How to Write Clearly, Think Clearly, and Learn Easily
ai.uga.edu
ai.uga.edu
I really disliked how the author randomly throws in opinions and beliefs like that in a context that didn't really warrant it. I thought I was going to read about epistemology; instead I got a summary of his worldview.
Have to in this case is confined to context of the principle itself, it indicates that you have to do such and such in order to follow the principle.
A learning strategy for history or literature: Subjective judgment is important; careful reasoning is not.
Really, careful reasoning is not required? This is patently false, and probably based on his English and History experiences in high school decades ago. I find that people who say such things rarely have adequate exposure to the subject area. Someone I encounter on a daily basis actually in the CS research community.
If you're not using deductive reasoning in the study of history or literature you're doing something horribly wrong. The authors statement is flat out wrong, no matter how you spin it.
But he isn't presenting some random opinion, he's claiming he's teaching how think clearly and one assumes he's trying to present well by example. Well, strike-three.
-- I think contrary to his rules, I don't think there is any set, global rules for presentation beyond the basic language skills he correctly says are rather in-born. What there are is a series of interlocking conventions and strategies on a per-subject and per-topic basis. Learning those well takes a long time and can't be summarized by a how-to...
I am holding a butter knife to my imaginary 3D-scanner: you have 64px^3 of the resultant image to determine the nature of the object. If you see the tip of my butter knife you'd assume it was a smooth, dull blade with a rounded form. If you saw the middle of the blade you'd know that it was serrated, but would have to speculate about the endpoints and the form of the knife. If you saw the end of the knife, you'd be hard pressed to determine its function; you'd only know that it is rounded, smooth, and roughly 1.5cm thick. Maybe you could guess that it was a knife, but you'd still remain ignorant of its greater nature.
Your knowledge consists of this tiny view of the knife, or else you're privileged to know all knowledge (so that you might approach it without a worldview or paradigm) or to know someone who does.
You cannot study knowledge without studying worldviews, or studying it with a worldview of your own.
2. The comment you replied to did not state that the commentator holds that view, it was merely an observation that they didn't expect certain content in the article.
For example, I might assert that "Tomorrow, the gravitational constant be the same as it is today." This seems like a fact: we have pretty strong theoretical justification for it, given certain empirical evidence, an assumption of regularity in nature, and the continued predictive success of the general theory of relativity. However, if tomorrow the gravitational constant is slightly different to what it is today, then although no (deductive [1]) logical law has been contravened (as would have to be the case if a provable statement turned out to be untrue), my assertion was clearly not a fact.
However, proofs (as in mathematical or logical proofs) are obtained through deductive reasoning, not inductive reasoning, as my statement was. Thus, I would argue, there is nothing wrong with presenting something as a fact which is not provable. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to assert very much at all: the restricted epistemology obtained would rule out all of science, for starters, and might even cast doubt on certain classes of observation statements.
Of course, you may have meant something other by 'provable' than I do, in which case clarification would be appreciated, since you presumably meant something by your assertion that facts must be provable, and it would be nice to know what it was!
[1] It is controversial as to whether a general inductive logic can be formulated.
I'm sure there's better formal language for this, but we could benefit by making a distinction between "facts in principle" and "facts in practice". Let's say a fact in principle is derived from a priori knowledge, whereas a fact in practice is one that we have accepted and depend on in order to make pragmatic decisions and survive. In principle, I believe that I exist but that I cannot prove objective reality exists. In practice, I accept that objective reality exists and that if I stand in front of a bus I will be hit.
I wish they taught me to do this before the 5-paragraph essay format. The latter of which is a useless exercise that has almost no application in real-life writing.
A part of me feels sad that the American schooling system relies so heavily on sub-par standards to teach the basics.
Even the great essayists (MLK Jr. for one) followed this to a degree. Introduce your point, support your point, tie it all together and conclude.
You learn it in what? Like 5th grade or Jr. High? Why would it be the pinnacle of real-life adult writing? But that very simplistic structure is the basis for much more complicated essay formats that you learn about in college (Compare & contrast, cause and effect, argumentative, etc.).
Also, just because some people can run well with 10 pound weights strapped to each leg doesn't mean it's a good idea to run with weights strapped to your legs. I've seen great 5-paragraph essays, but then again, I've also seen some great Visual Basic programs as well. These things serve as great starting points, but it is important to progress beyond them as you become more educated.
i've heard the basic "introduction, narration, .." - structure in school, but it sounds to me when you say 5para essay you really mean an essay with five paragraphs.
