Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!noao!amethyst!kww From: kww@amethyst.ma.arizona.edu (K Watkins) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Aah, but not in the fire brigade, jazz ensembles, rowing eights,... Summary: Life is too short to articulate everything. Message-ID: <701@amethyst.ma.arizona.edu> Date: 31 May 88 23:51:27 GMT References: <770@onion.cs.reading.ac.uk> <1177@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <1171@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <239@proxftl.UUCP> Reply-To: watkins@rvax.ccit.arizona.edu (K Watkins) Organization: Dept. of Math., Univ. of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721 Lines: 33 In article <239@proxftl.UUCP> tomh@proxftl.UUCP (Tom Holroyd) writes: >Articulate as much as you can. It's true we learn by doing, but we need to >be told what to do in case it's not obvious (eating is obvious). > Life is too short; in the case of a sufficiently aware articulator, both articulator and audience would die of old age before the articulator explained _everything_ s/he could about how to write the letter A. I am not being facetious here; I agree with the desirability of making valuable information explicit. But I believe that the question of which information is valuable is a complex one. It may seem simple at first; but in many cases it is hard for the articulator to tell which behaviors are relevant even to his/her own performance, let alone the as-yet hypothetical performance of the audience. And the assumption that one thing is obvious but another is not is the source of much (most?) disgruntled contempt between teachers and pupils. For instance, it is not even obvious to me what you mean by saying "eating is obvious." Is _how_ to eat obvious? to whom? is what or when or why to eat obvious? Are the currently much-famed eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, etc.) instances of persons sufficiently defective (?) as to be oblivious to the obvious? Note: This subject fascinates me in part because I am often accused of articulating far more than "necessary"...so (obviously?) my sense of what is obvious could use some work. Part of this issue lies in the fact that, when I articulate more than "necessary," I tend to lose my audience, and that audience loses whatever "necessary" information I was going to impart further down the line. After all, this message is more than a screen long; how many people who read the first screen are still reading? :-) What have those who quit before this point lost that they would have valued? And what, in my discussion, has been "unnecessary articulation of the obvious" whose omission would have improved the sum effect of my communication?