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Ritalin comments on Rationality Quotes October 2013 - Less Wrong
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It is, in fact, from comics. Another nonstandard habit is the frequent use of italics I've picked up from Eliezer Yudkowsky, along with other writing habits that would be qualified as "passionate" by some and "histrionic" by others. I myself find it quite practical in properly conveying emotional intensity.
I've been deitalicizing a bit lately.
We all grow old, don't we?
Nostalgic note: I remember back when I used to resent you for calling religion 'insanity'. Nowadays, I find it costs me strenuous effort to summon the very memory of a mindset where I could see it as anything but.
Similar here. I used to have some respect for the views of religious people, but it becomes more and more difficult to understand the way of thinking "some savages thousands of years ago had an imaginary invisible friend (usually telling them to kill everyone else), and despite all the knowledge and experience we have now, we should treat this invisible friend as a serious source of knowledge and morality (of course, avoiding those parts that are just too absurd and pretending they never happened)".
But I guess that's just human mind as usual. The more time I spend with people who believe in the fantasy land, the less silly the fantasy land seems. The more I think about what we know about reality, the more crazy it seems when someone comes and says, essentially, "but my invisible friend says so and so".
Now I wonder if I spend enough time without reading LessWrong and came back, which parts of LessWrong would seem crazy. -- I am not saying the situation is the same; I was impressed by LessWrong when I saw it for the first time; with religion I had to have religious friends for years just to move it from the "total craziness" category to "worth considering" category. But it is still possible that some parts of LessWrong would seem crazy.
There was a time when I was very rude to religious people because I thought that made me wise. Then there was a time when I was very polite because I thought equity in consideration was wise.
Now I'm just curt because I have science to do and no time to deal with fools.
Ah, yes :-D
There's only a certain amount of emphasis to go around. The more things you italicize, the less important each italicized word seems, and then when something's really important it doesn't stand out. It's like swearing---if I swear every time I spill a glass of water, then it loses its effect and when I drop a hammer on my toe there is nothing I can think of that will express the strength of my feelings.
In comics, the difference in weight between bold and standard is much less than in typical fonts. I think it works well in comics but here it makes me read things out of order in a distracting way.
I keep trying to tell my mom exactly this, every time we need to design some kind of print materials for the family business. She just doesn't get that emphasis is about the relative share of a reader's attention to different parts within a text, a positional good of sorts.
Oh, I keep getting that argument and I disagree completely. Swearing does not add nor substract emphasis; it is punctuation, placeholder words that might as well be onomatopeias. For an example of a character who swears constantly and still manages to highlight quite well differences in emotional intensity, I would suggest you look at Malcolm Tucker from british political satire The Thick Of It. For another who never swears yet also conveys utter fury, anger, frustration, pain, and so on impeccably, I would suggest having a look at any of the latest Doctors from Doctor Who. An angry David Tennant is a frightening frightening sight to behold. In the case of the hammer on your toe, I believe a heartfelt ARGH! does the trick nicely, with an extra hiss afterwards is you feel like it.
I personally find that part of the relief from swearing comes from breaking a taboo, and that this weakens over time. But perhaps watching The Thick Of It will reveal to me a more sustainable way.
As for italics, in the limit case where everything is in italics you surely would not conclude that THE WHOLE THING IS EXTRA SUPER IMPORTANT. So there's some crossover point; we just disagree on where it is. I believe my view is common at least for more formal (book-type) writing.
You don't need to study the entire population to extrapolate a result. Here's a [ http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/TheThickOfIt ]representative sample .
I suppose this is scoped to the statement "if I swear every time I spill a glass of water, then it loses its effect and when I drop a hammer on my toe there is nothing I can think of that will express the strength of my feelings?"
Because the overall point that emphasis must be conserved stands quite well.
Not really. Watch any opera or musical, listen to any speech; there's enough emphasis around to go on for hours and days, as long as you keep it varied and well-executed.
Heck, just marathon Gurren Lagann and tell me when you actually think the emphasis wears thin. My bet is, never.
In all of your examples, there are down times. Even Lagann.
I never said there never need to be any down times, I said there was no such thing as conservation of emphasis. Even in Lagann, the down times were tense, emotional affairs; at their lightest, they were deeply contemplative; that is hardly a lack of intensity.
On second thoughts, there is no particular minimum to emphasis, so it clearly isn't conserved. There is an issue of diminishing returns.
Phrased that way, I have to agree. Of course, diminishing returns can be streched with proper technique, but they are there nonetheless.
Well before the time skip, and the last episodes were just plain irritating.
That is an unusual perspective. The only parts that are left are the parts most people complain about. Nia's Awakening and the Deep Space arcs.
At least for my own speech, profanity is primarily a way to add emphasis. This seems to also be true for a significant fraction of the people I've known.
Of course, profanity is not the only available source of emphasis. There are still lots of ways to convey emphasis with the level of profanity held constant.
There's absolute emphasis ("Listen up, because I will only say this once" draws extra attention to the entire statement that follows), and relative emphasis (the word "constantly" in "...a character who swears constantly and still..." is emphasized more than its neighbors, regardless of the level of passion it is read with). You can get someone to pay more attention in general, but attention paid to one thing is still attention not paid to something else.
Is there some research that investigates the effect in a more detailed fashion?
I've actually just broken an italics-using habit when writing fiction. I used to use italics all the time for emphasis and making it clearer how the text would sound if read out loud (it felt clearer to me, at least.) A reader commented that the software I used to convert my MS Word draft to an epub converted all italics to bold, and that he found it disruptive, and had tried mentally reading the lines with and without the bold and having the emphasis didn't seem to make anything clearer. I used select-all on my MS Word document and removed all the italics in order to make him a new epub. Rereading scenes later, it turned out that my friend was right, and the lack of italics hardly seemed to make a difference. Now I don't use them period. (Once I stopped using italics constantly, it felt odd to use them occasionally.)
Italics are not a matter of clarity, they are more like a poor man's musical annotations. While it is often said that punctuation is a matter of placing pauses where you would if you spoke the sentence out loud, I believe that this is false; when reading out loud for an audience, whether it be a conference, a speech, a narration, one finds oneself placing pauses and emphasis in places where it would be awkward to do so by italics, bolds, points, commas, colons, semicolons, or m-dashes. Sure, when one is sufficiently attuned to a culture, to its turns of phrase and the ways people habitually emphasize things, one can use wording and phrasing to suggest the right way of reading. Being an amateur actor, I had to work with a scriptwriter who deliberately avoided doing that. You wouldn't believe how hard it was to give it emotional consisntency and proper flow; one practically had to build the character from scratch!
As an amateur director, part of my process with every play is to type up the script, stripping out all the stage directions and line-reading notes, precisely because I want to build the characters from scratch. But I do typically put in my own notes for the benefit of my actors who don't wish to do so (while encouraging them to ignore those notes and try different things if they feel right)