5 ms·

Intelligence is a text-based application.

32 points by gvb 17y ago

jdietrich 17y ago
If intelligence really is text-based, why have college lectures? Not a rhetorical question by the way, I'd genuinely like to know if anyone has evidence for the information-richness or otherwise of audiovisual presentation.
- robg 17y ago
  Lectures were originally spoken text. Then the lecturers got famous and started publishing their text as books. Text books. Now we have lecturers who often lecture from those words written by someone else. The best teachers I've known spend an inordinate amount of time writing out their original lesson plans. It's still text-based even if there are bells and whistles.
  - foldr 17y ago
    I have a different experience. The best teachers I've had generally spoke without notes (although I'm sure they'd thought about what they were going to say beforehand).
- ippisl 17y ago
  from research: First-year medical students prefer multiple learning styles[1]. If you give students only 1 learning style choice , more students prefer book based learning "5.4% preferred visual (learning from graphs, charts, and flow diagrams), 4.8% preferred auditory (learning from speech), 7.8% preferred printed words (learning from reading and writing)" [1] http://advan.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/1/13 http://advan.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/1/13
- abstractbill 17y ago
  If intelligence really is text-based, why have college lectures? During a lecture you can interrupt the speaker and ask for clarification or more detail on a particular point.
keefe 17y ago
I tend to agree that intelligence is text based and that touch is great - I have a sony reader touch and I absolutely love e-ink. Why? It's not luminescent!!! I can't go from a luminescent screen doing dev work all day to reading another luminescent screen for fun.
- krainboltgreene 17y ago
  But didn't you read his great counter point?! Oh, and by the way, I consume a moderate amount of video, and I really like doing it on the 1080p LCD TV just the right distance in front of my comfy leather chair with the great footstool. Among other things, I can balance my computer on my lap and write seriously on it, just like I’m doing right now.
tjmaxal 17y ago
"intelligence is text-based" is a very over reaching statement. But the idea that touch based computing favors analog input, I think is dead on.
Groxx 17y ago
First sentence of the article: Anybody who says they know how the tablet drama in general and iPad narrative in particular are going to play out is blowing smoke. Interesting, as the rest of the article is their theory of how it's going to play out. And the link title here is a rather random sentence from the article that has little bearing on anything else, and isn't qualified in any way.
- zacharypinter 17y ago
  So, he's pre-qualifying his remarks by saying nobody can know for certain, but then gives his thoughts anyways. I don't see a problem with that.
  - Groxx 17y ago
    * shoots self in foot * It's burning your own straw-man-bridge behind you, and then going back for your keys. If you can walk on water, go right ahead, but for people this means you're going out of your way to say you're wrong before you say something. I don't know what I'm talking about, but I know what I'm talking about.
mark_l_watson 17y ago
I would extend Tim's comments to include voice and speech as modes for interacting with computers. My wife and I got new Android phones recently and we both adapted instantly to speaking commands as often as possible instead of using the touch screen. For low bandwidth output, speech generation is good also. But in the large sense Tim Bray is right: text may be low bandwidth in a Shannon-sense, but is high in information bandwidth. As an example, I got more out of a 5 minute read of the New York Times online newspaper this morning than 30 minutes of watching any news show that I can think of (even the Colbert show :-)
Kilimanjaro 17y ago
"Intelligence is a text-based application." Entertainment is an imagination-based application. While Tim is right, Marc is right too. You can't look at the iPad as an intelligence tool, it is an imagination tool instead. For the couch, and that is exactly what Jobs intended when he started the demonstration back in january sitting in a comfortable couch with an iPad on his lap. Games, video, and everything entertaining is the first and foremost intention of the iPad. Programmers and geeks? not so. Intelligence will be relegated to a distant second this time. And there is exactly where Tim is wrong and Marc is right. edited
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  The iPad is not at tool at all, it is a distribution channel.
gojomo 17y ago
s/Intelligence/Civilization/ And yet: I've been surprised how many successful people barely (or crudely) read or write. One such recurring type is the dyslexic entrepreneur. They are very intelligent -- but also very verbal/kinesthetic and not at all text-oriented. (I also suspect, without ready examples, that other great artists/performers/craftsmen are awful readers/writers.) These types of intelligence will be underrepresented in a forum like this -- where 98%+ of our projected presence is writing. So even while our giant enterprises (sprawling corporations, large governments) and engineering projects (bridges, computers) are dependent on the written word and text-based intelligence for coordination, we shouldn't forget the widely-dispersed and valuable non-textual intelligence we also rely upon.
- nopassrecover 17y ago
  Is that intelligence valuable if it had to be reinvented every generation because it is lost though?
  - gojomo 17y ago
    Accepting your premise: maybe that need-for-reinvention makes it more valuable -- it can't be mass-produced by the printing press. Contesting your premise: these intelligences are passed down in other ways -- including ways that we hyperlexics barely perceive well enough to properly value.
    - nooneelse 17y ago
      I've often wondered if enabling the capture and transmission of this type of knowledge would be one of the killer applications for ubiquitous-ish wearable computers (or to put it more fancifully, one of the advantages of the Borg). Someone who is good at something but isn't good at explaining how they do it could wear the rig and the task could be recorded a few times through from their perspective (they could say how they think of the task's steps or whatever if they felt like it, but it wouldn't be needed). Other people, better able to describe things, could annotate the replays, break them into steps, explain motivations, put in branches for various cases, etc. A kind of first-person wikihow. That seems to be along the line of translating the non-verbal into video and text formats, making the non-textual wisdom more like text so we hyperlexics can sift it our way. Various trials using wearable computers to aid inspection and maintenance tasks have been done, but I guess we are still waiting on the tech and interfaces (or maybe more the social acceptance or right marketing) to catch up to the idea.
neilk 17y ago
I suspect that intelligence requires a composable interface. That is, composable in the functional programming sense, where each new element can transform the entire structure. But, as far as I know, we only have two really good composable interfaces: speech and text.
philk 17y ago
Good piece. Text is great because the information density is so much higher. The content in a thirty minute video can be absorbed in under five minutes of reading. (On a side note, whenever I read someone promoting rich e-books with sound and video embedded in the text to increase it's value I can't help but feel that they don't own or enjoy many books.)
- theycallmemorty 17y ago
  I enjoy reading, however sometimes when I'm trying to learn something I pick it up much faster if it is explained to me by another person, rather than reading about it... and that includes watching video. Surely there are others in this community who function similarly?
  - ROFISH 17y ago
    Video is great whenever I want to learn and do something, but it's hard to skim a video to find a certain piece you need.

