Re: Education (Was Re: Techwriting After the Boom)

[eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com]

>>They'd talk the
>>hind leg off a donkey about stuff that could be disposed of in minutes in
>>the lab -- Zeno's paradox, for instance -- and never reach a conclusion.

And I've never understood how such "education" was supposed to benefit anyone.
All that learning such paradoxes serves is to allow you to appear wise and
intelligent to a dimwitted, unquestioning audience. Just as magic is slight of
hand, paradoxes are slights of logic.

One such gem of stupidity was thrust on one of my English Classes in High School
by our teacher. She was all high and mighty and looking particularly chuffed
with herself about some logic warping explanation about how as you approach the
center of a spinning disk your velocity became zero. That in the center of this
spinning object existed a point that was not in motion. She was particularly
irked when I burst that particularly stupid bubble with two facts: 1- only your
tangential velocity is reduced, your rotational velocity remains constant. 2-
you'd have to infinitesimally thin to experience this zero tangential velocity
nirvana.

Like Zeno's Paradox (I had to look it up:
http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/zeno_tort/) many of the paradoxes
involve incorrectly/arbitrarily dividing something up into infinitesimally
small/pointless pieces and diverting attention from the real issue to these
infinitesimal fragments (not unlike many of the discussions on-list really). In
the case of Zeno, who in their right mind divides a race into ever decreasing
segments, defines the race solely in terms of catching up in those segments, and
leaves the total distance of the race and performance of the participants
unknown?

It's a lot like technical writing by an engineer/SME. While the explanation of
the operation to it's tiniest subcomponent certainly strokes their ego, it's
useless to the reader who want to know how to accomplish something (ie: When the
bloody race is over who wins). The user of a VCR wants to know how to record and
playback a show. They couldn't care less about electron spin.

Eric L. Dunn



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