[ccalvert]

I agree, diagrams are great -- in their place. But to the author's point, can you draw me a diagram that conveys the same information as the sample sentence from the article:

"Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law."

I don't think you can, but if you could, it would likely be very large and complex. This speaks to flexibility and information density inherent in text.

[nicklaf]

The diagram would indeed be enormously complex, because that sentence draws upon a vast amount of existing human knowledge. You'd also have to invent a visual language for describing this knowledge, which at present probably doesn't exist. One may as well try looking at fMRI images of human brains and try to infer the way that sentence triggers existing memories in order to figure out how the brain represents hierarchies of knowledge in memory.

I mostly use diagrams for describing completely new, abstract ideas in engineering or mathematics. Once the idea is understood, then yeah, it's faster to "query the database", and simply utter a word or write down a symbol.

[PhantomGremlin]

This speaks to flexibility and information density inherent in text

That is true, however, the only reason there is such "information density" is that you already know the meanings of those words, idioms, assumptions, etc. You know a lot of context that isn't being explicitly stated.

That quoted sentence has little meaning to a child or to anyone without a good deal of education and shared cultural background.

Diagrams and text serve very different purposes.