Long live the aphorism! Aphorisms are philosophy with brevity.
For being so short, it's amazing how much work can go into editing aphorisms (I have a collection myself). It's also amazing that so much garbage can be hidden by flowery language.
You have now shaken my confidence in the quality of the emails I have sent you....
I agree with this, but would add that there are other important linguistic subskills which you have not named, both known and undiscovered. Exposition and condensation both reduce (not uniquely) to smaller skills.
There is no real evolutionary imperative left to being or becoming a more well rounded human being. Cogs plugged into the industrial machine do really well for themselves in terms of anything that the hindbrain really wants - status, power, wealth, sex, relationships. That, I believe, is the reason behind the fall of literacy as you define it.
Interestingly, please note that tests for management institutes still check for reading comprehension and written essays, which use condensation and exposition skills.
I would argue that the practice of Spaced Repetition (e.g. with flashcard software like Anki, Mnemosyne, or SuperMemo) bears some similarities to processes described in this post. Could such a practice take back what was lost with Gutenberg? I think so.
The process of converting a source text into spaced repetition flashcards, if it is done effectively as described by Piotr Wozniak, involves a considerable deal of deconstruction and analysis of language. Lots of information must be deconstructed and made into many different precise flashcards with few words for each individual card. In a way, each card represents a cause and effect relationship, a small cog in the greater working body of language/knowledge.
The practice of actively producing language with flashcards may also, as Venkatesh says, "cultivate an appreciation of language as a medium for performance." One does one's SRS flashcard reviews every day for the long-term benefit. It becomes a medium for treating language as "a skill that can be indefinitely developed," with enhanced support from the memory algorithms built into the software.
Not coincidentally, some of the first uses of spaced repetition flashcard software, and to this day some of the most popular uses, were for learning computer programming--the linguistic derivative found in "high culture" as Venkatesh says. The method is particularly useful for such endeavors...or so I read.
Either way, spaced repetition when done correctly involves thought processes characterized by active deconstruction and use of language, not simply mindless exposure and repetition. The only thing it significantly lacks that comes to mind is a process of communal engagement and narrative thinking/creation.
and also...thank you venkatesh for taking the time to write this insightful post.
"To learn to think with language, to become literate in the sense of linguistically sophisticated, you must work hard to unlearn everything built on the foundation of literacy-as-reading-and-writing."
Over several years of high school English class in New Zealand we had 'Statement, Example, eXplanation' (with the accompanying acronym S.E.X., how's that for an awesome mnemonic) drilled into us as the 'correct' sequence to use in essay writing, without actually understanding anything of tension and resolution, expansion and compactification.
It took me until my final years of university to begin to unlearn this and actually understand what I was writing - I can only wonder how many people in my city today are working in business or as civil servants, still using the same old techniques.
Games have the potential to combine the alacrity of post-printing-press, language-as-one-dimensional-signal with the recombinant meaning-search algorithm of the deep literacy you describe.
By the way I just spend a week in Isreal designing some language games for this company: www.gingersoftware.com
I think ESL speakers are more canny on the meaning of the English language than your average Yalee.
This post moved me to abandon lethargy and sponsor Ribbonfarm (for the second time). Thanks.
It was difficult for me to read through this, at times: the neuronal fireworks it provoked were hard to see past. In my muddled, illiterate mind, one of the many thoughts that rocketed past my field of perception was "hmmm... Condensation, exposition, re-combination, etc. I wonder what the relationship of all that is to Shannon, compression, encryption, that sort of thing..."
Condensation faces the same hard limits that all data compression does. It will be lossy, lossless, or need to use pointers to data assumed to be shared.
Lossy is form over function. Scratch the surface, and the sentiment is either trivial or not generally true. Political soundbites are lossy. So are many aphorisms and 'wisdoms', both ancient and modern.
Lossless is what Einstein must have meant when he said that "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". It has limited scope for novel, complex, or illegible phenomena.
The most interesting (and hardest) case is the use of pointers. A good haiku for the right audience is an easy example. [Musical composition could also probably be seen as a series of pointers to emotional states, which together produce a complex cocktail of joy and fear and longing and defiance.] Well-done, these could link entire families of related ideas together, and with said families unlikely to be exactly identical between originator and recipient, some useful mutations of ideas could be introduced (with natural selection on further retransmission?). The downside is that pointers rely on there being some commonality. Far from being cross-cultural, their lossless form is highly culture-depndent and somewhat inward looking. They are riffs, rather than revolutions.
All three take a lot of effort to create, and the last two take a lot of effort to unpack as well. I doubt that there was a time in history when a large number of people were capable or motivated enough to do it. So, perhaps it is not that we have lost literacy, but that we have not increased it the way we thought we had.
"For brevity is very good, Where we are, or are not understood." - Samuel Butler, Hudibras
I can only concur with your conclusion of the state of (il)literacy today. I am intelligent and well-educated, and I can certainly read & write, but I find it hard to turn my thoughts into writing or express the ideas I've read about. So how do I become literate?
First of all, a prediction: the core idea of this post will form a part of your third book (if not second).
Second, a wish: some scholar or expert commenter should either endorse the brilliance and originality of your ideas above or provide a solid counterview.
Floating in my head right now are various thought-ticklers from two books and hence I see connections with them.
1. Just finished reading 'The Element' by Sir Ken Robinson, which comprehensively covers the strengths approach and takes it further. It adds the third dimension of 'opportunity' to 'aptitude' and 'passion'.
Vocabulary is a basic language skill while exposition and condensation involves understanding, assimilation, reflection and of course, a richer vocabulary and language skills. Some traits (talent themes) make people want to and adept at playing with concepts and expressing them in original ways. Some people may have intelligences in other areas.
2. Am somewhere in the second half of 'Tempo'. I wonder if a higher ability of exposition and condensation would make somebody form and stick too early to a key organizing insight, or, would it enable and encourage more flexible exploration and therefore arrive at a better cheap trick.
P.S. A example of ghana patha (of Gayatri mantra) can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piiIOIj8hXY
Is there any possibility that various pathas(ghan,dhwaja,jata) preserved the correct word and its vibhakti(hope i am using the right word here) because of Sandhi rules that apply between two(or more) words?
