
An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" - endergen
http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.html
======
tel
It's really important to note what he only barely says here—he's not
disinterested in software engineering because he doesn't think it's valuable
today—he's only interested in it because it's an okay model for how powerful
tools get built for children.

I feel like HN is a terrible audience for this message. Not because there
aren't people here who will love it—and to them, disregard the rest—but
instead because so much of the community is about making value with the
technology that exists today. We're trying to be _presentists_ and do good
jobs with the problems and tools that we have in front of ourselves. That's
why MVPs and marketing for traction make sense. That's why we can argue for oh
so long about the javascript framework of the moment or best practices for
software design. Because that stuff is important and has really tangible
relation to our ability to generate value today.

I respect the hell out of Bret Victor, but also recognize that he's targeting
something different. Something that makes him a little more of a mathematician
than a programmer. A little more of an artist than a builder. Something that
drives him to teach children instead of adults.

I personally struggle with this a lot, a lot. I want to build perfect
software, not because I care about that program, or because I think it'll make
me more money and thus give me more freedom. I strive for it because whenever
I make a step in that direction I realize I'm communing with something
unearthly. Something I don't understand.

Personally, I know I want to teach some day, but I couldn't stand academia
because the academia I found was chasing after efficiency in achieving a
notion I didn't believe in. For that reason, I'm so glad Bret does what he
does and tells the world about it. I believe in him, strangely enough.

I think because even though we cannot know at all what he's striving toward,
it's a value that I can come to respect much more than the entirety of "tech"
today. Truly, I hope a lot of people think that's foolish.

~~~
sas
I know he really doesn't identify with "teaching children." Making tools that
will be a useful basis for technology 100 years from now is different, but
related, to caring about pedagogy.

~~~
tel
Perhaps, I wrote that as much for myself as for my interpretation of Bret's
work. That said, I don't think anything I've read in the last 5 years has
impacted me as much as Papert's _Mindstorms_ , which I believe is a strong
influencer of Bret's work. Papert here is not teaching children because of
pedagogy but instead because he believes, as I do, that children and true
experts see the world in the same way.

So that's really what I meant when I highlighted teaching children. Not
changing school curricula (and I mean, who pretends today that schools are
really in it to teach children anyway?) but instead connecting with minds like
children sometimes are before they become afraid to learn.

------
charlieflowers
I think a lot of comments here missed Bret's point entirely. Here's what I
think his point is: The most powerful thing we know of is the human intellect.
Therefore, the most effective thing we can do is to figure out how to augment
and amplify that intellect, to help us think the unthinkable as naturally, and
intuitively as possible. And since it was a "personal note", Victor is saying,
"Feel free to focus on whatever problems you want ... _this_ is the problem I
want to focus on."

~~~
nsomaru
This is a key idea behind the "ladder of fall" (of man) presented in the
Bhagavad Gita Ch2, verses 62 & 63, which I will quote here for your
convenience:

62\. A man musing on objects develops attachment for them, from attachment
arises desire, from desire arises anger.[1]

63\. From anger arises delusion, from delusion confusion of memory, from
confusion of memory loss of intellect, from loss of intellect he perishes.[1]

There is a simple but powerful metaphysical system underlying these verses and
I apologise to the uninitiated reader, but would be happy to briefly outline
this system should anyone wish it so.

While I will avoid vague (undefined between myself and the reader) terms such
as 'natural' or 'intuitive' thinking, readers who accept that the intellect is
that which conceives solutions will also be able to entertain the possibility
that by improving/strengthening the intellect we improve our ability to solve
the problems that face us.

This improving of the intellect is the meta-solution to all problems, and
(caution: opinion) it should be a requirement for all human beings that they
develop this faculty (as the only known living beings with access to higher
reasoning faculties). Failing such, you are not living up to the name 'human'.
Perhaps this is a hardline stance.

Education (formal) fails us here. We are provided with material to think with
and about, but scarcely are we conducted through the arenas of thought by
those who have made it further than we. Instead, education seems to be a way
to simply 'make a living' by learning a skill and applying it in exchange for
money.[2] A noteworthy read on this is the Cardinal JH Newman's thoughts on
how British universities in the early 1900's were moving away from pure
'intellectual' development and became more utilitarian. A brilliant intellect
allowing us access to his thoughts.[3] Suffice to say, things have worsened
much since then.

[1] From "The Bhagavad Gita" by A Parthasarathy. As an aside, I cannot
recommend his book "The Fall of the Human Intellect" enough.

[2] I'm making a generalisation here. If you happened to have someone teach
you who opened up your mind, you're one of the lucky few in the world.

[3] <http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/>

