No. And I’ve read interesting arguments to the effect that the cognitive habits of text are critical for helping people think in a logically coherent fashion.
Low resolution video appears to be good for public relations work targeting masses of people prevented by poverty from cultivating their cognitive resources, but it does not appear to be good for spelling out solid and cogent reasoning.
The idea that video leads to less logically coherent thought is somewhat testable—are the comments to TED videos less coherent than those posters write to text?
Part of the author’s argument is simply that TV causes people to become mentally passive (alpha-wave brain states, etc) but another aspect of the argument is what kind of content optimizes impact given the medium. He argues that TV works differently even from movies in part because TV simply has such low resolution and so it mostly shows close ups of faces experiencing extreme emotions, slow motion replay of human bodies colliding, and dancing cartoon squirrels because those are what the medium does best.
A movie can give you a landscape or other complex scene and have it mean something. A book can cover nearly anything (including mental states), but only via low bitrate descriptive text, generally delivering a linearized stream of implicitly tree structured arguments or a narrative.
When choosing a publication venue, the form of the media determines the competitive environment and the safely assumed cognitive skills of the audience. There may be outliers like UCTV, but the central tendency reveals the medium’s strengths.
The place to look to test the author’s thesis (as opposed to the derivative claim about the value of video for this community) would be to compare the memetic complexity, themes, and “rationality” in top youtube videos, versus highest grossing movies, versus best sellers.
I could easily imagine that it could be helpful for aspiring rationalists to express themselves and argue in more than one medium simultaneously so that their ideas have to survive in multiple contexts that should not theoretically change the “reality correspondence” of their thinking…
And good uses for low res video could probably be found by anyone trying to consciously game the medium in light of analysis of the medium...
...but “in general, for society, as a medium” I would guess that low res video isn’t particularly conducive to rationality.
I agree about the general low quality of youtube comments, but occasionally I’ll see a special interest video with intelligent comments. The low quality may be a result of youtube being popular with the general public (blogs have specific audiences, youtube is for everyone) combined with founder effect, so that people who want to do intelligent comments generally put them elsewhere.
It seems to me that another test case is audio books vs books in text.
I’d rather see tests of how well people take in argument offered in text vs sound, and some attention to whether there are different subgroups.
No. And I’ve read interesting arguments to the effect that the cognitive habits of text are critical for helping people think in a logically coherent fashion.
Low resolution video appears to be good for public relations work targeting masses of people prevented by poverty from cultivating their cognitive resources, but it does not appear to be good for spelling out solid and cogent reasoning.
The idea that video leads to less logically coherent thought is somewhat testable—are the comments to TED videos less coherent than those posters write to text?
TLDR: argument via XKCD :-)
Part of the author’s argument is simply that TV causes people to become mentally passive (alpha-wave brain states, etc) but another aspect of the argument is what kind of content optimizes impact given the medium. He argues that TV works differently even from movies in part because TV simply has such low resolution and so it mostly shows close ups of faces experiencing extreme emotions, slow motion replay of human bodies colliding, and dancing cartoon squirrels because those are what the medium does best.
A movie can give you a landscape or other complex scene and have it mean something. A book can cover nearly anything (including mental states), but only via low bitrate descriptive text, generally delivering a linearized stream of implicitly tree structured arguments or a narrative.
When choosing a publication venue, the form of the media determines the competitive environment and the safely assumed cognitive skills of the audience. There may be outliers like UCTV, but the central tendency reveals the medium’s strengths.
The place to look to test the author’s thesis (as opposed to the derivative claim about the value of video for this community) would be to compare the memetic complexity, themes, and “rationality” in top youtube videos, versus highest grossing movies, versus best sellers.
I could easily imagine that it could be helpful for aspiring rationalists to express themselves and argue in more than one medium simultaneously so that their ideas have to survive in multiple contexts that should not theoretically change the “reality correspondence” of their thinking…
And good uses for low res video could probably be found by anyone trying to consciously game the medium in light of analysis of the medium...
...but “in general, for society, as a medium” I would guess that low res video isn’t particularly conducive to rationality.
I agree about the general low quality of youtube comments, but occasionally I’ll see a special interest video with intelligent comments. The low quality may be a result of youtube being popular with the general public (blogs have specific audiences, youtube is for everyone) combined with founder effect, so that people who want to do intelligent comments generally put them elsewhere.
It seems to me that another test case is audio books vs books in text.
I’d rather see tests of how well people take in argument offered in text vs sound, and some attention to whether there are different subgroups.