I hope the question is clear.If it is not forget it.
"You can have exceptional musical ability without knowing how to read music. And conversely, you might have no musical ability whatsoever, but still be able to read and write musical notation and translate back and forth between the keyboard and paper."
I'd call the basic skill "literacy", and the (inate and/or practiced) talent "eloquence" or maybe rhetoric. The French have "esprit" which can be translated as "wit", but doesn't necessarily have the humorous connotation. Finding the 'mot juste' is the talent I think you're talking about.
Redefining literacy (or splitting its definition into old combo-literacy and new basic and advanced literacies) seems unnecessarily complicated.
Reading further, I see you use "transcription" and "literacy". And there may in fact be political/rhetorical value in demeaning what is commonly called "literacy" to "transcription", and elevating the word "literacy" to the higher order skills. So feel free to delete both of my comments.
A couple notes:
In "Antifragility", Taleb talks about "oral tradition" as being anti-fragile (with its fragile counterpart being "e-books"), you probably hit the nail on the head as to why. But I digress.
What you're talking about seems to be the meaning of "critical thinking." But the cringeworthy fact is that the word "critical thinking" is now just a buzzword (for lack of a better word.)
About stimulus-response linguistics, I had an argument that touches on the nature of this. I was talking about (please forgive the cliche) the problems of consumerism, and I got the response that if that ethos were to stop there would be "no economy."
In this instance, the concept of "economy" was neutered from any and all narrative contexts that define its substance, and so it was left as a syllogism with a single value attached to it. The basic nature of this being that most educated people say "but X because Y", having actually turned X and Y into stand-alone conceptual entities.
Then there are the times we superficially get the demand "define X". I'm not saying that we shouldn't be clear in what we're communicating (and there are definitely times where a definition is an order), but sometimes a concept is an open-ended narrative that connects to consequences that are easier to understand when seen as an interlocking process. Above all, we sometimes have to understand meaning through the process of reading, such as with Derrida or Wittgenstein; the biggest problem with analytic philosophy is that unlike science, it's simultaneously dealing with what I'll call "background semantics" and "foreground semantics" simultaneously.
The short version of those few paragraphs is that sometimes an educated person says "breaking windows is good for the economy because it puts people to work" and all you want to do is yell "But what does that actually *mean*!?"
Venkat, I have only recently discovered you and your writings. I have been riveted. This is brilliant work and clearly what you should be doing. This particular analysis was no exception, and I have already recommended it to numerous friends as a 'must read'.
I do have one disagreement big enough that I feel I should address it. It is in response to the overall, historical picture you draw with the piece.
From my take on it, what you are implying is that following Gutenberg we traded a society full of literate, philosophical types (using "literate" in the deep sense in which you use it, defined as condensation and exposition), for a society full of illiterate (or, only "literate" in the now-customary, shallow sense of knowing how to read and write) button-pushers.
While this may be true in the upper classes, where deep-literacy may have ebbed and become degraded in the wake of the spread of the modern educational paradigm with its emphasis on shallow-literacy (deep-illiteracy), what actually seems to have happened underneath the upper class is the rise of a middle and poor class shallow-literacy where before there was simply abject illiteracy (illiteracy in both the deep and shallow senses). This still seems like progress of a kind worth calling "progress", as opposed to regression.
Nonetheless, I don't think this correction damages what you are ultimately driving at: that it is time for the classes below the upper classes (or all the classes) to invest their energy on something that looks more like the deep-literacy practiced much more broadly by the upper classes of the past, probably using the post-Gutenberg shallow-literacy as a foundation. I bring this up only because I think it is important to get the broad details of the long-term historical view right.
Perhaps my reading this implication into your piece, however, was a misread. I confess that, as fascinating as I found the piece, I do not presently have time to read it again to determine if my criticism is poorly founded. You, being the piece's author, can probably do so more quickly that I can reread it.
Thoughts?
This is your first post that made me feel justified in heartily recommending your blog to my colleagues (who are mostly from the Singularity Institute and to a lesser extent LessWrong). Yours is the only non-technical blog I've found thus far that I feel merits such an unqualified recommendation. I'm perturbed that there aren't more people doing this kind of, hm, "literate" cultural analysis;—or perhaps there are, but with a conceptual system I don't understand, or in a community I haven't heard of?
On that note, (and perhaps this should have gone in an email where it doesn't take up comment-section-space?): You mentioned Foucault and Derrida: do you have any advice, perhaps in a previous blog post or comment, on where to begin digging into the post-structuralist/postmodernist constellation of perspectives? I suppose I'm looking for some well-developed hybrid of social psychology and memetics that is hindered neither by (respectively) the necessity of statistical support, nor sometimes-unmotivated analogies to garden-variety Darwinian selection.
On an unrelated note, I believe you have a general outlook similar to Nick Szabo's. You might want to check out his blog at http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ , polished essays at http://szabo.best.vwh.net/. His intellectual background is similar to yours—lawyer, financial adviser, programmer, amateur historian—and his interests are too, but he tends to focus more on economics and especially the history of institutions. (I think anyone who explains the value of tradition by reference to algorithmic information theory is a person worth checking out.)
Excellent exposition piece. My only observation, as a lawyer who studied rhetoric as an undergrad, is that you (society) gets what you pays for. By that, I mean that the sort of literacy you uphold was the fruit of professional Roman and Greek rhetors and Irish fili and bards (in the Western tradition). They practiced their craft because they were paid, and paid well, to do it.
Now, we pay lawyers like my confreres to obfuscate (with jargon) or clarify in very precise ways in service of binding or loosing the application of various laws. The client won't pay for exposition or condensation.
Or we reward hip-hop artists with millions of dollars for their own particular brand of rhyming jargon.
Branding may be the last area where condensation occurs in an intentional way, as advertising seeks to pack sound bites with dense layers of meaning, emotion and meme-resonance through purposeful construction. And as anyone who's watched the Superbowl knows, advertising pays big.
I won't credit Twitter with the renaissance of condesation literacy until tweets are routinely compensated for their content rather than serving as the background for advertising or whatever other monetization vehicle Twitter ends up spawning.
