Posted by Phillip Marx on January 4, 2000, at 18:02:34
In reply to Re: KISS and tell2, posted by Phillip Marx on January 4, 2000, at 17:52:27
Looks lke an old mainframe editor problem eating up all my formatting characters. I'll track through the FAQs later. Manual space paragraphs for now.
-Skip-reading is best for some of you, skip-it reading is best for others. This is only peak-to-peak writing. I skip a lot. I’ve no intention or sufficient skill to be a novella-ist. Everybody criticizes the critics the most. But the following demonstrates my difficulties with KISS that I am very much aware of.
-Reading back, I see one of the problems. The threads aren’t in chronological order, except within sub-threads. I wasn’t aware of the scale of the site work, admirable work in progress, until my scale of work proved embarrassingly inadequate. When I stepped in, (gotta watch where I step, and whether I land running or slipping in the mud) I wandered through whichever topic seemed most relevant first. This was not von-Neumann linear. It was exploring: discovery. As threads seemed to insert themselves and grow their own dendrites, so did the distance between what I said and what I should have said. Anyone, including me, who started at the top thread items and worked down, was starting to get answers before questions. I wasn’t necessarily using much linear thinking in the first place, but the distortion via chrono-displacement wasn’t all mine. Being oriented as to time and place requires a lot in each place. Since I added to whichever thread I was on, presuming and not regurgitating what I said last, elsewhere, the train of thought got woefully separated. The thread list was small when I started. If I had written for what size the month’s thread((s)-cubed) ended up as, I would have been better paying three extra bucks a month for a personal home-page site to keep it all together on.
-Doing long reports, proposals and research papers allows one to defer the detailing of the details to the details section. The introduction section has the luxury of saying that it will all soon be explained in the following sections. The summary recollects highlights of the details (peak-to-peak) and justifies the collection of all the details with the result or at least what the benefit of a given result would be, often in advancing even one more, not yet really tangible, hypothesis. The abstract tries to do all three in a single paragraph. Abstracting is the most difficult to make stand-alone. All the points of view incorporated in a given document are often crammed into a single sentence that is virtual gibberish to anything but a resource search engine. They are often written as bait to get you to buy and read the details. That .01% of the words is used to magnify the sense of the need for the 99.99%, which is a deliberate deficit catering to anyone’s emotional response to superficial or real supply and demand.
-My writing in abstract form without promise of details could sound like bait in a lake without fish, or a carrot on a stick out of reach. Collapsing all those bulleted paragraphs into a single sentence in prose, playing on words and thought-rhyme to maximize memorability, doesn’t seem to be standing well alone. Dictionary grade inflection marking would help the readability a lot, though probably not be received well. It took me long enough to write that .01%, I can’t write the 99.99% in this lifetime and it seems foolish to me to try, especially before I take the most reasonable seeming classes. It’s more important for me to learn to make sense of this stuff first than to try to make sense without it. I’m not writing post-class theses here, and I think it is yet very important for me not to. Abstracts, especially abstracts of abstracts, can be like abstract art. Some can be beautiful and some can be ugly, yet artistic in some difficult to discern way.
-I am leaving out all the map phrases for all the issues I skirt (“on the one hand” “on the other hand” “on the plus side” “on the negative side” “in contrast to”) since it speeds writing, though it slows reading as the reader must decompress the thoughts. Writing to an audience I wasn’t intending complicates terminology and style synchronization. I was getting a lot of money to perfect stuff the hard way. Working for free should be free for me too. Working free of the details in just abstracts that would be totally non-abstract to those I am looking for isn’t deliberately rude. It’s just a search engine choice. I am trying to keep the big pictures and the little pictures together so I write picture-in-picture. Molecules have complex bonding links, so do my paragraphs.
