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Always Bet on Text (2014)

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Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#301

Post by LordDragonfang »

BeetleB wrote: post #299
LordDragonfang wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also very common to have multiple people conclude very different things from a photo. 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 p…

The ideological message in 1984 is anything but clear when you compare it to what the message would look like had George Orwell merely written a nonfiction treatise, without resorting to any literary devices. If you know nothing of Orwell or the historical importance of 1984 and you read the book, it certainly wouldn't be clear that Orwell was trying to make a point, let alone what that point is. Some people would gu…

Sorry, when I said "clear ideological point" I meant "clear that some ideological point was being made", not that it was clear what the message was. I thought I made that clear by immediately pointing out that people disagree on what the point of the story is.

The fact that I'm even having to make this clarification is kind of the point of my argument. And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear.

Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#302

Post by pmarreck »

This sounds great if you are very literate and well-vocabularied.

Most people in the world are not. Or don't speak English at all, another problem with text that you don't find with images.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#303

Post by iamcurious »

scroot wrote: post #151
mannykannot wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not plausible that, but for the limitations of technology, you could substitute a picture for the argument presented in your post.

Walter Ong said something like (paraphrasing): "If the phrase 'a picture is worth a thousand words' is true, then why does it need to be a phrase at all?"

Cause that phrase is just 7 words. A picture would have 993 other unnecessary words.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#304

Post by Nitramp »

aftbit wrote: post #268

As usual, context matters. If you're trying to convey complex thoughts about abstract matters, then language is the way to do it. If you are trying to convey deep emotional states, then a photo or video is probably better. You cannot convert the 1st amendment into photos, and you cannot convert the Mona Lisa smile into words. Just try to use words to describe either of these photos and see how they fall short: https:…

John Steinbeck arguably did that for your first image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath

It's not really apples to apples of course. Steinbeck describes much more, but also takes much more time to consume. The point though is that it's possible to convey very complex emotional states in literature or poetry

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#305

Post by handedness »

Nitramp wrote: post #304
aftbit wrote: post #268

As usual, context matters. If you're trying to convey complex thoughts about abstract matters, then language is the way to do it. If you are trying to convey deep emotional states, then a photo or video is probably better. You cannot convert the 1st amendment into photos, and you cannot convert the Mona Lisa smile into words. Just try to use words to describe either of these photos and see how they fall short: https:…

John Steinbeck arguably did that for your first image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath It's not really apples to apples of course. Steinbeck describes much more, but also takes much more time to consume. The point though is that it's possible to convey very complex emotional states in literature or poetry

For anyone who isn't familiar with the subject of that photo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#306

Post by fuzzfactor »

hardlianotion wrote: post #166
fuzzfactor wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I read from parent's point that what you are trying to communicate matters. I take from that, that text works sometimes, and sometimes something else is a better form of communication.

Yes, it does help when you can read between the lines . . .

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#307

Post by BeetleB »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #301
BeetleB wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideological message in 1984 is anything but clear when you compare it to what the message would look like had George Orwell merely written a nonfiction treatise, without resorting to any literary devices. If you know nothing of Orwell or the historical importance of 1984 and you read the book, it certainly wouldn't be clear that Orwell was trying to make a point, let alone what that point is. Some people would gu…

Sorry, when I said "clear ideological point" I meant "clear that some ideological point was being made", not that it was clear what the message was. I thought I made that clear by immediately pointing out that people disagree on what the point of the story is. The fact that I'm even having to make this clarification is kind of the point of my argument. And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 i…

> And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear.

No, it's evidence that George Orwell was obfuscating his point. When you make a point through fiction, that is obfuscation. To make my point clear, had you made a faithful version of 1984 into a movie, people who know nothing of the book would still not be clear about whether it has a point or not. It has nothing to do with it being in text form.

> Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.

The two are not contradictory. It's easy to tell what is being documented. Whether it is true is a different story.

The crux of my discussion isn't about what happens when the author/photographer is intentionally trying to mislead, but when they are not trying to mislead. If an author writes a nonfiction treatise it leaves a lot less room for ambiguity. When I read PG's essays, I don't have discussions with others on what he really means. A photo, without context, can inspire several emotions, all unrelated to reality, and this is true no matter how hard the photographer tries. Case in point, when I was in school, my teacher showed the class a photo he had taken from a newspaper - but without any context. He asked the students to try to write a news article where the photo would make sense. Obviously, the responses were widely different, and none was close to the reality. In some stories, the subjects in the photos were victims. In others, they were the villians. The reality turned out to be their being heroes.

Even when you provide accurate context to a photo, there are no shortage of instances where once you see the video of the event and/or hear from the subject, you find out that while the context was correct, the photo is showing a mere moment that is not reflecting what most people who see the photo are thinking. Take a video of someone having a long conversation, where they laugh often. It's not hard to capture a frame where it looks like the person is in pain.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#308

Post by necovek »

majewsky wrote: post #46
necovek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I totally agree with the OP, the point to remember is that text is a really terse storage as long as you have the Unicode mapping already stored to transform the binary compressed form to actual pictures of text (vs abstract forms or numeric codepoints when simply stored as "textual" bytes). This does not diminish the value and expressiveness of text, but it needs to be said that in 5000 years time we'll need b…

> in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's post. Nitpick: In all likelihood, an English dictionary would be enough. Even if the Unicode spec is lost, the text can probably be deciphered by using frequency analysis plus the dictionary to associate codepoints with characters.

Sure, but the English dictionary is a bit longer than the Unicode spec :)

My point was that there is a lot of implied data that undermines this "compression" of information into "simply bytes" today: I am pointing out the implicit in OP's assumption.

Maybe I did not choose the right addendum, but a pretty comprehensive addendum is needed (in all likelihood, an "ancient English dictionary" is needed anyways).

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#310

Post by flukus »

montebicyclelo wrote: post #13

> text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period. On the other hand, many (technical/mathematical) concepts are more effectively explained using diagrams/images. E.g. the very visual approach taken in Mathologer videos [1] makes difficult, esoteric, mathematical ideas accessible to a wider audience. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ8pnCO0nTY

On the other, other hand. I find text far superior for creating and editing technical diagrams and images. Give my graphviz over any GUI editor to do the same.

In this case the diagrams are good for communication but terrible for expression, I think this distinction is being overlooked by many here.

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