I was curious about the about this negative comparison of popular culture with the past. If anyone knows about more detailed notes on this, it would be nice to have links. The claim seems to be that it has become less diverse and that a smaller proportion of people are in a narrator/creator/editor role. I was confused by the Bali example, since it would be surprising if a culture of that size didn't have its own narrative variations which should be true even tody. But from anecdotal experience(not Bali specifically), it is my impression that there were more individual narrative traditions at smaller levels (town/village) as compared to the present day.
The second aspect seems more clear. Larry Lessig, incidentally, also talks about this in intros to his copyright talks.
About the eigenvector reference, I didn't understand what the linear map(whose eigenvectors you are taking) refers to? Or do you just mean that the text is a superposition of the basic elements inside meaning space?
I love where you are going with this. Have you read "Hamlet's Mill"? An essential counterpart to the Mcluhan|McKenna|Joyce (what is it with the Celts and language? Must have something to do with the bards) explorations of language.
"Hamlet's Mill" is an analysis of the technical language of myth (and how its codes relates to astronomy) - and reveals that myth is programming. I think you will find it fascinating...
Venkat,
I read your work regularly but do not comment regularly, I'm afraid due to external constraints. But I've become a supporter - not specifically for the content of this article, but for your overall content. I particularly enjoyed your map you published on the Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region and am particularly stunned by the space in the noosphere (blogosphere) that we both occupy - very similar, but arrived at independently. Interesting, coincidental, or simply Google's decision that we fall into user profile #15876, but curious nonetheless. Reading this post makes me lament what was lost - I dismissed poetry when I was younger as an effete, self-indulgent art form, but now see it as a vehicle to craft great meaning (and multiple layers) and wish I had the time or wherewithal to explore it. The loss of high culture seems to me most lamentable, particularly with its vulgar and venal replacement; Fukuyama's Economic Man. With our society's obsession with productivity and efficiency (over resilience and assumedly anti-fragility - haven't read Taleb's book yet) we are evolving happily towards H.G. Well's Moorlocks - technically minded barbarians in perpetual servitude to machines/institutions/corporations/whatever. In the 80's-90's, in the music and video fields, first with the sampler and then cheap video processing hardware, with there was an explosion of exposition and condensation in the electronic music/music video scene, with musical motifs first borrowed, then abjectly stolen, then modified and finally re-created as a new work on its own right, which would then undergo a similar cycle. Changes to the copyright laws squashed this cycle which was starting to produce some interesting results in the early 90's. (c.f. negativland) A derivative style was squashed in the efforts to maintain mass culture. Fortunately, long tail effects seem to be fragmenting that hopelessly as there are fewer and fewer ties to mass culture as we all fractionate to our own self-reinforcing islands in the net. In a world of sound bites and aggressive video editing, perhaps it is smarter for one to focus on the behaviorist game of aversion and attraction - after all, it isn't what you say, its what people hear. And in a world without true literacy, moving the 999/1000 to respond in an expected way to what is said is the point of the exercise. That one outlier can be ignored - no-one will listen to him (or her) anyway. Good stuff. Keep writing.
Warning: I am not technical, nor am I an academic.
I'm going to tell you about two things that I've been doing on a regular basis that I feel are increasing my "literacy" as defined by you in this post.
1) Speaking at Toastmasters. I find that coming up with something compelling, provocative, informative, inspiring, wise, entertaining, and emotional (not necessarily in the same speech, of course), and saying it to a group of people in six to eight minutes, makes me more literate. It is very hard. It's hard to expand upon one idea, and it's hard to take a bunch of ideas and condense them. It's hard to edit. It's hard to simplify. Being good in six minutes is way more difficult that it seems if you've never tried it.
2) Making up stories for my three year-old daughter using a series of illustrated cards. The set we have is from a company called eeBoo. They are called, "Tell Me a Story - Fairy Tale Mix up." Telling a good story with these cards (no matter how many of them I use, and no matter the order) is one of the most difficult things I have done in my life. I'm 37 and have always considered myself to be moderately creative. I now realize that my creativity is lacking in a major way, and I can appreciate how the difficulty of packing meaning into pictures, aphorisms, poems, etc. while telling these stories. We have been spoon-fed stories and characters for so long, that breaking away from our "go-to's" is painful. I would challenge anyone to use these cards with their kids. You will get more out of the experience than they will.
Thanks, Venkat. Super post!
Excellent ideas. As a grad student in translation studies, I'd like to point out a few things about "the fall of high culture."
"Instead of condensing new knowledge into wisdom, we began encrypting it into jargon." Arguably, this was happening long before the printing press. Scribes often made plenty of mistakes when transcribing texts or speeches. These "errors," which often resulted in texts that sounded like jargon, were the result of various factors, including lack of familiarity with the subject, lack of spelling conventions, lack of grammatical/linguistic knowledge (which I know you might object to), speculation about the ideas being transcribed, or simple misunderstandings.
"Exposition as creative performance gave way to critical study as meaning-extraction." In the history of translation at least, the idea of "meaning extraction" or "meaning transfer" also predates the printing press. Augustine in the 6th century was already talking about signs and the signified, which was a notion revisited more than 1000 years later by the linguist Saussure and his followers, who treated language as a tool providing a common means of referring to things. But it is interesting to note that, in Europe, talk of "meaning transfer" in translation did erupt right after the printing press came around.
"Natural philosophy turned into science, and lost its literary character." Ever read Darwin?
"Interpretation and re-enactment became restricted to narrowly political ends." I think this is a bit too sweeping a generalization, although an interesting one. In any case, interpretation and translation were used for political ends long before the printing press. Alfred the Great of Wessex in the 9th century used translation and literature to secure political goals (I just completed some research on this). The old story of the Septuagint also indicates that translation was a type of political exchange.
it´s a great work
The "hardest problem of science" the origin of language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
Tempus fidgets.
I'm always interested to read someone else explicate an idea that I've had floating around for awhile but which was beyond my ability at the time to actually explain (Thank you Mr. Polanyi). It triggered a few thoughts which I felt like sharing. I was reminded of Jose Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, maybe it's not connected, since I think I'll need to read it a few more times to assimilate the ideas, but it came to mind.