32 points by gvb 17y ago

If intelligence really is text-based, why have college lectures? Not a rhetorical question by the way, I'd genuinely like to know if anyone has evidence for the information-richness or otherwise of audiovisual presentation.

robg 17y ago
Lectures were originally spoken text. Then the lecturers got famous and started publishing their text as books. Text books. Now we have lecturers who often lecture from those words written by someone else. The best teachers I've known spend an inordinate amount of time writing out their original lesson plans. It's still text-based even if there are bells and whistles.
- foldr 17y ago
  I have a different experience. The best teachers I've had generally spoke without notes (although I'm sure they'd thought about what they were going to say beforehand).
ippisl 17y ago
from research: First-year medical students prefer multiple learning styles[1]. If you give students only 1 learning style choice , more students prefer book based learning "5.4% preferred visual (learning from graphs, charts, and flow diagrams), 4.8% preferred auditory (learning from speech), 7.8% preferred printed words (learning from reading and writing)" [1] http://advan.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/1/13 http://advan.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/1/13
abstractbill 17y ago
If intelligence really is text-based, why have college lectures? During a lecture you can interrupt the speaker and ask for clarification or more detail on a particular point.

keefe 17y ago

I tend to agree that intelligence is text based and that touch is great - I have a sony reader touch and I absolutely love e-ink. Why? It's not luminescent!!! I can't go from a luminescent screen doing dev work all day to reading another luminescent screen for fun.

krainboltgreene 17y ago
But didn't you read his great counter point?! Oh, and by the way, I consume a moderate amount of video, and I really like doing it on the 1080p LCD TV just the right distance in front of my comfy leather chair with the great footstool. Among other things, I can balance my computer on my lap and write seriously on it, just like I’m doing right now.

tjmaxal 17y ago

"intelligence is text-based" is a very over reaching statement. But the idea that touch based computing favors analog input, I think is dead on.

