Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Sense of Style

Reading Steven Pinker's book "The Sense of Style" helps one think about writing, have a look:
https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-persons-guide-writing-21st-century
A master of communication Pinker is clear in defining objectives and critical of the waste many authors create. We must be articulated when addressing an environmental issue, must be direct and clear without distractions or examples that are not relevant.

I am with Prof. Heidi Owsley writing a book titled "Earthkeeping" where we bring together the analysis of human nature and its relationship to how humans relate to their physical environment. We can not forget that the way one behaves relates directly to the way one thinks.

Another aspect of communicating is honesty. Are we communicating to inform? or are we communicating to convince? or are we communicating to mislead? There are ways one have to express an idea so the reader has to be involved in the process. Dave Levitan in his book "Not A Scientist" focus on the misleading tools and artifacts that people use to mislead. Mainly politicians that use this gimmicks for their political gain. http://www.davelevitan.com/not-a-scientist/ 
Natural science is a complex discipline and can be oversimplified both for good and for bad purposes.

One can talk about human evolution in general which is systematic or in particular which is selective. The systematic approach needs to take into account all particularities of its elements and that makes it complicated. For this approach to be effective the elements in the system have to be organized within categories, take for example an organism the categories would be organs and functions. Humans as organisms have organs (hearts, eyes, lungs, etc.) and functions such as senses (sight, smell, taste, etc.) and motions (grabbing,  locomotion, etc.) Individual organs can also be analyzed as systems when parts of it can be defined, this appears to be a fractal relationship appearing always in the universe.

An interesting philosophical proposition.

     

No comments: