From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Mar 03 2003 - 01:03:39 MST
On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 08:58:56PM -0800, Lee Corbin wrote:
> > If a book could be completely changed, without leaving anything out,
> > into video it would be a much better source.
>
> That's an awfully big "if". You simply couldn't write a video
> that explicates, for example, economics. Too many abstractions.
> Yet understanding these abstractions is essential to understanding
> how the world really works.
Exactly. How do you teach mathematics (say group theory or
multidimensional analysis) on video? You can certainly visualize
examples (which is good), but each example will be just an example. The
drawback of video and other visual mediums is that they are particular,
the things we see are more concrete than the abstractions of writing.
And in many fields it is the abstractions that are important.
Speech/writing, being linear, always runs at a high abstraction level.
The best symbolic art and visualisation still works by showing a
concrete example of something, which we then try to interpret as a
generality rather than a particularity - something which requires a
great deal of skill from the artist and a quite extensive understanding
from the viewer.
> > Our minds will change and eventually learn to accept information
> > in video form as well as we do in written form.
Quite likely. There is a generational difference in image comprehension,
it seems. But that people can comprehend complex information in a
certain medium doesn't make it generally better at conveying *all*
information.
> > The alphabet is Primitive. Only 26 letters for English.
> > It's time to move on.
One can always imagine extending it, and that usually shows the problem.
I guess English would need the double amount of letters to cover all
phonemes. Now each letter is a sound, but the expressiveness has not
changed and it is slightly harder to learn. One could try to make
Speedtalk a la Heinlein, but that just means that one sacrifices
redundancy and learnability for brevity, no new linguistic abilities.
I would like to add hypertext and better stacks to language. But that
requires improvements in the listener, rather than language itself.
> Quite often, videos and CDs do enhance understanding. "A picture
> is worth a thousand words." But an equally great truth, though
> not an opposite is, "A word can be worth a thousand pictures."
> How many pictures would it take to convey "expropriate",
> "contemptible", or "increasing rarefaction"?
Or a C^2->C^2 function or the set of all morphisms?
We can take advantage of the different levels of complexity. Writing and
speech are linear, low bandwidth but high abstraction (writing somewhat
more than speech, since one gets a memory enhancement tool in the paper
and can even go 2D if needed). Images has higher bandwidth and a lower
level of abstraction, while video is even higher in bandwidth and
concreteness. Maybe we should try to invent further information channels
for other purposes?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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