Phillip,
>Thanks for your apology. I must say, though, that reading your post reconfirms the impression I have had that you are indeed manic. Your thoughts seem to be hyper-accelerated and all over the place. You seem unable to stick to your topic, and instead go off in all sorts of tangents. Interesting though they may be, the tangential streams strongly suggest manic thinking.-Single topic, single topic, just how does one create a single, really single topic? Sounds luxurious. Several people seem to be parroting monotonic (not monotonous, but single-tone (tome)) thinking style propaganda. That might be a conservative, stress-lowering, safer way to think while in a hampered, recovery state. KISS is a therapy (not to be confused with KISSing, which is also great therapy). Getting back to real life will mean re-assuming complexities, running from complexities is a disorder only tolerated and imposed by therapy. I am a details person, though one of those details has always been keeping all the details together, details scavenging and details dumping are part of it. Tangents are really just straight lines that don’t necessarily intersect the shapes in more than one place. It’s an invention for geometry’s sake, for the description of geometrical shapes as well as geometric ideas, a simplification convenience in spite of it’s own complexity. Tangent writing styles are necessary else sufficient dissertation requires calculus to describe every infinitesimal point (and intangible functions are really messy). Cartoons show thoughts as clouds (not just cloudy thinking) and my paragraphs have volume, too much volume, even when compressed into just trying to describe (or touch, scratch) the “surface” of each idea. Condensing and distilling is necessary else too many paragraphs becomes a worse problem. My Y2.1K think thing is just two pages short of 100 pages in 10 pt. as terse as I can get it. Getting 20 to 40 proposals completed in a single shift of 80+ long terrible hours straight minimum, has trained me to think fast, accelerate through all topic turns and not burn out the brakes. It was my job as manager to keep “all over the place” securely intact. That was never a period of time I could have stayed up for with less reason, or with less stress. I had to consolidate all topics simultaneously (keeping them separate only in my head) and not lose or misplace even one tangent, and try to master the decision difficulties of determining what stays and what doesn’t under military contract deadlines where real lives were at stake. The Gulf War was a month shorter just because of one of the “littlest” programs I worked on, and casualties expected (budgeted) by our side were decimated, the right kind of decimated. People outside aerospace haven’t the tiniest inkling how many times aerospace has already saved countless lives, innocent ones too. If you think surgeons have stress, imagine what ABM people go through. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake with each tiny mistake. Everyone IS everyone else’s keeper and glad of it. My workplace pace was chosen by myself and my employers to be as far opposite to care-free as humanly possible. Aerospace has filled many hospitals and cemeteries with it’s cold-war wounded and killed. And we can’t get any respect for it either, how does that guy say that like a joke, it’s a joke that it’s a joke. When we try to convince ourselves that it all was worth it, we get pictures of people who took 8-cent bullets shoved in our faces. Shrinks and philosophers may bewail the balance of lifestyle, but they have a right to their lifestyle choices protected by those who equip our protectors. It’s my turn now to step back from such rigid requirements, or at least relax to a recreational level, if I can ever get back up to a level that’s fun. I need to spend the time instead on generating income that doesn’t cost me personally so much.
-I could break all this up into indentured sub-paragraphs, but the site “left-justifies” everything. A bunch of smaller paragraphs just looks like so many endlessly rippling sand dunes. Maybe if I next time double return between major thought blocks, hmmm, I can avoid paragraph numbering maintenance obnoxious-ness. Dr. Bob?
>As you begin your coursework toward a masters, you should think about seeing a psychiatrist about this mania, because it might interfere with your ability to complete your academic responsibilities. If you were to write a paper in the fashion you write your posts, I cannot imagine a professor considering it a well-written paper. Your writing style is more like creative, stream of consciousness, manic, driven and not at all suitable to the straight, to the point style that is required in school.
-I’d like to get my Masters, but I’m only building up some non-core electives now, low stress, self-beneficial, and, except for the psy-stuff, with income potential as isolated from critical “company and country life-dependent” scheduling as humanly possible. If my stocks recover half as much as half the analysts predict, then I’ll be an 800-pound gorilla with my time and get several Masters and maybe a Pastors. I’m not going to spend anything that hasn’t panned out yet though. No more of those mandatory work overtimes that eventually turn into class withdrawals or incompletes that revert to something worse on the transcripts. Since I “concentrate” on academics in ways that look manic, I get practically all straight A’s. My first try through college, though I made honor roll, I crashed from starvation after the scholarship money ran out (VietNam War era). When I returned to finish my Bachelor’s, I was well funded by Hughes (they paid for it 100%) and well-fed. I got almost straight A’s. I only got one B, and even that was a B+, my computer died and kept dying until replaced during that class. I was forced to do the video-presentation with a visibly jury-rigged computer. Self-assessment the class was called, do I still sound like I spent most of that time re-fixing my computer? I am still my own biggest blind spot. I now have several back-up computers from that lesson. I have gotten straight A’s ever since my breakdown, too. I can prove that’s not a delusional statement. I do well academically, always have, at least when I eat more than mind-starving American rice. I took a year of medical, advanced medical and legal transcription and human anatomy and terminology in the early part of