I also recalled a conversation with an old roommate while I was slogging through his copy of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He commented that Lawrence wrote in a very British manner, and that every hundred pages or so there would be one idea worth remembering, but that one idea was so fantastic that it made the hundred pages worth it. I guess you'd say the expositional element is there, though outside maybe Mao the condensation element is missing.
Another thought was remembering both my reading of Clausewitz's On War and my experience of the Air Force's attempt to distill his writings into something to pass on to cadets. The Air Force managed to turn his concept of Economy of Force on its head. Instead of the original idea of using all resources to their maximum utility, it became using the least amount necessary to get the job done.
I wonder if the loss of a common education (classics, Greek and Roman history/philosophy, etc as a Western example) also factors in to some extent. It might provide a common set of building blocks that everyone is familiar with which allows for them to be reassembled in new and different ways, whereas we seem to have splintered into a multitude of different specialties with little to no cross flow between them. It's hard to write deeply when you can't depend on your readers to understand that you're stealing a line from Shakespeare, which was pulled from the bible, and which was used in an entirely different way by this poet. Whole levels of meaning are lost when that common orientation is stripped. A small cut off culture like you describe would still have a similar orientation which allows for the growth of literacy.
What I am getting at is similar to the lossy vs. lossless recording methods mentioned above. Meaning depends on the context of what is written, which includes the reader's background. Strip that background and what was a lossless method loses layers of meaning. I think others have said some of the same things as I have so I'll leave this here, Just remember, what I wrote means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
Interesting extension of this: the rise in online education inevitably will focus the mass market of education on the compilation of facts and data, rather than the critical thinking around that data. As billions learn facts and data from the best professors in the world, critical thinking will atrophy.
This is probably the most flattering interpretation of my decision to become a mathematician.
My personal writing style is very unsuited to modern literacy; I love to condense but am not very good at exposition. And every time I sit down to write, I end up thinking instead.
One English professor of mine told me that when she was an undergrad, her professor would let students skip the final exam if you came to his office and recited Milton's poem Lycidas. I took that to mean you would learn more about literature from this exercise than from his lectures and could prove this better than regurgitating his musings in a blue book.
I had been mulling over delving back into Nietzsche for about a week before reading this piece, and this treatment of dense writing and aphorism was enough to push me over the edge. This obliged in an unexpected way; just thirty pages into Zarathustra, we get "that everyone may learn to read in the long run corrupts not only writing but thinking" and "whoever writes in blood and aphorism does not want to be read but learned by heart." This is from 1883, just prior to your tentative date for the shift to post-literacy; unsurprisingly, given his skepticism of the mass man and his isolated perspective (as well as writing style!), Nietzsche seems to have been very attuned to the sea-change taking place. I even think he's got a line to condense this n-thousand word exposition to two sentences:
"In the mountains, the shortest path is from peak to peak, but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be the peaks, and those who are addressed, tall and lofty."
As a side note, I think this can be one of the great strengths of religion, particularly the ones that venerate a sacred text (rather than the ones that worship the text, like most fundamentalisms). My mother is a pastor and seminary professor, and ensured that as I was gaining first-order, functional literacy as a child, I was also taking note of word choice and order, structural composition, multiple layers of meaning, and other second-order literacy concerns. Though no longer religious, this appreciation for literary density has stuck with me in a way that I think is much more likely if one is taught that the importance of reading lies in the ability to parse an encoded tradition, rather than get current events from a newspaper (or worse, to "find the theme to this short story and argue for it." A parody at best).
Might be worthwhile to think through Knuth's literate programming with this in mind.
Thank you, I am truly impressed.
I was linked here from quora.
that is a perfect one-liner to describe what is happening. I have struggled to find the words to descibe it, and there they are. perfect
A few comments:
1. Can you provide any reference for your interpretation of Indian combinatorial recitation practices? A "null hypothesis" would be that such elaborate practices were simply an aberration serving no useful purpose that was developed once and then persisted solely by conservatism of tradition.
2. "Sites like tvtropes.org are sustaining basic literacy skills."
This sentence reveals imprecision of your concept of "literacy". TvTropes is all about *semantic* literacy, that is, being able to recognize cultural contexts and references. As such, it has no inherently "linguistic" component - one can be well-versed in modern memes and popular cultures in exactly the same way that ancient tribesmen could be well-versed in their own local culture, poems, oral tradition etc. If this is what you mean by "literacy", it's completely unoriginal (and schoolteachers have been ranting about this kind of "illiteracy" since the beginning of time), but as I understand, your concept of "literacy" is closer to syntactic or low-level aspects of language, somehow more related to the structure of language, not the outside reality that language refers to (in this respect, I see no particular structural difference between quoting Shakespeare quoting Bible and quoting "Casablanca" or Tarantino's movies). Or am I missing something?
3. "Mathematics and programming, two specialized derivatives of language that I consider part of high culture, retained the characteristics of oral cultures of old, with an emphasis on recombinant manipulation, terseness, generality and portability."
Can you elucidate that? It seems a rather far-fetched claim.
"Curiously, I find the language of illiterate (reading-writing sense) to usually be much clearer. When I listen to some educated people talk, I get the curious feeling that the words don’t actually matter. That it is all a behaviorist game of aversion and attraction and basic affect overlaid on the workings of a mechanical process. That mechanical process is enacted by instrumental meaning-machines manufactured in schools to generate, and respond appropriately to, a narrow class of linguistic stimuli without actually understanding anything.
When I am in a public space dominated by mass culture and its native inhabitants, such as a mall, I feel like I am surrounded by philosophical zombies. Yes, they talk and listen, but it is not clear to me that what they are using is language."
Yes...yes...sort of.
I understand and sympathize and disapprove, but I don't think this is new. I think it's always been the case.
Years ago I came across a startling quote by Chomsky, something like: "The primary function of language is not communication." At first I was puzzled, but now I think I understand what he means, and it's exactly what Venkat is talking about. Most of what passes between us when talk to each other is not information, it's something else, something social. Like a very sophisticated system of grunts. It only seems odd to those of us who need something different in our interactions.
Very interesting post, which I've responded to . . .
I really enjoyed this article. It was well written and provoked a lot of reflection.
I'm now curious to know more and I would love to read more about this topic. Would you be willing to share some of the sources you used for your research?
Long live the aphorism! Aphorisms are philosophy with brevity.
