amounts to just world fallacy borne out of common market delusions. In truth, communication-first leaders are only as good as the team under their command, that really understands the managed domain, is. And since this team is largely replenished by people of the same stock, vying for the same position of power, they are not very good.

What results from this process of distributed re-interpretation of vaguely-worded, likely not very coherent, buzzwordy policies is a strangely incoherent and characteristically apathetic environment. For an extreme example of this pattern, see a typical UN press release and its vanishingly small influence on the state of things.

If we ask a hypothetical about the possible outcome of, say, very high spatial intelligence nation-state leader, we enter wild speculation territory.

I could try: "An object of harmonious art, but in political, life-shaping domain. Some precisely specified spacetime volume of greatness you'd want to be a part of once you saw a glimpse of it, even if you cannot quite put it into words", i.e. "A place of participation in a great multi-scale-harmonious vision".

There’s a real ‘ceci n'est pas une pipe’ treachery-of-images philosophical trap here, of course.

If text’s so darn great, after all, why do you need to draw a picture of it before I can understand it?

Indeed, there are situations where you cannot convey your message using text.

One of the things I’ve learn doing e-commerce is that if you believe you can just use more text to compensate for short comings in you UX you’ll be very disappointed.

We had a subscription product, you where informed that you’d be sign up for a monthly charge seven times during checkout and people still complained. They just saw two prices and click on the lowest. No amount of text will fix people who are basically on auto-pilot.

00101010010100110101001... is text too, but I agree SVG is just machine description, human sees the rendered result in that context.