h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Your words are suck - A87808684
Author: IndeterminateTranslations - U14999438

This is my first attempt at submitting anything for review by anyone other than a professor, so please don't go easy on me and provide scolding criticism.

Welcome to h2g2.com and Peer Review. I have left you a message in your Personal Space, which hopefully will help you find your way around your new home


Peer Review deals primarily with factual articles, so I'm not certain your Entry is suitable within its original format.

You might consider moving it to:

http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/Writing-Alternative

Where you will receive further assistance or advice from other Researchers.


Good luck!!


lil

Hi, a Guide Editor here. Indeed, welcome to h2g2! From your interests, I'd say you'll fit right in.

Peer Review isn't the place for this kind of writing, however - lil's got the right suggestion. Send it to the Alternative Writing Workshop. The folks there will enjoy discussing philosophy and essay-writing with you.

In the meantime, why not have a look round the Guide, to see what sort of thing we do? I can think of several topics you've hit on that could be the basis of a Guide Entry - Carnap's theories, Nietzsche, Nietzsche's sister, the bowl of water experiment you mentioned, etc.

Whether or not this is Guide material, I enjoyed reading it. It was amusing yet clearly informative, although that might be just because I was filtering it through my own prejudices into my vast and efficient brain.

I particularly liked this bit;

"In addition, my short attention span doesn’t help and neither does yours, so bare with me now. The transferring of information via human language is a process that should be scrutinized with extreme prejudice."

In support of which I immediately removed my trousers.

Which may just be own interpretation, if I had written that line it would be an illustrative joke; for anyone else it is a typo or error. However, a mellow old age has inclined me to believe the best of everything, hence my disrobing with a smile.

Hi, and welcome to h2g2.

I really enjoyed reading this and as Dmitri and lil have said this would really get a much better audience in the Alternate Wrting Workshop.

You'll need to go into one our older skins to take it out from here and pop it over there.

it's really easy.

Use this link, which in lovely shade of blue
http://www.h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/classic/RF1

Next to your entry will be 'remove' click it. You'll get a little pop up, just click on ok.
Click on 'My Space' in the top left hand corner and scroll down a bit until you get to 'My Most Recent Guide Entries', your entry will there.
Click on your entry and there will be the Submit for Review button.
Click on that and submit it to the Alternative Writing Workshop.

Simples (as folk used to say)


Mags Scout/SubEditor

Magwitch, I think you deserve a prize, for posting a skin-changing link that actually works and was used by the person addressed to achieve what you intended. I've seen so many attempts to offer advice which fail miserably due to h2g2's bizarre URL system.

Thanks, Gnomon.

I was having a bit of a moment. So tested it myself and wrote the instructions down as I was doing it.

I don't quite understand what I'm supposed to take away from this. So should I just kill myself or not?

It seems interesting & I would be interested in reading something in this area but here is my feedback.

Feedback: I found it rambling, lacking in definitions and clarity. It begins with "telephones" and ends with assertions that poor Nietzsche has been misinterpreted and something about the Nazis. In the middle there is comment on input, abstraction, and output, with reference to assassinations, college educations, bowls of water, morphing, complexity and malleability.

Structure is something to work on ... the introduction suggests you should have gone back to "telephones" and applied whatever you raised in the middle section to an explanation of whatever you wanted to explain as regards to "telephones". You could have given some definition and details on "telephones" as not everyone knows what it is ... in Britain we talk of Chinese Whispers.

Also you make many assertions that seem unconvincing or just too vague. For example

1) "Input is the summation of information processed by the senses."

2) "mental input (or the senses) is fallible " ... then something extremely vague about college education, exploring three bowls of water, something about Google and epistemology [I haven't a clue what you are trying to say in this paragraph & it is no proof or vaguely relevant to an "argument" of mental input as being fallible].

3) "Philosophers have been aware of the fallibility of the senses since ancient times"

Lets have some discussion as to what you mean by senses, in 1) you suggest it is a processor of summed information, in 2) you suggest it is "mental input" in 3) you suggest the senses are fallible.

Now input could mean the external / internal energy acting upon or within our bodies. I don't think there is any question of fallibility at this stage?

Then there is the body sensory apparatus that converts these forms of energy into neuronal signals: "pre-conscious" information. So the question is does fallibility have meaning at this stage? There will be issues associated with any measurement device; sensitivity, noise etc. Feedback processes also occur at this stage.

Then there is the processing of the neuronal signals by neuronal networks forming the main body of the nervous system including the brain. So what does fallibility mean at this stage of the processing?

At what stage does the pre-conscious information become conscious information ... that must be the abstraction stage you are referring to? .... and are the bowls of water that you vaguely reference relevant to an argument for the fallibility of mental "input" when surely they are only relevant to the abstraction level where we become conscious of "temperature"?

Ps - the title needs changing ... it is not very informative as to the content of the article. It suggests that the readers "words" are a nonsense, but I don't think your article proves that?