For being so short, it's amazing how much work can go into editing aphorisms (I have a collection myself). It's also amazing that so much garbage can be hidden by flowery language.
You have now shaken my confidence in the quality of the emails I have sent you....
I agree with this, but would add that there are other important linguistic subskills which you have not named, both known and undiscovered. Exposition and condensation both reduce (not uniquely) to smaller skills.
There is no real evolutionary imperative left to being or becoming a more well rounded human being. Cogs plugged into the industrial machine do really well for themselves in terms of anything that the hindbrain really wants - status, power, wealth, sex, relationships. That, I believe, is the reason behind the fall of literacy as you define it.
Interestingly, please note that tests for management institutes still check for reading comprehension and written essays, which use condensation and exposition skills.
I would argue that the practice of Spaced Repetition (e.g. with flashcard software like Anki, Mnemosyne, or SuperMemo) bears some similarities to processes described in this post. Could such a practice take back what was lost with Gutenberg? I think so.
The process of converting a source text into spaced repetition flashcards, if it is done effectively as described by Piotr Wozniak, involves a considerable deal of deconstruction and analysis of language. Lots of information must be deconstructed and made into many different precise flashcards with few words for each individual card. In a way, each card represents a cause and effect relationship, a small cog in the greater working body of language/knowledge.
The practice of actively producing language with flashcards may also, as Venkatesh says, "cultivate an appreciation of language as a medium for performance." One does one's SRS flashcard reviews every day for the long-term benefit. It becomes a medium for treating language as "a skill that can be indefinitely developed," with enhanced support from the memory algorithms built into the software.
Not coincidentally, some of the first uses of spaced repetition flashcard software, and to this day some of the most popular uses, were for learning computer programming--the linguistic derivative found in "high culture" as Venkatesh says. The method is particularly useful for such endeavors...or so I read.
Either way, spaced repetition when done correctly involves thought processes characterized by active deconstruction and use of language, not simply mindless exposure and repetition. The only thing it significantly lacks that comes to mind is a process of communal engagement and narrative thinking/creation.
and also...thank you venkatesh for taking the time to write this insightful post.
"To learn to think with language, to become literate in the sense of linguistically sophisticated, you must work hard to unlearn everything built on the foundation of literacy-as-reading-and-writing."
Over several years of high school English class in New Zealand we had 'Statement, Example, eXplanation' (with the accompanying acronym S.E.X., how's that for an awesome mnemonic) drilled into us as the 'correct' sequence to use in essay writing, without actually understanding anything of tension and resolution, expansion and compactification.
It took me until my final years of university to begin to unlearn this and actually understand what I was writing - I can only wonder how many people in my city today are working in business or as civil servants, still using the same old techniques.
Games have the potential to combine the alacrity of post-printing-press, language-as-one-dimensional-signal with the recombinant meaning-search algorithm of the deep literacy you describe.
By the way I just spend a week in Isreal designing some language games for this company: www.gingersoftware.com
I think ESL speakers are more canny on the meaning of the English language than your average Yalee.
This post moved me to abandon lethargy and sponsor Ribbonfarm (for the second time). Thanks.
It was difficult for me to read through this, at times: the neuronal fireworks it provoked were hard to see past. In my muddled, illiterate mind, one of the many thoughts that rocketed past my field of perception was "hmmm... Condensation, exposition, re-combination, etc. I wonder what the relationship of all that is to Shannon, compression, encryption, that sort of thing..."
Condensation faces the same hard limits that all data compression does. It will be lossy, lossless, or need to use pointers to data assumed to be shared.
Lossy is form over function. Scratch the surface, and the sentiment is either trivial or not generally true. Political soundbites are lossy. So are many aphorisms and 'wisdoms', both ancient and modern.
Lossless is what Einstein must have meant when he said that "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". It has limited scope for novel, complex, or illegible phenomena.
The most interesting (and hardest) case is the use of pointers. A good haiku for the right audience is an easy example. [Musical composition could also probably be seen as a series of pointers to emotional states, which together produce a complex cocktail of joy and fear and longing and defiance.] Well-done, these could link entire families of related ideas together, and with said families unlikely to be exactly identical between originator and recipient, some useful mutations of ideas could be introduced (with natural selection on further retransmission?). The downside is that pointers rely on there being some commonality. Far from being cross-cultural, their lossless form is highly culture-depndent and somewhat inward looking. They are riffs, rather than revolutions.
All three take a lot of effort to create, and the last two take a lot of effort to unpack as well. I doubt that there was a time in history when a large number of people were capable or motivated enough to do it. So, perhaps it is not that we have lost literacy, but that we have not increased it the way we thought we had.
"For brevity is very good, Where we are, or are not understood." - Samuel Butler, Hudibras
I can only concur with your conclusion of the state of (il)literacy today. I am intelligent and well-educated, and I can certainly read & write, but I find it hard to turn my thoughts into writing or express the ideas I've read about. So how do I become literate?
First of all, a prediction: the core idea of this post will form a part of your third book (if not second).
Second, a wish: some scholar or expert commenter should either endorse the brilliance and originality of your ideas above or provide a solid counterview.
Floating in my head right now are various thought-ticklers from two books and hence I see connections with them.
1. Just finished reading 'The Element' by Sir Ken Robinson, which comprehensively covers the strengths approach and takes it further. It adds the third dimension of 'opportunity' to 'aptitude' and 'passion'.
Vocabulary is a basic language skill while exposition and condensation involves understanding, assimilation, reflection and of course, a richer vocabulary and language skills. Some traits (talent themes) make people want to and adept at playing with concepts and expressing them in original ways. Some people may have intelligences in other areas.
2. Am somewhere in the second half of 'Tempo'. I wonder if a higher ability of exposition and condensation would make somebody form and stick too early to a key organizing insight, or, would it enable and encourage more flexible exploration and therefore arrive at a better cheap trick.
P.S. A example of ghana patha (of Gayatri mantra) can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piiIOIj8hXY
Is there any possibility that various pathas(ghan,dhwaja,jata) preserved the correct word and its vibhakti(hope i am using the right word here) because of Sandhi rules that apply between two(or more) words?
I hope the question is clear.If it is not forget it.
