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Jan. 14th, 2004 05:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taratemimaYesterday was a day of screw-ups.
A day was left off my paycheck. While they are distributing the live checks for the amount left off, it's still pain.
My Internet provider was bottle-necking when I try to bring up a page, talk to someone on Yahoo, whatever. Oddly enough, Java games worked great. My brother thought it was the weather. The modem was rebooted and it works fine now.
Somehow, at work, thinking about technical writing is making me think of people assuming if you don't get the information and its implications the first time, you're stupid, rather than they are transmitting the information badly. It lead to Hayek and an article mentioning some work he did in information theory, then to jmhm's article linking to a blog criticizing the idea that stupidity explains why there is less criticism of Bush Administration policies (incidently making me think of a Lew Rockwell article about 'stupid').
Somewhere, there is a Jeanne d'Arc entry about teaching writing to engineers and specific problems with some of some ideas about information and intelligence, like mechanical knowledge is privileged over literary knowledge, and if you need the latter to understand the former, you are dumb.
It occurs to me that writing about politics is often viewed as persuasive, but there is also the transmission of information. Everyone has some issue they get outraged about, or more than one if you're a real crank. It's easy
to pick up on news and history that sticks to your outrage filter. The task is to find some piece of information from news that doesn't. That is connected to being able to argue against your own position, as per chipuni's challenge.
Then I think of my Unknown Armies game, where I find some symbolic and psychological basis in a religion based on what I consider one cruel money-making scam. Then I go back to how I can do the process of playing devil's advocate, but I feel that I do write my views very clearly. I tie writing clearly to the process of technical writing.
A day was left off my paycheck. While they are distributing the live checks for the amount left off, it's still pain.
My Internet provider was bottle-necking when I try to bring up a page, talk to someone on Yahoo, whatever. Oddly enough, Java games worked great. My brother thought it was the weather. The modem was rebooted and it works fine now.
Somehow, at work, thinking about technical writing is making me think of people assuming if you don't get the information and its implications the first time, you're stupid, rather than they are transmitting the information badly. It lead to Hayek and an article mentioning some work he did in information theory, then to jmhm's article linking to a blog criticizing the idea that stupidity explains why there is less criticism of Bush Administration policies (incidently making me think of a Lew Rockwell article about 'stupid').
Somewhere, there is a Jeanne d'Arc entry about teaching writing to engineers and specific problems with some of some ideas about information and intelligence, like mechanical knowledge is privileged over literary knowledge, and if you need the latter to understand the former, you are dumb.
It occurs to me that writing about politics is often viewed as persuasive, but there is also the transmission of information. Everyone has some issue they get outraged about, or more than one if you're a real crank. It's easy
to pick up on news and history that sticks to your outrage filter. The task is to find some piece of information from news that doesn't. That is connected to being able to argue against your own position, as per chipuni's challenge.
Then I think of my Unknown Armies game, where I find some symbolic and psychological basis in a religion based on what I consider one cruel money-making scam. Then I go back to how I can do the process of playing devil's advocate, but I feel that I do write my views very clearly. I tie writing clearly to the process of technical writing.
