It's frustrating that you see me as complaining, because my original goals were to (constructively!) get people to 1) remember to check the evidence for a claim before accepting it and 2) remember to either present evidence for your claims or label them as hypotheses. Pointing these things out is definitely helpful because humans have a whole bunch of biases that make us fail to notice a lack of justification and believe things before they are justified. I've been saved from making this mistake a number of times by "[citation needed]".
(Perhaps "[citation needed]" came across as snarky? Next time I'll write "What's your evidence?".)
The rest of my posts weren't complaining, either; mainly, I was arguing for the importance of getting people to do 1 and 2 above, and against the notion that it wouldn't be better for opinions (of the "claims you believe to be true" variety, not preferences) to be either supported or marked as hypotheses when they are expressed (at least in this sort of context).
I was definitely not dissenting; my criticism would be exactly the same even if I agreed with the expressed claims 100%.
At the risk of repeating myself: the "opinion" he is expressing is actually a theory of procrastination. When you make broad statements like "the reason why human-beings procrastinate is to feel in control of their life", you are declaring your belief about why a widespread phenomena occurs of the type which is either right or wrong (or partially right).
Making such statements without providing any evidence for them is not only intellectually vacuous (since if there is no need to provide evidence, then any claim can be made), but it leads to bias in others where people assume that because an argument was not made, that the information is "well known" or the person providing the information is an expert.
There's nothing wrong with sharing opinion. I'm guessing that the reason he came to the conclusions he did was based on personal experience (probably mixed with some reading); if so, then he shouldn't have said "the reasons why human-beings procrastinate is to feel in control of their life", he should've said "I noticed that I seem[ed] to procrastinate not because of (...), but because I didn't feel in control of my life". If his evidence wasn't introspective, then he should have shared whatever his evidence was. If he didn't have any evidence other than plausibility, then he should've framed what he was saying as a hypothesis (and ideally still explained his reasoning).
You don't have to back up everything you say with scientific evidence, but you shouldn't make sweeping claims, especially in fields like this one where the jury is still out, without either providing evidence or qualifying your claim. (And I don't buy the "it's too much extra writing" argument; he could've inserted "I have a hypothesis:" after "Dear procrastinator" and had it completely covered.)
And no, I'm not just being nitpicky; a number of well-known biases like the primacy effect, confirmation bias, the "trusting the confident statement" bias I mentioned earlier (which I can't remember the name of for the life of me), and wishful thinking (in this case, wishing for a solution to procrastination) mean that humans are very vulnerable to forming irrational beliefs when ideas are presented in this way. An ounce of prevention, in the form of stating the reason you believe what you believe at least when you're making new or potentially controversial claims, is surely not too much to ask given how easy it is and how far it goes.
I don't take claims without evidence as a rule, and he didn't present any evidence. His case is especially problematic because he is making strong claims about a fairly well-studied field in which there is not a clearly dominant theory.
If he's not intending to present what he's saying as fact, he should say so.
Also, I frequently find the information I'm looking for in the blurb from the website and so don't bother to click through. (Or I view the cached version.)
Don't worry about the name--I think it's a sufficiently general pattern that it makes sense to use it in multiple contexts, and I don't think it trademarked or anything (like "For Dummies" is).
A little bit of explanation about formalisms and the communication problems you mention from a computer scientist/linguist who gets that same look of satisfaction:
In natural languages, the relationships between utterances and what they convey are somewhat fuzzy. Words like "tree" and "run" don't have single precise meanings; they have a variety of senses associated with them, and these senses vary in how closely they are related to each other. Biological trees made of cells are quite closely related to computer science trees by their shared shape; the relation between running with your legs and running for office is a bit fuzzier, via the race metaphor; the relation between a river bank and a financial bank is even more unclear.
Meaning in natural language is built in aggregate from associations, with the senses of expressions converging over time in groups of communicating speakers. Natural languages do not clearly define the relationships between different expressions, nor between expressions and the real world. Because natural languages are unspecified and evolving, you can only measure how often (in your observation) different expressions and relationships between expression reflect different situations.
