I think roughly a month ago I had an discussion about using Anki to learn biology data on LW. The person complained about the perceived inability of Anki to be text only. He rather wants to learn using things like Venn diagrams because they are better at displaying information then pure text.
The problem is that it’s not straightforward to simple create a Venn diagram while creating Anki card or while discussing on LessWrong. It takes extra time.
With a bit of smart UI design we might have an UI that makes it easy to make points via diagrams. Of course that means we need to think about how to create good diagrams for a bunch of other semantic constructs.
Especially if your default medium of data entry isn’t a keyboard but a multitouch device having a bunch of diagrams might be better than text. Text developed in an environment where space was expensive. Today keyboards are simply amazing technology that make text into very easy.
I could imagine that the necessary technology won’t be developed in customer applications like facebook but in a field like biology where it’s very important to express complex ideas in an easy to understand manner. A series of big diagrams might just perform better than a bunch of long and convoluted sentences.
It’s easier to upload and store. Text takes less space. Uploading it to a network or sending it to a friend takes less bandwidth.
Today that might be a concern. I don’t think it will be in 20 years.
I think a large part of why Google Wave failed was because it was just too slow.
Text is easier to search (this refers both to searching within a given piece of text and to locating a text based on some part of it or some attributes of it).
Speech to text to technology should make this easier in the future.
You can’t play background music while consuming audio-based content, but you can do it while consuming text.
I think you can play low volume music in the background of a podcast.
I can consume text at a rate sometimes as high as 26 words a second. I cannot do that with audio. If we had text-to-speech, I would use it for turning audio into text, and consuming the text. Or the author could use it and produce text, which they could then edit. Frequently when talking we do all sorts of things we don’t do when writing: repeat ourselves, use funny turns of phrase, search for words, etc. The bandwidth advantage to the consumer of a small amount of work for the producer makes text continue to be valuable.
As far as diagrams go in technical areas, there are some famous pictures in mathematics. These pictures inevitably mean nothing without text. Transmitting abstract ideas, and in particular transmitting subtle variations in how solid something is, doesn’t seem compatible with diagrams. Diagrams are good for some concepts, but it’s still an art to get good ones. Creating them is expensive, and sometimes they don’t work. On the other hand it’s hard to beat a good graph for communicating numerical data easily and letting the viewer draw appropriate inferences.
I think roughly a month ago I had an discussion about using Anki to learn biology data on LW. The person complained about the perceived inability of Anki to be text only. He rather wants to learn using things like Venn diagrams because they are better at displaying information then pure text.
The problem is that it’s not straightforward to simple create a Venn diagram while creating Anki card or while discussing on LessWrong. It takes extra time. With a bit of smart UI design we might have an UI that makes it easy to make points via diagrams. Of course that means we need to think about how to create good diagrams for a bunch of other semantic constructs.
Especially if your default medium of data entry isn’t a keyboard but a multitouch device having a bunch of diagrams might be better than text. Text developed in an environment where space was expensive. Today keyboards are simply amazing technology that make text into very easy.
I could imagine that the necessary technology won’t be developed in customer applications like facebook but in a field like biology where it’s very important to express complex ideas in an easy to understand manner. A series of big diagrams might just perform better than a bunch of long and convoluted sentences.
Today that might be a concern. I don’t think it will be in 20 years. I think a large part of why Google Wave failed was because it was just too slow.
Speech to text to technology should make this easier in the future.
I think you can play low volume music in the background of a podcast.
I can consume text at a rate sometimes as high as 26 words a second. I cannot do that with audio. If we had text-to-speech, I would use it for turning audio into text, and consuming the text. Or the author could use it and produce text, which they could then edit. Frequently when talking we do all sorts of things we don’t do when writing: repeat ourselves, use funny turns of phrase, search for words, etc. The bandwidth advantage to the consumer of a small amount of work for the producer makes text continue to be valuable.
As far as diagrams go in technical areas, there are some famous pictures in mathematics. These pictures inevitably mean nothing without text. Transmitting abstract ideas, and in particular transmitting subtle variations in how solid something is, doesn’t seem compatible with diagrams. Diagrams are good for some concepts, but it’s still an art to get good ones. Creating them is expensive, and sometimes they don’t work. On the other hand it’s hard to beat a good graph for communicating numerical data easily and letting the viewer draw appropriate inferences.
I think you mean speech to text technology.
Fixed.