"You can have exceptional musical ability without knowing how to read music. And conversely, you might have no musical ability whatsoever, but still be able to read and write musical notation and translate back and forth between the keyboard and paper."
I'd call the basic skill "literacy", and the (inate and/or practiced) talent "eloquence" or maybe rhetoric. The French have "esprit" which can be translated as "wit", but doesn't necessarily have the humorous connotation. Finding the 'mot juste' is the talent I think you're talking about.
Redefining literacy (or splitting its definition into old combo-literacy and new basic and advanced literacies) seems unnecessarily complicated.
Reading further, I see you use "transcription" and "literacy". And there may in fact be political/rhetorical value in demeaning what is commonly called "literacy" to "transcription", and elevating the word "literacy" to the higher order skills. So feel free to delete both of my comments.
A couple notes:
In "Antifragility", Taleb talks about "oral tradition" as being anti-fragile (with its fragile counterpart being "e-books"), you probably hit the nail on the head as to why. But I digress.
What you're talking about seems to be the meaning of "critical thinking." But the cringeworthy fact is that the word "critical thinking" is now just a buzzword (for lack of a better word.)
About stimulus-response linguistics, I had an argument that touches on the nature of this. I was talking about (please forgive the cliche) the problems of consumerism, and I got the response that if that ethos were to stop there would be "no economy."
In this instance, the concept of "economy" was neutered from any and all narrative contexts that define its substance, and so it was left as a syllogism with a single value attached to it. The basic nature of this being that most educated people say "but X because Y", having actually turned X and Y into stand-alone conceptual entities.
Then there are the times we superficially get the demand "define X". I'm not saying that we shouldn't be clear in what we're communicating (and there are definitely times where a definition is an order), but sometimes a concept is an open-ended narrative that connects to consequences that are easier to understand when seen as an interlocking process. Above all, we sometimes have to understand meaning through the process of reading, such as with Derrida or Wittgenstein; the biggest problem with analytic philosophy is that unlike science, it's simultaneously dealing with what I'll call "background semantics" and "foreground semantics" simultaneously.
The short version of those few paragraphs is that sometimes an educated person says "breaking windows is good for the economy because it puts people to work" and all you want to do is yell "But what does that actually *mean*!?"
Venkat, I have only recently discovered you and your writings. I have been riveted. This is brilliant work and clearly what you should be doing. This particular analysis was no exception, and I have already recommended it to numerous friends as a 'must read'.
I do have one disagreement big enough that I feel I should address it. It is in response to the overall, historical picture you draw with the piece.
From my take on it, what you are implying is that following Gutenberg we traded a society full of literate, philosophical types (using "literate" in the deep sense in which you use it, defined as condensation and exposition), for a society full of illiterate (or, only "literate" in the now-customary, shallow sense of knowing how to read and write) button-pushers.
While this may be true in the upper classes, where deep-literacy may have ebbed and become degraded in the wake of the spread of the modern educational paradigm with its emphasis on shallow-literacy (deep-illiteracy), what actually seems to have happened underneath the upper class is the rise of a middle and poor class shallow-literacy where before there was simply abject illiteracy (illiteracy in both the deep and shallow senses). This still seems like progress of a kind worth calling "progress", as opposed to regression.
Nonetheless, I don't think this correction damages what you are ultimately driving at: that it is time for the classes below the upper classes (or all the classes) to invest their energy on something that looks more like the deep-literacy practiced much more broadly by the upper classes of the past, probably using the post-Gutenberg shallow-literacy as a foundation. I bring this up only because I think it is important to get the broad details of the long-term historical view right.
Perhaps my reading this implication into your piece, however, was a misread. I confess that, as fascinating as I found the piece, I do not presently have time to read it again to determine if my criticism is poorly founded. You, being the piece's author, can probably do so more quickly that I can reread it.
Thoughts?
This is your first post that made me feel justified in heartily recommending your blog to my colleagues (who are mostly from the Singularity Institute and to a lesser extent LessWrong). Yours is the only non-technical blog I've found thus far that I feel merits such an unqualified recommendation. I'm perturbed that there aren't more people doing this kind of, hm, "literate" cultural analysis;—or perhaps there are, but with a conceptual system I don't understand, or in a community I haven't heard of?
On that note, (and perhaps this should have gone in an email where it doesn't take up comment-section-space?): You mentioned Foucault and Derrida: do you have any advice, perhaps in a previous blog post or comment, on where to begin digging into the post-structuralist/postmodernist constellation of perspectives? I suppose I'm looking for some well-developed hybrid of social psychology and memetics that is hindered neither by (respectively) the necessity of statistical support, nor sometimes-unmotivated analogies to garden-variety Darwinian selection.
On an unrelated note, I believe you have a general outlook similar to Nick Szabo's. You might want to check out his blog at http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ , polished essays at http://szabo.best.vwh.net/. His intellectual background is similar to yours—lawyer, financial adviser, programmer, amateur historian—and his interests are too, but he tends to focus more on economics and especially the history of institutions. (I think anyone who explains the value of tradition by reference to algorithmic information theory is a person worth checking out.)
Excellent exposition piece. My only observation, as a lawyer who studied rhetoric as an undergrad, is that you (society) gets what you pays for. By that, I mean that the sort of literacy you uphold was the fruit of professional Roman and Greek rhetors and Irish fili and bards (in the Western tradition). They practiced their craft because they were paid, and paid well, to do it.
Now, we pay lawyers like my confreres to obfuscate (with jargon) or clarify in very precise ways in service of binding or loosing the application of various laws. The client won't pay for exposition or condensation.
Or we reward hip-hop artists with millions of dollars for their own particular brand of rhyming jargon.
Branding may be the last area where condensation occurs in an intentional way, as advertising seeks to pack sound bites with dense layers of meaning, emotion and meme-resonance through purposeful construction. And as anyone who's watched the Superbowl knows, advertising pays big.
I won't credit Twitter with the renaissance of condesation literacy until tweets are routinely compensated for their content rather than serving as the background for advertising or whatever other monetization vehicle Twitter ends up spawning.
I was curious about the about this negative comparison of popular culture with the past. If anyone knows about more detailed notes on this, it would be nice to have links. The claim seems to be that it has become less diverse and that a smaller proportion of people are in a narrator/creator/editor role.