Formalisms, like natural langauges, are also used to represent meaning via expressions made of symbols and relationships between them. (Technically, formalisms don't have to represent anything, but in practice they usually do because otherwise they're not very useful.) Unlike natural languages, formal languages have normatively defined specifications. These specifications can be written in a variety of ways, but usually they define rules (which always apply) for deriving expressions from each other.
To be able to use formal languages for real-life problems, you need to have these five skills:
Symbol manipulation: deriving expression in desirable forms from old ones using a specification
Interpretation: relating formal expression to the domain
Encoding: capturing domain knowledge in the formal language
Abstraction: finding consistent patterns in the domain (to be expressed in the formalism)
Modeling: expressing relationships in the domain using relationships between symbols
Unfortunately, most people are not very good at these skills. It is hard to break habits like using intuition and relying on others' ability to resolve ambiguity. Furthermore, most people are not very good at dealing with abstractions, especially new ones or higher-level ones. To make things worse, some of the problems involved in using formal systems are genuinely hard, even for computers and mathematicians. Obviously, even the most accomplished mathematicians are not always able to get the results they are looking for, let alone quickly, but people who are good with formalisms usually don't have as many problems with things like checking their intuition or dealing with abstractions.
The problem with communicating formal ideas to people who are not good with formalisms is rather fundamental, because the very attributes which make formalisms useful are the ones that those people have trouble understanding. You can, of course, relate the results of using a formalism, but without using formalisms it is often very hard to usefully express the "why" of the result. The problem is compounded because people who are good with formalisms have a hard time figuring out what is understandable to others, due to the general "knowing it too well to teach it" effect as well as lack of practice (since most people who care about formalisms are good with them).
Some talented communicators are able to explain formal results satisfactorily to others by relating them to familiar abstractions or rephrasing their logic in everyday terms, but unfortunately this frequently results in misunderstanding and misapplication of the results. Furthermore, there are a number of formal results which really can't be properly understood unless you have mastered the skills above (particularly in theoretical computer science and formal logic). The problem is akin to trying to talk to non-programmers about programming, but more general. Programming languages are formal languages, of a sort, but most programmers only understand a few particular formalisms. Theoretical computer science and proof theory involve dealing with a larger and more abstract set of formalisms, including formalisms about formalisms.
If you need examples of the difficulties, just look at all the ways that people try to explain Gödel's incompleteness theorems or monads informally.
Even better would be weighting that by testing comprehension. And even better than that would be finding the relation between reading speed and comprehension, letting the user set either and automatically estimating the other.
I'm from Tyler. There's not really a "city center". There is a downtown area, which is where Google drops you, but the surrounding area is mixed; some of it is fairly nice, and some of it is a bit run down (as you say). The downtown area mostly hosts legal stuff—courts, lawyers' offices, city government, etc.
South Tyler is generally considered to be somewhat nicer than the downtown area (which is further north). For instance, one of the nicer neighborhoods in Tyler is Holytree, which is off of Grande near its intersection with South Broadway. There are also some nice areas around the southern parts of Paluxy, which runs roughly parallel to Broadway. A lot of the nicer areas, though, are not actually within Tyler itself, but in the surrounding suburbs.
My soon-to-be alma mater has very small class sizes (student-teacher ratio is less than 10 to 1, most upper level classes are 4-8 people), so class here really is often a "conversation of peers". Discussions are an excellent way to learn, both because they encourage questioning and sharing and because they force you to engage the critically engage material on a regular basis rather than just memorizing it long enough to take a test.
People often seem to think of discussion-style teaching as being a social science/humanities thing, but it also works surprisingly well for math, computing, and science. I think a lot of people have the idea that in more technical courses, you have to do lectures (maybe with labs) because you're basically trying to teach a bunch of information. Most schools focus on teaching technical skills and knowledge, and expect you to just pick up on how to think as you go along.
Turning that around--teaching thinking and letting students pick up technical skills from examples--seems like a better idea because technical knowledge progresses so rapidly and because technical skills are easier to pick up. It also enables discussion-style teaching in math, computing, and science. Instead of listening to a lecturer spew material you could have found in a book, you solve problems together.