~~~
halftimegravy
_"There is a simple but powerful metaphysical system underlying these verses
and I apologise to the uninitiated reader, but would be happy to briefly
outline this system should anyone wish it so."_

I would be interested to hear more about this.

------
keithpeter
_"I will not fix your vacuum tubes. I will not invent your Darlington pair"_

I can fix guitar amplifiers, and I can still calculate the DC working point of
a silicon bipolar based push-pull amplifier circuit. I also appreciate the
general principles of negative feedback, stability and, ultimately, the
unfolding of a dynamical system.

I take the point being made, but _the tools we use govern our learning_
(Heidegger, Nietzsche, hopefully not too strong for HN). There is value in the
_here and now_ as well as 100 years ahead.

The Irish writer Chris Arthur writes on the theme of time passing, and his
essay 'facing the family' might be of interest.

------
stephengillie
I have heard that SICP calls it 'design by wishful thinking'[1]. In planning,
it's called "planning for the unexpected", and can be seen i.e. in "built-in
snow days" in primary school calendars [2]. Mathematicians will sometimes
insert a new variable where necessary in an equation, then go back and figure
out what the math should have been to make that variable work. In physics, the
neutrino was something we knew must exist but didn't know what it was, so we
made a placeholder [3].

I think of it as an allegory: Our forward progress is like running up a set of
stairs. Yet the stairs are only half completed. Our goal is to have our foot
moving downward before the stair is placed, with the confidence (or faith)
that others will place and secure each stair before our foot hits it.

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5765447>

[2] Example: [http://bdtonline.com/local/x2056602588/Mercer-school-
system-...](http://bdtonline.com/local/x2056602588/Mercer-school-system-marks-
all-built-in-snow-days-off-its-calendar)

[3] <http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html>

------
thewillcole
Bret is probably an awesome teacher.

tl;dr: "Right now, today, we can't see the thing, at all, that's going to be
the most important 100 years from now...But whatever that thing is -- people
will have to think it. And we can, right now, today, prepare powerful ways of
thinking for these people. We can build the tools that make it possible to
think that thing."

------
espeed
A few weeks ago after Bret gave the talk at MIT Media lab, he tweeted...

"An MIT prof after my talk: "It's as if you showed us how to climb Everest,
and then at the end you say, 'We need to go to the moon'"
(<https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/321830848196390912>).

------
jonmc12
Video is available now: <http://vimeo.com/67076984>

~~~
nswanberg
Discussion here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5783106>

~~~
michael_nielsen
It's been submitted at least three times. All three submissions disappeared
off the front page, and two are dead, because it's being flagged. The fact
that it's being flagged -- multiple times, I believe -- makes me sad.

------
JackFr
Took a while to understand that he didn't mean 'unthinkable' in the sense it's
typically used.

~~~
geg3
It is always delightful when a word seems to take on fresh meaning when
deployed literally.

------
exratione
All of what you do today is transient, but what lives on is the fact that you
contributed to the process of building new and better technology. If you
contribute to the right technologies, you might also live on in addition, but
it is true that pretty much nothing you do will last in and of itself as an
entity. That's fine and as it should be - if your work is lasting then
progress must have halted in a field you care enough about to contribute to.
That can't be good.

------
evangineer
Seems to me there's a deeper point being made here about deciding what one's
purpose in life is and choosing to pursue it wholeheartedly.

------
espeed
Here is a talk and paper where Alan Kay presents the Nile language Bret
referenced in his talk...

"Programming and Scaling" (<http://www.tele-
task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/>)

"Programming and Programming Languages"
<http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2010001_programm.pdf>

------
drcube
Claude Shannon was a _physicist_. He got paid to think about the big century-
defining ideas. Engineers are supposed to think about the concrete here and
now, that's our whole purpose.

Shannon was an extremely important person, a genius, and one of my heroes. But
he didn't build the Bell Telephone System, engineers did.

