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?