Talking and writing Talking is natural. Writing is not. It may seem strange that the manual dexterity needed to hold a pencil—or use a keyboard—comes later than the lingual and mental dexterity needed to speak. But it does. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing speech
Applause lights Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test. For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI. If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldn’t balance the risks and opportunities of AI. Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. “We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI” can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalist—the link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies speech
Perilous to be sure It would not be clear where the boundary of sanctioned speech lay until an attempt had been made to cross it and that attempt had failed. Such efforts Wittgenstein regarded with benevolence. He treated them as reconnaissance expeditions, perilous to be sure, but well worth the effort expended on them. H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change wordsexplorationspeech
Idiolect A Definition en.wikipedia.org Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people. Things you didn't know you can be bad at languagepersonalityidentityexpressionspeech
Writing and Speaking An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better. writingspeechcommunicationpractice
The primacy of interpretation over sensation A Fragment by Mark Liberman languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings. More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest. These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.) memorysensesmeaningspeechwords
Note-Taking for Pencilophobes An Essay from Field Notes on Science and Nature by Piotr Naskrecki MantisAn extension of my brainRecordingsThe era of paper
Mantis One of the first relational databases for biologists was Biota. Unfortunately, in its early stages of implementation, Biota did not yet have all the elements that my work on taxonomy, systematics, and behavior of katydids required. I decided to develop my own solution, and Mantis was born. There is a fairly long list of data points, but having a database designed specifically to record them simplifies the record-keeping process tremendously.
An extension of my brain Mantis has become an extension of my brain, and extra memory storage space that never forgets anything and thus, I am convinced, is a reason for major memory lapses on my part. Why should I make an effort to remember the author of that paper on the courtship behavior of Cyphoderris when I can quickly look it up?
Recordings Of course, I do not carry my laptop with me when out in the first at night, and if anything requires me to make a note I either record it as a voice message on the sound recorder (which I always carry with me), or make a note in a small, waterproof notebook.
The era of paper Instant availability and portability of data make research in the field infinitely easier for scientists, but what is lost is the feeling of slow accumulation of knowledge and the physical evidence of one’s scientific prestige—the extensive shelves of important-looking volumes and journals. There is no denying it, the era of paper is fading fast, and I can easily imagine a time when students will be perplexed by the strange, primitive implement known as the pencil. As far as I am concerned, this time cannot come soon enough.