I was confused by the Bali example, since it would be surprising if a culture of that size didn't have its own narrative variations which should be true even tody. But from anecdotal experience(not Bali specifically), it is my impression that there were more individual narrative traditions at smaller levels (town/village) as compared to the present day.
The second aspect seems more clear. Larry Lessig, incidentally, also talks about this in intros to his copyright talks.
About the eigenvector reference, I didn't understand what the linear map(whose eigenvectors you are taking) refers to? Or do you just mean that the text is a superposition of the basic elements inside meaning space?
I love where you are going with this. Have you read "Hamlet's Mill"? An essential counterpart to the Mcluhan|McKenna|Joyce (what is it with the Celts and language? Must have something to do with the bards) explorations of language.
"Hamlet's Mill" is an analysis of the technical language of myth (and how its codes relates to astronomy) - and reveals that myth is programming. I think you will find it fascinating...
Venkat,
I read your work regularly but do not comment regularly, I'm afraid due to external constraints. But I've become a supporter - not specifically for the content of this article, but for your overall content. I particularly enjoyed your map you published on the Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region and am particularly stunned by the space in the noosphere (blogosphere) that we both occupy - very similar, but arrived at independently. Interesting, coincidental, or simply Google's decision that we fall into user profile #15876, but curious nonetheless.
Reading this post makes me lament what was lost - I dismissed poetry when I was younger as an effete, self-indulgent art form, but now see it as a vehicle to craft great meaning (and multiple layers) and wish I had the time or wherewithal to explore it. The loss of high culture seems to me most lamentable, particularly with its vulgar and venal replacement; Fukuyama's Economic Man. With our society's obsession with productivity and efficiency (over resilience and assumedly anti-fragility - haven't read Taleb's book yet) we are evolving happily towards H.G. Well's Moorlocks - technically minded barbarians in perpetual servitude to machines/institutions/corporations/whatever.
In the 80's-90's, in the music and video fields, first with the sampler and then cheap video processing hardware, with there was an explosion of exposition and condensation in the electronic music/music video scene, with musical motifs first borrowed, then abjectly stolen, then modified and finally re-created as a new work on its own right, which would then undergo a similar cycle. Changes to the copyright laws squashed this cycle which was starting to produce some interesting results in the early 90's. (c.f. negativland) A derivative style was squashed in the efforts to maintain mass culture. Fortunately, long tail effects seem to be fragmenting that hopelessly as there are fewer and fewer ties to mass culture as we all fractionate to our own self-reinforcing islands in the net.
In a world of sound bites and aggressive video editing, perhaps it is smarter for one to focus on the behaviorist game of aversion and attraction - after all, it isn't what you say, its what people hear. And in a world without true literacy, moving the 999/1000 to respond in an expected way to what is said is the point of the exercise. That one outlier can be ignored - no-one will listen to him (or her) anyway.
Good stuff. Keep writing.
Warning: I am not technical, nor am I an academic.
I'm going to tell you about two things that I've been doing on a regular basis that I feel are increasing my "literacy" as defined by you in this post.
1) Speaking at Toastmasters. I find that coming up with something compelling, provocative, informative, inspiring, wise, entertaining, and emotional (not necessarily in the same speech, of course), and saying it to a group of people in six to eight minutes, makes me more literate. It is very hard. It's hard to expand upon one idea, and it's hard to take a bunch of ideas and condense them. It's hard to edit. It's hard to simplify. Being good in six minutes is way more difficult that it seems if you've never tried it.
2) Making up stories for my three year-old daughter using a series of illustrated cards. The set we have is from a company called eeBoo. They are called, "Tell Me a Story - Fairy Tale Mix up." Telling a good story with these cards (no matter how many of them I use, and no matter the order) is one of the most difficult things I have done in my life. I'm 37 and have always considered myself to be moderately creative. I now realize that my creativity is lacking in a major way, and I can appreciate how the difficulty of packing meaning into pictures, aphorisms, poems, etc. while telling these stories. We have been spoon-fed stories and characters for so long, that breaking away from our "go-to's" is painful. I would challenge anyone to use these cards with their kids. You will get more out of the experience than they will.
Thanks, Venkat. Super post!
Excellent ideas. As a grad student in translation studies, I'd like to point out a few things about "the fall of high culture."
"Instead of condensing new knowledge into wisdom, we began encrypting it into jargon."
Arguably, this was happening long before the printing press. Scribes often made plenty of mistakes when transcribing texts or speeches. These "errors," which often resulted in texts that sounded like jargon, were the result of various factors, including lack of familiarity with the subject, lack of spelling conventions, lack of grammatical/linguistic knowledge (which I know you might object to), speculation about the ideas being transcribed, or simple misunderstandings.
"Exposition as creative performance gave way to critical study as meaning-extraction."
In the history of translation at least, the idea of "meaning extraction" or "meaning transfer" also predates the printing press. Augustine in the 6th century was already talking about signs and the signified, which was a notion revisited more than 1000 years later by the linguist Saussure and his followers, who treated language as a tool providing a common means of referring to things. But it is interesting to note that, in Europe, talk of "meaning transfer" in translation did erupt right after the printing press came around.
"Natural philosophy turned into science, and lost its literary character."
Ever read Darwin?
"Interpretation and re-enactment became restricted to narrowly political ends."
I think this is a bit too sweeping a generalization, although an interesting one. In any case, interpretation and translation were used for political ends long before the printing press. Alfred the Great of Wessex in the 9th century used translation and literature to secure political goals (I just completed some research on this). The old story of the Septuagint also indicates that translation was a type of political exchange.
it´s a great work
The "hardest problem of science" the origin of language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
Tempus fidgets.
I'm always interested to read someone else explicate an idea that I've had floating around for awhile but which was beyond my ability at the time to actually explain (Thank you Mr. Polanyi). It triggered a few thoughts which I felt like sharing. I was reminded of Jose Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, maybe it's not connected, since I think I'll need to read it a few more times to assimilate the ideas, but it came to mind.
I also recalled a conversation with an old roommate while I was slogging through his copy of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He commented that Lawrence wrote in a very British manner, and that every hundred pages or so there would be one idea worth remembering, but that one idea was so fantastic that it made the hundred pages worth it. I guess you'd say the expositional element is there, though outside maybe Mao the condensation element is missing.
