The problem with facts speaking for themselves is that they rarely do; on the contrary, they are frequently cryptic. That being so, perhaps the next-best thing is that people should be familiar with the dark arts of rhetoric, so that they are better positioned to recognize and respond to their use. The measure of credibility is only saying things that stand up to scrutiny.
With a steel ball, air resistance and the Magnus effect were apparently not an issue. Now I'm curious as to how it goes with either a ping-pong ball, or a golf ball and a longer drop to the floor.
I get the feeling that a one-dimensional view of directed/purposeful behavior (weak -> strong) is constraining the discussion. I do not think we can take as obvious the premise that biologically-evolved intelligence is more strongly directed than other organisms, which, in many different ways, are all strongly directed to reproduction, but it seems there are more dimensions to intelligent purposeful behavior. There are some pathological forms of directedness, such as obsessive behavior and drug addiction, but they have not come to dominate in biological...
This is an interesting question and you have made many pertinent points, but it remains unclear to me why a move from listening to silent reading creates selective pressure for styles that can be received and understood quickly. If that is an advantage in silent reading, why less so for the same words spoken? After all, listening seems to be burdened with a few additional barriers to comprehension, such as in disambiguating homophones and the inability to skip backwards and re-hear what was just said.
The preference for brevity in telegraphy and newspapers ... (read more)