(Aside: interactive learning is really the only way to justify the high cost of college from an educational perspective. Ignoring stuff like networking and partying, it seems like going to a school where they teach by lecturing is a waste of time and money, since there are so many free lectures available online.)
The "everyone vote on answers" format is a surprisingly effective way to improve engagement in lectures. They get people to pay attention, they give you in-class feedback about what you have learned, they give the teacher more input (like you said), and they make lectures a bit more fun without being too cheesy.
Another simple technology-based way to improve engagement is to have students post their writing for class (reading responses, essays, etc.) on a forum. I took a class once where, instead of sending the professor a reading response for every class, we posted a reading response to a class Facebook group once a week. We were also required to write at least one substantial reply to others' posts once per week. The interaction was awkward, at first, and some people did the bare minimum the whole time, but after a few weeks a good chunk of the class was posting more than they were required to on a regular basis. Besides simply improving engagement, it seemed like it was making people think and write better, probably because they knew their peers were going to read what they wrote.
I mostly prefer text-based conversation. You have more time to respond, there's usually less filler, text creates an extremely convenient/useful record automatically, it is easier to return to past topics, it is easier to communicate bigger/more complex ideas, and (for me) reading is quicker than listening.
The only real disadvantages are that typing is a little slower (I type around 90 WPM but speak around 150 WPM) and that you don't get body language cues in writing. For the sorts of things I am interested in, though, I actually prefer not having body language. Body language makes us try to react to others by guessing their mental states from some subtle changes in their shape. This is problematic for two reasons; first of all, this sort of guessing is inherently imperfect, but more importantly, we tend to be quite heavily influenced by our perceptions of others' reactions. (This makes sense, evolutionarily; it is a way of making us cooperate and preventing us from diverging too much.)
What this means for conversation is that topics are chosen, opinions are suppressed, and minds are changed purely on the basis of our faulty readings of others' opinions. This is especially problematic when talking about abstract ideas because subconscious emotional reaction is an awful predictor of the merit or validity of ideas. The problem is compounded because we are very bad at simply setting aside our reactions, especially in social contexts.
Body language heuristics are obviously good for some things. They help us negotiate relationships, know when others are upset, and interpret ambiguity. But they also give us false impressions and lead to socio-cognitive biases. Furthermore, a large proportion of the benefits of body language come from dealing with problems of face-to-face interaction between primates, meaning that the benefits are less when dealing with textual communication (and especially communication about abstract ideas).
Even small talk over IM seems to be more stimulating to me on average than face-to-face small talk. I have observed this not only in my own interactions but in watching the interactions of others as well. My sample could be biased, because I am obviously a nerd who mostly hangs out with other nerds, but I think I've seen enough "normal" people to make a general statement. Your mileage may vary if you have different tastes in conversation than I do. But if you prefer to talk about the abstract or the complex, or if you try to avoid cognitive biases, then the only way I can imagine face-to-face conversation being generally preferable is if it has a strong instinctive appeal to you.
A lot of people do seem to have this innate preference. The same people often seem to prefer reading on paper than on screens. Some of them say their preference is based off of eye strain--which might even be a reason to prefer speech over text--but for a lot of people the reason seems to be more aesthetic.
I agree. I can even corroborate the hypothesis anecdotally, since CTAs on the right side "feel" right to me, but without data it's still just a hypothesis.
As a frequent early adopter, I'd say the most important thing you can do after providing a useful product in order to retain early users is to actively provide excellent support. I'll tolerate buggy software longer if it is easy to report bugs (and I know that reported bugs actually get looked at).
Interacting directly with early users also "humanizes" your company, which makes people both more forgiving of early mistakes as well as more likely to put a little bit of extra effort into helping you get better.
I was too; that's why I said "I think". I've heard that too, but it nearly always seems like the "good bits" get put in the slides while a lot of the other things that the speakers say I could have done without. Of course, the rest of the stuff is often interesting, just not usually nearly as useful.