Popper’s principle implies: (1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable. They have to say what will not happen. Beware of vague predictions that are compatible with any outcome!
But that is Popper's view as to the demarcation of science. Popper was not of the view that science is the only realm of legitimate knowledge. And it's in conflict with:
If all knowledge depends on physical measurement, then not only do you lose truth, beauty, and love, you also lose mathematics, logic, and even epistemology!
Startups are generally based on some hypothesis (like "people want to communicate by multicasting 140-character messages"). Not refutable, exactly, but testable by building a company around it. Smart founders keep track of their hypotheses and are always looking for evidence for and against them.
You know if you still like it, but you don't know if it is beautiful. You might like ugly things.
When we say "X is beautiful", it is actually shorthand for "Lots of people find X beautiful", or "The consensus is that X is found to be beautiful".
/aspie
Not everyone would agree to this. There are people who believe that objective beauty really is "out there" in the world, independent of human judgement.
Your opinion is very fashionable at the moment, particularly among academics and intellectuals, and similar arguments are applied to morality and anything else not subject to empirical investigation. But as I said, this way of thinking is by no means universal.
If you believe in god, space aliens, etc., we can shift the admirer of beauty to another perceiver, but still, without the perceiver there is no concept of beauty ascribed to the object.
People are weirdly insecure about their taste in visual art. Nobody worries "Uh-oh, what if I like music that's actually bad?" I guess at least with bad music, you feel like you have company. If you're into Eminem you'll meet other people with Eminem T-shirts, but you don't see people with Thomas Kinkade or Jeff Koons T-shirts.
In my opinion this single topic is impossible to fit in a presentation. A book is more reasonable format. I would recommend "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
Not some folk-theory or heuristic, but actually understanding the mechanism.
It is not surprising that more effort is required to create more information. I don't see where we need a new theory here.
- VERBOSE: “One of the best things you can do for yourself to improve your writing is to learn how to cut out words that are not necessary.”
- TAUT: “To improve your writing, cut out unnecessary words.”
In at least the senses I care about I don't see any information in TAUT absent from VERBOSE; if you see any such information TAUT please do point it out.
Which is what I was getting at: TAUT prose communicates identical thoughts with fewer words; why is it so difficult and unnatural to generate?
I find this curious. I now have some suspicions but nothing extremely well-formed.
(!) You'd be right that in the context of essays-for-school the target wordcount is predetermined and information is expensive so the lazy satisfy the requirement(s) with the verbal equivalent of double-spacing + jumbo font.
Is there anything to be learned from the structure of the jumbling?
No answers, just getting it out there.
It is easier for the author to convert the PowerPoint into a PDF, but what is easier for the reader is if the information was in HTML/web format. The author should package the information so that it enters our heads as easily as possible.
This is why user-centered interfaces are better than programmer-centered interfaces. The point is to make it easier for the user, not easier for the programmer.
Formatting is last. This is why I like to write in plain text (I use emacs, but that's not really important). When I use something like MS Word, formatting is in your face from the get-go (probably 80% of the toolbar and menu items concern formatting), and I tend to sidetrack into formatting too much at the expense of properly organizing my ideas.
("If you can spell
int main(int argc; char* argv[]);
(I'm not an example. My English was good enough to read books about three years before I learned C.)
I just commented on something else.
(I learned the difference between "its" and "it's" embarrassingly recently, by the way.)
His disdainful view of the value of rhetoric and vicious hostility to the achievements of high culture, or the use of language in artistic ways to express in more aesthetically appealing ways thoughts that can be expressed more "simply" toward largely semantically equivalent ends (from an empirical perspective, anyway) also rubs me the wrong way.
I mean, sure, saying something as tersely as possible is often valuable and a good lesson to teach. It is also often the wrong thing to do or, more likely than being flat-out wrong it simply has costs as well as benefits. What precisely those are depends on what you're trying to achieve with your writing.
Should one take Dr. Covington's suggestions when writing a novel, an interesting anecdote, or a persuasive expository essay, even if one is otherwise partial to the goals of clarity in the thinking and writing that goes into it? Do most writers we consider interesting, compelling, thought-provoking, intriguing, entertaining, etc. follow his stylistic suggestions? Would their writing conserve those essential qualities if they did?
In short, while his objectives may be good lessons for people that write in unclear, logically incoherent or circumlocutory ways, he seems to tend toward very extreme reductions. It is a necessary part of intellectual development to learn to grapple with the complexity that inheres in many facets of existence, and that includes gestalt complexity that cannot be reduced to very simple atoms as, for example, in the ontology Functional Programming preaches. The world is not a giant software construction.
