

The Shocking Truth About Doug Engelbart: Silicon Valley's Sidelined Genius - smacktoward
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/07/the_shocking_truth_ab.php

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deerpig
The article is alltoo true. Engelbart's work was an enormous influence on my
own. But when I gave credit to him in conference papers, and business
proposals I was pulled aside and told that it wasn't a good idea to tie
yourself too closely to Engelbart because he was viewed as being too "out
there". I always had the same reply. "Have you actually /read/ and of
Englebart's papers?" In almost every case the answer was no. And when they did
answer yes, it was always along the lines, "well all he was talking about was
hypertext which is the same as the Web." Silicon Valley loves to talk about
changing the world, but that's largely bullshit. Engelbart is far from the
only genius that is being ignored today who will never get funded. You can
make obscene amounts of money building another photo sharing or dating app,
but try to work on an important problem and you'll starve to death.

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mattip
Maybe a more appropriate tribute is actually HN itself as a manifestation of
his Collective IQ, from [http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-
highlights.html](http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html)
"Collective IQ" is a special set of collective capabilities, built upon our
basic human capabilities, such as sensory, perceptual, cognitive, motor, etc.
Any significant collective capability is achieved by "augmenting" such basic
human capabilities by means of training, enculturation, etc. in operational
use of: (a) appropriately coordinated systems of artifacts and tools (the
"Tool System"); and (b) vocabulary, conventions, roles, organizational
structures, values, rules of conduct, methods of cooperation and education,
etc. (the "Human System"). Together the Tool and Human Systems comprise the
"Augmentation System." The purpose of the bootstrapping strategy is to
accelerate the natural co-evolution of our Tool and Human Systems toward ever-
more powerful Augmentation Systems enabling increasingly effective Collective
IQ

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epo
I can't decide whether this is gibberish or just pretentious. You should give
up writing until you have learnt to express yourself clearly (and have ideas
worth sharing).

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general_failure
Well, I am not sure if epo is a troll but he does have a point. If you give
the original comment a quick read it sounds like gibberish. The language is
very 'heavy' like in academic papers. Academic papers to me are a big turn off
and I hardly understand what they say most of the time. It also shows how
little of academia reaches the common programmers - they are largely
inaccessible. (compare number of papers to numbers that actually end up in
real software)

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nahreally
Academia reaches out to the common programmer and student all the time; they
write books.

Academic research papers are aimed at other researchers, i.e. people who are
up to speed with the concepts and terminology, if you or I don't understand
the latest research on machine vision, then though luck, we just lack the
necessary background, and that's discounting the fact that we are different
audiences and seek for different content and form from each other.

How often are we programmers interested in detailed proofs? Or even sketch
proofs? If you decide to helpfully include code samples and they are full of
boost::this or ApacheFooXMLFactoryThat, would that be of help to an academic
who only implements his algorithms in isolation and doesn't know of massive
APIs, or to researchers 20 years from now?

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gcb0
He made 2 mistakes. Had more than 30 years and never wrote rockstar ninja on
his resume.

