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Always Bet on Text (2014)

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Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#311

Post by necovek »

cycomanic wrote: post #47
necovek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really surprising sentiment to me. I despise videos when I want to learn something. Give me a nice text (+ pictures if a subject requires it) so I can follow at my own pace: slow down, skip or skim as needed.

For me it depends a lot on what I want to learn. For some things (e.g. programming) text is much better. For other things (e.g. repair a part on a bike) text requires images, to really be able to quickly grasp what one has to do. Finally, for learning e.g. dance moves I really want a movie (or a live instructor). So like usual "it depends".

Yeah, it definitely depends for me too, but getting the nuances right from a video wouldn't work for me at all, even in a thing like dancing. Live instructor is an entirely different proposition (you can choose to focus on the bits that you care about, move around to get a better view, etc.). And I can stop them and ask for them to repeat, slow down or split their movement into more granular "part-steps".

Videos are simply not that for me. Perhaps with actual 3D videos and improved tooling we might get there (eg. ability to zoom in on an instructor's hips in "infinite" resolution if you are having trouble following that particular bit of their motion).

And I mean, you can sure learn from a video, but I just find it harder. Eg. I can go look at dance or basketball moves and try to reconstruct them, but it's usually a couple of core points that need to be taken in to achieve them that are much easier to grasp when broken into fundamentals.

However, videos where the gist of the work is on the student, vs on the instructor, are much easier to make, which I believe is part of their popularity!

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#312

Post by flukus »

yohannparis wrote: post #177
leephillips wrote: post #169

The author may have overstated his case, but I hope the designers of GUI applications are listening: most of the icons on your menu bars mean nothing to me, so your application is hard to use. Substitute words.

My biggest pet-peeve is the hamburger icon instead of the world 'Menu'. You are saving 10px... for what!?

In defense of the hamburger menu, it's singular, nearly universal and well understood, I can deal with that just fine. This is very different from rows of icons in something like word where there's a huge array of functionality hidden behind obscure hieroglyphs.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#313

Post by andrewflnr »

robenkleene wrote: post #88

The question is whether these advantages are because text is a better communication medium, or because of the limitations of our technology? Take using a computer to type a word versus draw a picture: Effectively everyone who uses a computer can type a word, but I'd bet less than 10% could draw a circle. But put a piece of paper in front of someone and effectively everyone can draw a circle. This points to there bein…

I think he's trying to express a point about the gradient is the whole human-communication-technology system than precise properties of any part of it. And I say "express" rather than "make a point" because I don't think he expects to convince anyone. It's summed-up life experience, not a proof.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#314

Post by andrewflnr »

kreeben wrote: post #56
cycomanic wrote: post #41

I think the post conflates several quite unrelated concepts under the label text. Also what does he mean by text and information? For example he mentioned the "optical telegraph", which is a semaphore system which used a system of messages which AFAIK were not alphabetic text. Another example if we compare logographic language systems (e.g. Chinese characters, hieroglyphs ...) to alphabetic systems. I guess we can sa…

I agree that the author has mislabeled "text". What are characters if not pictures? What is text if not a sequence of pictures? What's a picture if not a depiction of a concept? In a bag-of-words type of model, I see no difference between a word and a painting, no difference between the body of work of van Gogh and the body of work of Kafka. They both use multiple sets of concepts to compose new sets of concepts. Pic…

If you expand the definitions of text and pictures so they encompass all the same objects, of course you find that their expressiveness is equivalent. At that point, however, your logic is no longer connected to the team world. But since you asked, the special ingredient in text is syntax.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#315

Post by andrewflnr »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #157

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…

> Words leave nothing to the imagination.

If only. Differing interpretations of words are one of the dominant sources of political discord in the US. The things words leave to the imagination are killing people.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#316

Post by c22 »

LocalH wrote: post #91
ajconway wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emoji are modern hieroglyphs. It's just an additional means of conveying meaning. > font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions This could have been a major issue, but media platforms recognized it and have provided their own pictograms for years, mostly compatible with each other.

They have a valid point, however. What is now widely considered to be a "water gun" emoji started out as an actual gun, but Apple decided at one point that they were going to be "progressive" and changed it to a water gun. To me, this upends the entire idea of emoji having a stable definition.

It's fascinating to me that they did this with the pistol, but :knife:, :bomb:, :dagger:, :crossed_swords:, :bow_and_arrow:, et al all look as threatening as ever.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#318

Post by c22 »

jameshart wrote: post #216
hrishi wrote: post #14

Agreed, with a counterpoint: Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe a concept or an event, text is king. However, media is more efficient at transmitting sentiment. It will take you far more than 4000 bytes of text to transmit the feeling or emotion an icon can convey, when used well. This is why we've (as a species) started using emojis, and why media leans to emotion and sentiment while text…

“Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe a concept or an event, text is king.” Really? Why are video games so visual, in that case? To update you on the situation your character is in, inform you where the enemies are, give you feedback on your current health and objectives... most video games use a rich graphical system of colors and symbols overlaid over a high resolution image of the game wor…

There are action text adventure games, even massively multiplayer ones.

I probably have blown more time on text MUDs than all other computer gaming combined, but even back when I used to play things like counterstrike I spent an inordinate amount of time using text to chat with team mates or in the console binding and triggering macros.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#319

Post by Cogito »

robenkleene wrote: post #135
everdrive wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A circle doesn't usually convey very many ideas, though. Words can.

Circles are building blocks of pictures, which can convey ideas, just like words are a building blocks of sentences.

A circle has a fixed level of abstraction, and representing a complex thought requires many circles. Importantly, in a complex image each individual circle doesn't convey much information, it's the composition that encodes any information.

Words have a near arbitrary level of abstraction, so that single words can convey immense collections of ideas, so much so that new words can be defined that represent the ideas that would otherwise take many words to express.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#320

Post by nwienert »

BeetleB wrote: post #307
LordDragonfang wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

You’re comparing incredibly arbitrary things. Is a photo comparable to a tweet, sentence, paragraph or novel? Is a video equatable to an essay?

You’ve convinced me that it’s all incredibly relative and complex, very much impossible to set up an equation with which to even compare it, and there’s no clear cut answer - and further, I don’t see why one side even needs to win, or why anyone cares beyond some personal attachment or game or identity pride or maybe just a childhood love of Wittgenstein.

Are symbols text? All of math could be represented as symbol. Are spoken words text? What about animal calls? The intro to Wall-E conveys so much, did I need text to understand that? I’m persuaded by a seeing a video of beautiful village in its natural state, or nature. Li Ziqi is maybe the most compelling video on all of YouTube, and it has no audio or text whatsoever.

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