Comment by crpatino
11 years ago
> text alone is not nice either. Good luck describing a complex design, I much prefer a diagram.
If you look at a detailed diagram of a complex design, it is even worse than text. I consider myself pretty good at spacial intelligence (Before discovering computers, I was leaning towards mechanical engineering and took 4 years of technical drawing at middle school level, not to mention my lifelong hobby: drawing/sketching), yet give me a call-graph with more than a hundred elements in it and my head will start aching in no time.
If there are high quality diagrams that represent any complex entity in a relatively accurate way is only a consequence of the fact that some (probably)human intelligence has devoted a significant amount of time to synthesize the essence of the problem at hand, abstract the irrelevant details away, and use a highly symbolic representation to communicate the results to others.
You can do that with text (it is called summarizing), but it requires more training for both the producer and the consumers to do it effectively, which takes us to the next point.
> Text can also be ambiguous and it requires more attention than a video
Video and other graphical media helps to lower the threshold to communicate this summarized bits of information, which has both advantages and disadvantages. If there are social advantages to communicate some information to the general population, then significant amounts of effort should be devoted to making the message as digestible as possible (without losing to much accuracy).
However, if you rely on this methods to train the professionals, you will end up with a bunch of marginally competent fools that are not capable of grasping just how much more learning they are missing. Then, they will take over the training of the next generations and knowledge loss is practically inevitable.
There are cases where precision is required, and anything that lowers the attention threshold is more a bug than a feature.
"If you look at a detailed diagram of a complex design, it is even worse than text."
Not necessarily. (Or horses for courses, or YMMV, or however you want to put it.) For some kinds of things, diagrams seem to do awfully well. Not all kinds of things, there are plenty of people who overuse diagrams, but some kinds of things.
E.g., consider the success of Feynman diagrams. They're at the edge of my expertise (I did a Ph. D. thesis on QM calculations, but not the kind that uses them) so I'm not 100% confident of this, but I have the strong impression that no one has developed a textual form that represents those relationships in a way that most people find comparably clear.
Or consider the humble "graph" (in the common usage, not the math "graph theory" usage). I do not want to deal with the text replacement of a nontrivial scatter plot in a typical experimental paper, or a diagram of a clever waveform in an radar ECM monograph.
Or consider the humble map (again in ordinary usage, not math usage) of e.g. Florida or the US interstate highway system.
Electronic circuit diagrams, medium-complexity Venn diagrams, and probabilistic inference networks also seem to be cases where diagrams can be hard to beat.