Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with.

The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting.

I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation.

We had a very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, and a short grainy video clip of her getting into a plane and smiling and waving.

My question was: Which one of these two media conveys more information about Amelia?

One gave extraordinary detail of her face, eyes, and seemed to many was a much better "fidelity" document. Others noticed that although you couldn't see her face in the video, you could feel from her gait, waving, body language and the way she shook hands _much more_ about her than from the static photo.

Both files are the same size in bytes.

So which one has more "information"? Which one is more "authentic"?

Not to attempt to answer here with a deep dive into phenomenology, but each carries a different kind of information, which can be static, dynamic, or meta-dynamic in higher orders relative to a matrix of assumptions that must be carried forward in parallel by the culture that wants to decode the message later.

I like that Miris tries to explore this by questioning the richness of text. But maybe the question doesn't hold up well under those conditions of investigation - because one might say that a great poet using only a few words might capture a landscape better than a painting, but if our culture drifts toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood we cannot say that the medium itself degraded.

Then there is the value of the written word. While the grainy video may reveal more than the high resolution photograph, the written word may reveal more than a grainy (or high resolution) video. A diary is much better at exposing motivations, emotions, the perceived relevance of events. A newspaper article can articulate the events of a day much better than a film that captures a fragment of time in the framed image of space. It's not that written accounts are necessarily better on these accounts (one could, for example, have a video diary). It is simply that they turn out to be better than the often fragmentary accounts from higher fidelity sources.

(It is also worth noting that these higher fidelity sources are often left to decay or are intentionally destroyed due to the difficulty and expense of maintaining them.)

I agree. My written travel journals are far more interesting than the pictures, because they show how I actually felt while I was there, with all the little stories that go with the trip.

I get what the author is trying to say, and I certainly agree. Sometimes you simply need it to look a certain way or use an image that cannot be summarized in text in a meaningful way in order to get your point across.

All those monks slaving away doing doodles in the margins weren't just staving off carpal tunnel. There's meaning there you can't get any other way. Before Man could write, Man made art.

The other HN article about "plaintext only" I also agree with. HTML is the synthesis of the two. Sometimes I forget what a great idea and a blessing HTML is. Even if you don't have a browser that can render it, reading an HTML document isn't difficult if it isn't festooned with auto-generated nonsense.

A digital format needs to be as simple as possible. If you need a 1000 page long definition for the word document format to be able to get the information out of it, it's not really good for anything when the format is forgotten.

one might say that a great poet using only a few words might capture a landscape better than a painting, but if our culture drifts toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood we cannot say that the medium itself degraded.

That has little to do with the medium. If the painter takes as much effort as the poet, and the viewer as much time and effort as the reader, just as much information and emotion can be gleaned from the painting as the poem.

The medium can matter in both cases, in the sense that the medium is not just the format, but also the cultural context of interpretation. There can be subtleties in word choice that evoke shared stories, or word connotations or otherwise make reference outside the work itself. You can have the same references in the form of visual symbols, stylistic choices or more. The viewer/reader must make much more effort to gain that cultural context for interpretation, which may very well be lost or degraded over time.

I would posit that while a painting has can be very high context, that the tendency is for poetry to be even more context dependent. Transplanted outside its native culture, I suspect visual works (again, on the margin) can be grasped with more depth by the viewer than than a reader of the (on the margin) poem.

> very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart

I thought photo quality was rather meh until the 50s or at least the 40s? Even with large films the results are often muddy in olden shots—while 70 mm movie film from the 60s will probably still be redigitized into super-duper-hd formats in the late 21st century (e.g. https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0).

There are a bunch of crisp photographs from the late 30s. The hard part was getting the subject to stay still long enough and not blur the background, since the higher resolution / finer grain required a longer exposure time / wider aperture. You can check out various archives for examples, https://www.shorpy.com/ is one.

This is not quite correct... For motion picture film, yes, anything older than the 70mm film you're talking about tends to be low-resolution because of the physical constraints of moving a foot or more of film through a camera each second. However, still photos from that era were much better - the limitations of film stocks were lighting, and with enough light to gather, a large format photo could be extremely sharp and high-resolution (if that was the priority). It sounds like this is referring to a formal portrait setting, with potentially very bright studio lighting and high quality film, so it could easily be sharper than all but very recent digital cameras (as large-format film still is).

I think the thought experiment still "works" (as much as philosophers can say something useful about the question it poses) even if the photo was upscaled.

Yeah, it was taken in like 1938 or something. Scanned using modern gear. Of course, it's surprising how much detail comes out of chemical photography of that era. But you're right, the "resolution" is arbitrary and probably oversampled.

Have a look at Ansel Adam's photography. The sharpness is outstanding.

It would be interesting to compare the video and the photo to a similarly-sized excerpt of her writing.

I'm curious : what is "meta-dynamic" information?

Good question. So as I see it: something that's about generative behaviours. For example: The rules that describe the dynamics of generative systems like Collatz (n%2==0 ? n' = n/2 : n'=3*n+1) there's specific integers that make it work while for a Lorenz attractor you'd have three floats that could take different initial values. That would be a conversation about "meta-dynamics".

Or maybe, what changes are behind systems that change?

ngl I am also curious about meta-dynamic information and I do not think this response helped me understand the definition much.

Do you mean the rules for Collatz are the meta-dynamic information? because from the rules we can generate additional information dynamically?

Are you able to describe it a different, less mathematical, way maybe?

for example, can meta-dynamic information be observed by seeing the way someone jumps up and down?

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