~~~
andrewflnr
Engineers are allowed to think of whatever they want on their own time. Do I
need to remind you what Einstein was "supposed" to be thinking about when he
figured out special relativity?

~~~
nglevin
nijk, I'd like to upvote your comment, but you've been hellbanned.

For those who can't see the dead;

"We have no need for 7 billion Einsteins. Humanity is a team project."

~~~
andrewflnr
To nijk: That's good, because we can't have that many. We'll take all we can
get. But if potential Einsteins don't bother because of some idea of what
they're "supposed" to think about, then we wouldn't get any.

Then again, you probably can't stop them with snide internet comments, so this
discussion is fairly moot.

Besides, why wouldn't a Team Humanity of 7 billion Einstein-level
intelligences, with the same diversity of specific skills, be better than what
we have now?

------
pdonis
This will probably get downvotes, but this is one of those posts that just
rubs me the wrong way. Your mileage may vary.

I stopped short at the beginning of the second paragraph:

 _Every talk is for an audience, and it's the speaker's responsibility to say
what the audience needs to hear._

Wait, what? Yes, every talk is for an audience, but that just means you have
to know where your audience is coming from in order to communicate. You don't
give a talk full of programming jargon to an audience of businesspeople that
know nothing about programming except that they often need to hire
programmers.

But to me, the second part of that statement sounds like something a con man
would say. You say whatever it is you came there to say; whether it's "what
the audience needs to hear" is irrelevant. (Of course the audience is
presumably interested in what you have to say; otherwise, how did you get the
speaking gig in the first place? But to me, a speaker who worries about "what
the audience needs to hear" is not a speaker I will put much credence in. I
want a speaker who will say what he thinks, regardless of its impact on me.)

Then there's this, later on:

 _one of the most powerful and important statements you'll ever hear..._

 _Right now, today, we can't see the thing, at all, that's going to be the
most important 100 years from now._

100 years? How about 10 years? Our inability to predict the future works on
much shorter timescales than he seems to think. Why the emphasis on 100 years?

Oh:

 _I personally care about mattering 100 years from now._

As another commenter here pointed out, if your work still matters 100 years
from now it probably means your field has stagnated. Even getting your _tools
for thinking_ to matter 100 years from now is a longshot; are you Einstein?
Are you Shannon? Sure, those are ideals to aspire to, but the very nature of
large numbers means most of us won't end up there.

I see the writer's general point, and I even agree with it: having better
tools to think with can have a far greater impact than building one particular
thing. But what's conspicuously missing from this post is any specifics on
_how_ to do that, or how to teach young people to do that.

Ok, done ranting. :-)

~~~
ableal
> Ok, done ranting. :-)

OK, I'll take it from here ;-). Me, I paused at these words:

 _"the intent is always to influence"_

Well, yes, I suppose so. Except, perhaps, for the non-fools (actually Johnson
said blockheads) who wisely spin entertaining stories for money.

But the word "influence" always reminds me of a story that my mother
recounted. Many moons ago, there was a bit of social and labor unrest around
our parts, and there was a general workers assembly at the factory where she
worked.

One of the workers speaking at the meeting said his piece, and finished by
remarking: "But this is just my opinion, and anyone who lets himself be
influenced is a fool".

That simple remark still gives me pause today, when I contemplate all the
"influencers" busily emulating Genghis Khan, trying to insert their ideas into
as many brains as possible.

~~~
pdonis
I know I said my post would probably get downvotes, but I'm glad to find
someone discussing instead of downvoting. Thanks. :-) I agree that the use of
the word _influence_ instead of _inform_ is highly suggestive.