I really don't think that's what Covington meant.
He purports to teach me to "How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily."
I don't buy it.
I found it very clear.
In my experience, to write better, you need to write more. Starting a blog about something I love has greatly improved the quality of my written communication.
> Really important point (from Sir Karl Popper)
A belief isn't warranted unless you could have known if it's not true.
(1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable.
(2) It's your job to test your opinions against evidence.
You should always be looking for evidence that your current beliefs are not correct.
> A student who is only good at one subject is often someone who has only one learning strategy.
"Ask HN: What are your (non-hn-related) hobbies?"
For example, to remember the spelling of Wednesday, I have always pronounced it in my head as "Wedness day".
Perhaps that's why many foreigners write much better English than natives: they don't get to find out the pronunciation before they see the word in writing.
Usually I recognise this as either an incomplete understanding of the topic, or a representation of the problem that I'm not familiar with.
When this happens, I usually make a note of the question or topic, and specific questions I have that are preventing me from understanding the problem, and I seek out different sources of similar knowledge. I find different authors present ideas and concepts in different ways, and sometimes if a concept isn't clear in one text, it's clear in another.
In your specific example, I'd recommend seeking another book or article on neural networks and skim it until you find information on the concept you're stuck with, and see if it can add any pieces to the puzzle. If that fails, sometimes just forgetting about it and proceeding will unlock understanding at random later on, usually in the shower in my case.
I was in a meeting at VeryBigCompany where someone presented a PRD for review. A large Word document, projected. In theory this is a high leverage document; getting things right would make life easier downstream.
I noticed a few spelling errors, and gently pointed them out. I was ignored. Unwisely, no doubt, I sharpened my voice a bit and repeated the comment. The author recorded my comment with the air of someone humoring a small child.
Next I noticed grammatical errors. Some sentences had two plausible meanings; some had none.
To the other participants, the important thing was that the PRD touched on the key concepts. My focus on minutiae was inappropriate.
But to me, the flaws in expression signified flaws in thinking. I think Covington was right in this case, and the thoughts were nonsense too.
It's very important to remember that language is a tool for communicating ideas, if you focus on the language as the 'end' you are forgetting it is only a 'means'.
The fact that you can't spell doesn't mean you're stupid. The fact that you are unable to find a way to correct your spelling does.
Given a set of criteria with objective measures, one can objectively tell if something meets those criteria, or not, or whether it meets more of those criteria, or not. But words like better and good express emotional value judgements. It is, as far as I can tell, impossible to prove that my criteria for what makes something good is objectively better than yours.
E.g., I may think food A is better than food B because it is spicier. You may may think food A is worse than food B for the very same reason. How do you determine whose version of better really is?
http://orgmode.org/manual/Setting-up-Remember-for-Org.html#S...
and: > However some things don't fit nicely into a hierarchy.
sometimes the hyperlink feature of org-mode helps with a non-tree-like structure: http://orgmode.org/manual/Hyperlinks.html#Hyperlinks
Org-mode in Emacs is brilliant for this. Write things as outlines, shift sub-trees around trivially, fold (hide) and un-fold (reveal) subtrees, embed links within your outline, export to text or HTML when needed.
I have yet to find a truly great outlining program yet. (Note: I plan on learning org-mode emacs but I am a vim guy so the initial inertia of learning it is high.)
I rearrange things by writing them down again (in the new order). This also helps to refresh the memory.
It's alright, but not good enough to deserve top spot on HN for hours. Maybe it's just a really slow news day for HN.
Madman - put ideas on paper with no regard for formalities
Architect - organize ideas into a a rough outline
Carpenter - "build" according to the architect's specifications, still with little regard for word choice or grammar
Judge - edit carefully for word choice, syntax, and grammar
It yielded a productivity boon in some areas for me.
Though I smiled when I saw "if you can spell ... int main(int argc; char* argv[]);" -- his first semicolon should be a comma in C. Also: the world is (more or less) spherical, not round. :-)
Especially the difference between lie, lay, laid, lied, lain, layed, and lying !!
* Link to an oversize PDF of your PowerPoint presentation
* Present idea salad in bullet point format
* Use italics and bold to give your argument "turbo boost"
Actual quote: "Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader."
I get so sick of some of the posts on HN by people who seemingly live to save something negative about anything.
But that actual quote is an important point, expressed in few words: many inexperienced writers are "in love with the sound of their own voice" and forget to put themselves in the position of the reader.