my recovery since I thought I was going to be stuck home by the medications, with a slurred appearance not very work compatible. The dangerous-to-exclude tangents lawyers, doctors, corporate and government officials have to deal with would really make you dizzy here, even if you were on, what’s it called, is it piracetam? Logical tangents are essential, especially those on check-lists. Loophole containment, though hated, rules. Just read any APA publications, no single vector stuff there. Though I learned a lot, destiny doesn’t point to transcription for me since I never could get my typing speed back up to speed (lucky? Or too bad? TBD). Funny, that transcription professor just this second e-mailed me an invitation for lunch. Besides, Dr. Jensen has me far more functional than I was then. I can no longer type near 100wpm, skill atrophy, carpal tunnel flash pain cross-compensating un-coordination, I dunno. I can only muster short bursts of 50wpm, even after sticking out a speed refresher course, which still gave me an A for merely improving 10wpm. That one was a hard A. I graduated B.S.B.A. “With Distinction” - one of only 28 out of 800 graduates that year to do so. Not delusional, I have the diploma and the graduation video to prove it. I’m mostly the same now as then, except I’m more cautious and conservative (self-conservative) now. I just looked through that video a few weeks ago trying to find the clips of our nuclear reactor room test pulse glows for my Y2.1K thing. I’m still me. My academics are not hurt by my writing. BS professors, (oh no) like full scope work even more than BA professors do. Or is that where the difference is, the specialist incentive? I cram a lot into my writing. I sure don’t have time to build a page full of footnotes. I am a cross-technology consolidator by trade. Something has to give, or my body will give in again. I’ll sacrifice the low end before I’ll sacrifice the top end. Research proposals are only bids to fill in the low end anyway, maybe I’m conditioned to wait until someone is willing to pay for it to give all the grunt work. Mensa loves streams-of-thought, why is it so poorly respected here? I know that a lot of the early bipolar literature sounds like a lot of dumb (outside the problem type ignorance) people trying to understand intermittently gifted people and why they couldn’t stay that way and crashed from self-disappointment so bad. The new writers are too much smarter now, no trace of respect for bipolars now, history is full of history-worthy inspired bipolars, but I don’t see much in the age since bipolar medicine. Is nothing above average not abnormal now? Where is the technical source for all this contempt for broad thinking coming from? I hear it from so many sources that I wonder what the real base source reference is. Where is the core authority reference (dummy?) who is so paranoid about how neural networks work that they malign bursts of efficiency and intuition with so much psy-disorder propaganda? All of us go to school to increase our mental capabilities. Is any such success such a malady? Where has all the flag waving for personal development gone? Is above normal as bad as below normal because it metrically rates a “standard” deviation from norm equally? Norm should not be a goal unless it is up. Norm means statistical average, not what “normal” should really be as high as. Things that skew the gaussian “norm” up should be the norm. Is it really right to be so digital about people in an analog world? Without so much disease holding down the norm, what would the “average” norm be? Imagine how high-functioning (and how much high-er functioning, one-sigma maybe, may be, maybe: that’s a ha-ha, not a typo)) normal would be without disease (sorry, not time to re-word now, but the drift is drifting there somewhere). We all, like axons, find our place(s), and touchstones. Someone will Messianically (axonically) re-solve (thereby resolving) this problem soon, I hope.
-Last thought before going to work: I got my work done (“pure”-itanical work ethic, purged by fire: ethics laser surgery), at significant expense to my health. My last company’s stock value rose 10,000% during my tenure there and they did not like my leaving, they covered overdue dental care after I left. I’m really sorry that their value dropped 9,000 of those 10,000% after I left, especially since I had such a nice stock-bonus plan, which they graciously helped me to hold out till the last day for best vesting of. They graciously accommodated me and my medicinally depressed and suppressed productivity for a year after the breakdown. They trained me at their own expense for that demotion to email, inter and intra-network administrator - they sent me to Vermont (IBM co-facility, the largest single-story building in the country) for two weeks to set up a dual Lantastic-Novell network. But medicine accumulates. I had to quit when I started stopping for red lights in the middle of intersections. Now I treat too much work for no pay as a red light, strike that, stop sign. I’d love to flesh out what I write again. I just can’t afford it. I have to put myself higher on my priority list than I like or I’ll get totally useless again. Don’t most of us have the water sloshing over our gunnels too often? Me too, still. I’m not going to work myself up to needing so much medication to knock me down for a healing spell again voluntarily.
-If I start working for myself instead of working for someone else, then maybe “my” value will go up 10,000% in 6 years. There sure is more room up than down for me now. I have to keep it smart smartly or keep it too simple stupidly. Catch-22. Darned if I say too much, and darned if I say too little. Only recourse is to do a little of all three, since even the middle is complained about so much. Going on and on is what things written not-too-tersely looks like. I for sure can’t take even this much time after classes start, even though I’m only working part time (>20 hrs/wk), that’s mostly to make room for learning well what I want to learn in classes that favor income re-increases. Reserves appreciate positive cash flow as well.
-Yahoo. I’ve just been invited to the Eagle Scout’s Court of Honor to bestow Scouting’s highest rank upon my nephew. Normally I don’t read my mail before work. Yahoo, I did today.
pm
poster:Phillip Marx
thread:17556
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000101/msgs/18019.html