Another thought was remembering both my reading of Clausewitz's On War and my experience of the Air Force's attempt to distill his writings into something to pass on to cadets. The Air Force managed to turn his concept of Economy of Force on its head. Instead of the original idea of using all resources to their maximum utility, it became using the least amount necessary to get the job done.
I wonder if the loss of a common education (classics, Greek and Roman history/philosophy, etc as a Western example) also factors in to some extent. It might provide a common set of building blocks that everyone is familiar with which allows for them to be reassembled in new and different ways, whereas we seem to have splintered into a multitude of different specialties with little to no cross flow between them. It's hard to write deeply when you can't depend on your readers to understand that you're stealing a line from Shakespeare, which was pulled from the bible, and which was used in an entirely different way by this poet. Whole levels of meaning are lost when that common orientation is stripped. A small cut off culture like you describe would still have a similar orientation which allows for the growth of literacy.
What I am getting at is similar to the lossy vs. lossless recording methods mentioned above. Meaning depends on the context of what is written, which includes the reader's background. Strip that background and what was a lossless method loses layers of meaning. I think others have said some of the same things as I have so I'll leave this here, Just remember, what I wrote means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
Interesting extension of this: the rise in online education inevitably will focus the mass market of education on the compilation of facts and data, rather than the critical thinking around that data. As billions learn facts and data from the best professors in the world, critical thinking will atrophy.
This is probably the most flattering interpretation of my decision to become a mathematician.
My personal writing style is very unsuited to modern literacy; I love to condense but am not very good at exposition. And every time I sit down to write, I end up thinking instead.
One English professor of mine told me that when she was an undergrad, her professor would let students skip the final exam if you came to his office and recited Milton's poem Lycidas. I took that to mean you would learn more about literature from this exercise than from his lectures and could prove this better than regurgitating his musings in a blue book.
I had been mulling over delving back into Nietzsche for about a week before reading this piece, and this treatment of dense writing and aphorism was enough to push me over the edge. This obliged in an unexpected way; just thirty pages into Zarathustra, we get "that everyone may learn to read in the long run corrupts not only writing but thinking" and "whoever writes in blood and aphorism does not want to be read but learned by heart." This is from 1883, just prior to your tentative date for the shift to post-literacy; unsurprisingly, given his skepticism of the mass man and his isolated perspective (as well as writing style!), Nietzsche seems to have been very attuned to the sea-change taking place. I even think he's got a line to condense this n-thousand word exposition to two sentences:
"In the mountains, the shortest path is from peak to peak, but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be the peaks, and those who are addressed, tall and lofty."
As a side note, I think this can be one of the great strengths of religion, particularly the ones that venerate a sacred text (rather than the ones that worship the text, like most fundamentalisms). My mother is a pastor and seminary professor, and ensured that as I was gaining first-order, functional literacy as a child, I was also taking note of word choice and order, structural composition, multiple layers of meaning, and other second-order literacy concerns. Though no longer religious, this appreciation for literary density has stuck with me in a way that I think is much more likely if one is taught that the importance of reading lies in the ability to parse an encoded tradition, rather than get current events from a newspaper (or worse, to "find the theme to this short story and argue for it." A parody at best).
Might be worthwhile to think through Knuth's literate programming with this in mind.
Thank you, I am truly impressed.
I was linked here from quora.
that is a perfect one-liner to describe what is happening. I have struggled to find the words to descibe it, and there they are.
perfect
A few comments:
1. Can you provide any reference for your interpretation of Indian combinatorial recitation practices? A "null hypothesis" would be that such elaborate practices were simply an aberration serving no useful purpose that was developed once and then persisted solely by conservatism of tradition.
2. "Sites like tvtropes.org are sustaining basic literacy skills."
This sentence reveals imprecision of your concept of "literacy". TvTropes is all about *semantic* literacy, that is, being able to recognize cultural contexts and references. As such, it has no inherently "linguistic" component - one can be well-versed in modern memes and popular cultures in exactly the same way that ancient tribesmen could be well-versed in their own local culture, poems, oral tradition etc. If this is what you mean by "literacy", it's completely unoriginal (and schoolteachers have been ranting about this kind of "illiteracy" since the beginning of time), but as I understand, your concept of "literacy" is closer to syntactic or low-level aspects of language, somehow more related to the structure of language, not the outside reality that language refers to (in this respect, I see no particular structural difference between quoting Shakespeare quoting Bible and quoting "Casablanca" or Tarantino's movies). Or am I missing something?
3. "Mathematics and programming, two specialized derivatives of language that I consider part of high culture, retained the characteristics of oral cultures of old, with an emphasis on recombinant manipulation, terseness, generality and portability."
Can you elucidate that? It seems a rather far-fetched claim.
"Curiously, I find the language of illiterate (reading-writing sense) to usually be much clearer. When I listen to some educated people talk, I get the curious feeling that the words don’t actually matter. That it is all a behaviorist game of aversion and attraction and basic affect overlaid on the workings of a mechanical process. That mechanical process is enacted by instrumental meaning-machines manufactured in schools to generate, and respond appropriately to, a narrow class of linguistic stimuli without actually understanding anything.
When I am in a public space dominated by mass culture and its native inhabitants, such as a mall, I feel like I am surrounded by philosophical zombies. Yes, they talk and listen, but it is not clear to me that what they are using is language."
Yes...yes...sort of.
I understand and sympathize and disapprove, but I don't think this is new. I think it's always been the case.
Years ago I came across a startling quote by Chomsky, something like: "The primary function of language is not communication." At first I was puzzled, but now I think I understand what he means, and it's exactly what Venkat is talking about. Most of what passes between us when talk to each other is not information, it's something else, something social. Like a very sophisticated system of grunts. It only seems odd to those of us who need something different in our interactions.
Very interesting post, which I've responded to . . .
http://milpubblog.blogspot.pt/2012/08/defining-literacy.html
I really enjoyed this article. It was well written and provoked a lot of reflection.
I'm now curious to know more and I would love to read more about this topic. Would you be willing to share some of the sources you used for your research?