[lit-ideas] Re: Gripes
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 11:55:13 -0700
> I heard Peter Gordon being interviewed on Science Friday yesterday and I was
> at
> a loss as to why this was news. "No word, no concept" has always seemed
> a no-brainer to me. Aren't words just symbols of concepts? If there's no
> symbol, it's a pretty safe bet there's no concept.
There are many ideas (or ways of thinking) that often aren't expressed in
language. And
often, there are ideas that can't be expressed in language. Either they're too
complex, or
they're the type of ideas that don't lend themselves to being couched in
linguistic
metaphors.
This is very common in computering, because we deal with things that are often
based on
theories that are often very different from the world of human activities.
When developing a new computer project or product, I've noticed that it's very
important to
get the metaphor right from the very beginning. Adobe Acrobat, for example,
made a real mess
of their metaphor and it languised for many years, because people didn't
understand what a
PDF is. It's still really bad: although PDFs are widely used now, nearly all of
them are in
low resolution, which makes them nearly worthless for printing. The vast
majority of users
(I'd guess 99.8%) have no idea that they are producing low resolution files,
because they
think "PDF is installed in my computer, therefore it works", yet Acrobat is not
that kind of
"just install it and use it" software.
Google is another example: yes, it's a search engine, but the way it works, and
why it
works, is not easy to explain to people who aren't familiar with library
science. Google, at
heart, is computerized bibliometrics (also called cybermetrics). Yet I
seriously doubt that
even 1% of the people who bought Google stock a few day ago have even HEARD
this word, much
less understand it.
The astonishing thing about Google is that it makes about a billion dollars per
year ($985M
last year) on a tool that hardly anyone understands, and which Google simply
won't explain.
We're familiar with this (concepts that can't be explained in language) in
physics: quantum
mechanics and relativity are at complete odds with our everyday experience and
sense of
reality. We "know" that time is the same time everywhere, but in physics, there
is no
general, universal, standard time. There is only local time, and the rate of
time is
dependant on local conditions of space. A satellite in orbit runs slightly
slower both
because it is moving fast and because it is further way from the mass of the
Earth. Try
explaining that to a born-again Christian who understands the world in terms of
shepards and
kings.
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
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