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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I worked for several years as a leader of birding tours, and I have met a few sad individuals who were so focused on adding to their life lists that they would refuse to look at a bird species that they had seen before, no matter how spectacular the view or how fascinating its behavior of the moment might be. “I don’t need that bird” was their standard reply.
For a person just getting started in some area of natural history, and unabashed focus on list-chasing is a good thing, at least for a while. The trick is knowing when to stop.
Keith Brown described how he got the idea “that the maximization of daily species lists of butterflies, a seemingly unscientific goal (though much employed in a sister area, ornithology), could give a large scientific fallout."
For example, he described how six weeks’ effort in the Brazilian central plateau had turned up twenty-five species previously unknown for the area—but then he had adopted the “maximization” method, and in another six weeks, he had found nearly three hundred more species.