{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age","title":"Episode 24 | Linear Text in a Graph-Shaped World","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1396,"description":"\nEpisode Summary\n\nThink of everything you know about a single subject. Coffee, your job, your favorite band. It is not a list and it is not an outline. It is a web, where everything connects to everything and there is no first item and no last. Now try to write it down. You cannot write a web. You have to pick one thread and pull, one word after another, until the web becomes a line. For 5,000 years that has been the deal we make every time we read or write.\nIn this episode, the finale of Arc 2, we name the structural problem underneath every difficulty this arc has explored. Human knowledge is shaped like a network: a dense mesh of concepts joined by relationships, where almost everything links to almost everything else. Written text is shaped like a line: one word after another, a single ordered path from first word to last. Every act of writing flattens the network into a sequence, and every act of reading tries to rebuild the network from that sequence. Drawing on the semantic network research of Quillian, Collins, and Loftus, the small world findings of Steyvers and Tenenbaum, and Willem Levelt's linearization problem, we show that the conversion in both directions is lossy by design, and why naming that loss is the first step toward closing it.\n\nKey Topics Covered\n\nKnowledge is a network: nodes joined by links, where the connections carry much of the meaningQuillian's semantic memory model and Collins and Quillian's reaction time evidence (roughly 75 ms per step up the category hierarchy)Spreading activation fans out in parallel to all of a concept's neighbors at once (Collins and Loftus)The mind as a small world: any two of about 5,000 words separated by roughly three associative steps, never more than fiveWhy text is one dimensional: Saussure and the linear nature of the signifierThe roughly 5,000 year old technology of writing, from scriptio continua to spaced wordsText was optimized for story, persuasion, law, and scripture, all forms whose meaning...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/FqjMDaQUSm1bYfkwwD6aDUnSGdwLjCiheWhxBb00zow/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84YjIz/YzkwMzlmNGM5YmEw/NTJkOGYyMTk0YTMw/ZWM0Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}