Groxx 17y ago

First sentence of the article: Anybody who says they know how the tablet drama in general and iPad narrative in particular are going to play out is blowing smoke. Interesting, as the rest of the article is their theory of how it's going to play out. And the link title here is a rather random sentence from the article that has little bearing on anything else, and isn't qualified in any way.

zacharypinter 17y ago
So, he's pre-qualifying his remarks by saying nobody can know for certain, but then gives his thoughts anyways. I don't see a problem with that.
- Groxx 17y ago
  * shoots self in foot * It's burning your own straw-man-bridge behind you, and then going back for your keys. If you can walk on water, go right ahead, but for people this means you're going out of your way to say you're wrong before you say something. I don't know what I'm talking about, but I know what I'm talking about.

mark_l_watson 17y ago

I would extend Tim's comments to include voice and speech as modes for interacting with computers. My wife and I got new Android phones recently and we both adapted instantly to speaking commands as often as possible instead of using the touch screen. For low bandwidth output, speech generation is good also. But in the large sense Tim Bray is right: text may be low bandwidth in a Shannon-sense, but is high in information bandwidth. As an example, I got more out of a 5 minute read of the New York Times online newspaper this morning than 30 minutes of watching any news show that I can think of (even the Colbert show :-)

Kilimanjaro 17y ago

"Intelligence is a text-based application." Entertainment is an imagination-based application. While Tim is right, Marc is right too. You can't look at the iPad as an intelligence tool, it is an imagination tool instead. For the couch, and that is exactly what Jobs intended when he started the demonstration back in january sitting in a comfortable couch with an iPad on his lap. Games, video, and everything entertaining is the first and foremost intention of the iPad. Programmers and geeks? not so. Intelligence will be relegated to a distant second this time. And there is exactly where Tim is wrong and Marc is right. edited

waterlesscloud 17y ago
The iPad is not at tool at all, it is a distribution channel.

gojomo 17y ago

s/Intelligence/Civilization/ And yet: I've been surprised how many successful people barely (or crudely) read or write. One such recurring type is the dyslexic entrepreneur. They are very intelligent -- but also very verbal/kinesthetic and not at all text-oriented. (I also suspect, without ready examples, that other great artists/performers/craftsmen are awful readers/writers.) These types of intelligence will be underrepresented in a forum like this -- where 98%+ of our projected presence is writing. So even while our giant enterprises (sprawling corporations, large governments) and engineering projects (bridges, computers) are dependent on the written word and text-based intelligence for coordination, we shouldn't forget the widely-dispersed and valuable non-textual intelligence we also rely upon.

nopassrecover 17y ago
Is that intelligence valuable if it had to be reinvented every generation because it is lost though?
- gojomo 17y ago
  Accepting your premise: maybe that need-for-reinvention makes it more valuable -- it can't be mass-produced by the printing press. Contesting your premise: these intelligences are passed down in other ways -- including ways that we hyperlexics barely perceive well enough to properly value.
  - nooneelse 17y ago
    I've often wondered if enabling the capture and transmission of this type of knowledge would be one of the killer applications for ubiquitous-ish wearable computers (or to put it more fancifully, one of the advantages of the Borg). Someone who is good at something but isn't good at explaining how they do it could wear the rig and the task could be recorded a few times through from their perspective (they could say how they think of the task's steps or whatever if they felt like it, but it wouldn't be needed). Other people, better able to describe things, could annotate the replays, break them into steps, explain motivations, put in branches for various cases, etc. A kind of first-person wikihow. That seems to be along the line of translating the non-verbal into video and text formats, making the non-textual wisdom more like text so we hyperlexics can sift it our way. Various trials using wearable computers to aid inspection and maintenance tasks have been done, but I guess we are still waiting on the tech and interfaces (or maybe more the social acceptance or right marketing) to catch up to the idea.

neilk 17y ago

I suspect that intelligence requires a composable interface. That is, composable in the functional programming sense, where each new element can transform the entire structure. But, as far as I know, we only have two really good composable interfaces: speech and text.

philk 17y ago

Good piece. Text is great because the information density is so much higher. The content in a thirty minute video can be absorbed in under five minutes of reading. (On a side note, whenever I read someone promoting rich e-books with sound and video embedded in the text to increase it's value I can't help but feel that they don't own or enjoy many books.)

theycallmemorty 17y ago
I enjoy reading, however sometimes when I'm trying to learn something I pick it up much faster if it is explained to me by another person, rather than reading about it... and that includes watching video. Surely there are others in this community who function similarly?
- ROFISH 17y ago
  Video is great whenever I want to learn and do something, but it's hard to skim a video to find a certain piece you need.