

Intelligence is a text-based application.  - gvb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/04/02/Wrong-About-the-iPad

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jdietrich
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.

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robg
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.

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foldr
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).

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philk
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.)

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theycallmemorty
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?

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ROFISH
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.

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neilk
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.

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mark_l_watson
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 :-)

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keefe
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
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._

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Kilimanjaro
"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
The iPad is not at tool at all, it is a distribution channel.

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Groxx
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.

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zacharypinter
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.

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Groxx
* 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.

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tjmaxal
"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.

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gojomo
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.

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nopassrecover
Is that intelligence valuable if it had to be reinvented every generation
because it is lost though?

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gojomo
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
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.

