Always Bet on Text (2014)

I agree, as you say until you reach the point where newborns are already surrounded by it.

>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.

No teacher needed whatsoever quite often, but maybe so usually, so I can not say crucial.

>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.

The evolution of more expressive vocalizations might have been required along these lines for us to reach where we always thought modern man was to begin with.

I'll also add that well written prose has moved me (and many others) emotionally in more powerful ways than any photo ever has.

Your Great Depression era photo conveys emotions only because of the context around it - context I know primarily because of text. If I showed this photo to a relative of mine half way across the world, they would merely see an ordinary woman with two sleepy kids.

But that's true for text, too. The US just had a very major politicized event where two sides had two wildly different conclusions over what one man's words meant. And there's a grand legal tradition of taking one specific document and interpreting what its words mean and applying it to a plethora of situations. There's plenty of people that come to wildly different conclusions over what certain amendments do or do not mean.

Hell, look at literary analysis! You can give people a book like 1984, and some people will say in all confidence that it is explicitly anti-socialism, when the author said the literal opposite. And that's something with a supposedly clear ideological message, to say nothing of works with less concrete themes.

This argument is pretty trivially false.

By this logic, the best programming language is assembly, because it's the most general. Actually, writing opcodes directly might be more general, in case your assembler doesn't have translations for some undocumented opcodes. The best editor would be a hex editor. The best web browser would be netcat piped into a hex editor, as well. The best OS would be no OS at all (because OSes impose restrictions in order to make programming easier and safer). The best application, for any kind of application, would be an interpreter that would allow you to create your own, however you wanted.

Engineering is necessarily a tradeoff between generality and efficiency. Technology is largely used to make things more efficient, and so our tools always impose some constraints on the problem/solution space in order to be more efficient than not using that tool.

A common design pattern is a specialized fast-path and slower (but more general) fallback.

In addition, as many others have stated here: "the right tool for the right job". Videos, audio, pictures, and interactive tools will always be more efficient for certain problems. If your sole concern is generality, then yes, by all means, use text. However, this will almost never happen; your design space will almost always necessitate a tradeoff of generality with efficiency - in which case, pure plain text is rarely the solution.