[JimWhitton]

I found an interesting passage on how we digest information in Steven Pinker’s new book about writing, The Sense of Style.

In chapter three, “The Curse of Knowledge” Pinker lays out some methods of explaining an esoteric idea in plain language without patronizing the reader. He says that the main cause of writing incomprehensible prose is the difficulty to imagine what it’s like for the reader not to know something that the writer already knows.

On pages 67-69, Pinker discusses the mental phenomena he calls “chunking”. This may remind you of Ayn Rand’s description of the crow epistemology.

“When we know something well, we don’t realize how abstractly we think of it. . . (One of the ways) in which thoughts can lose their moorings in the land of the concrete . . . is called chunking. Human working memory can hold only a few items at a time. . . Fortunately the brain is equipped with a work-around for the bottleneck. It can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed ‘chunks’. Each chunk, no matter how much information is packed inside, occupies a single slot in working memory. . .”

Pinker gives the example of breaking up a long series of letters into smaller chunks to help us to remember them. But “chunking is not just a trick for improving memory; it’s the lifeblood of higher intelligence. . .”

Then Pinker gives an example involving concepts. “As a child we see one person hand a cookie to another, and we remember it as an act of giving. One person gives another one a cookie in exchange for a banana; we chunk the two acts of giving together and think of the sequence as trading.” We chunk acts of selling and buying together and call it a market. We chunk many markets together and call it an economy, etc.

Pinker goes on: “As we read and learn, we master a vast number of these abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit which we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks. . . The amount of abstraction that a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of her readership. . .”

After he discusses the problem of using specialized lingo, Pinker sums up his point: “The curse of knowledge means that we’re more likely to overestimate the average reader’s familiarity with our little world than to underestimate it. And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension.”  

[SteveRogers]

In a certain sense, it is refreshing to see someone address the topic in those terms. But on the other hand, why rename concepts and concept formation as “chunking” and present it as if concepts are an arcane but helpful notion discovered by “the psychologist George Miller”? That seems rather ironic in a section devoted to presenting ideas in a manner that informs without being patronizing.

[JimWhitton]

I gather that the term “chunking” refers not only to concept-formation, but to any integration of items into a single unit to make them easier to deal with. For instance, breaking down a long Visa number into a smaller number of parts, or forming acronyms. 

I guess Pinker doesn’t know about Ayn Rand’s work on epistemology–or if he does, he’s not admitting it. I wonder if anyone on this list is familiar with George Miller.

[Author]

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