
Thought as a Technology - chewxy
http://cognitivemedium.com/tat/index.html
======
joelg
I think there's a subtle danger to "cognitive outsourcing", or at least an
important distinction to be aware of. "Cognitive outsourcing" works like an
oracle, but many of our best tools work more like bicycles: very direct, very
fluid, very analog, with continuous feedback that helps us build an
constructive intuition. Bicycles extend the range of what a human can do;
oracles do something that a human tells them to do.

Sometimes this difference is a function of how information is displayed and
how it reacts to the user. Terminals and REPLs are inherently oracles;
spreadsheets connect our fingertips directly to raw information.

Other times it’s just a difference in the conceptual model that users
construct. Some people think of Google as an oracle ("what is the weather
like?"); others as a bicycle ("weather"). Those who bicycle around Google
aren’t just “better at Googling”; they have a fundamentally different view of
what they're doing.

This isn’t to say that oracles are inherently wrong or that bicycles are
always better, but there’s a huge difference between truly augmenting a human
and merely interfacing with one. It’s important to know which idea is
appropriate for any given problem space.

(most of this comment was ripped from here:
[http://joelgustafson.com/ideas/2016/08/25/oracles-and-
bicycl...](http://joelgustafson.com/ideas/2016/08/25/oracles-and-
bicycles.html))

(see also [http://mental.bike](http://mental.bike), which I don't know why I
own)

~~~
westoncb
I think your bicycle/oracle distinction is interesting. It seems like the
tradeoffs in preferring a bicycle to an oracle are similar to considerations
leading up to decisions _not_ to abstract. If we could assume the oracle would
fulfill its function perfectly, there would be no real reason to prefer the
bicycle; unfortunately, however, experience shows us that the internals of
complex black boxes we construct are rarely perfect, and that opening the box
may be necessary, and unpleasant. On the other hand, with a bicycle, a feeling
of control remains throughout: it's always understood how some action on the
bicycle will evolve the state of your situation. The downside for the bicycle
is that its definition requires it to remain relatively simple.

My first thought for getting around this was something like formal
verification that a black box does what it says—but once 'what it says' is too
complex for a person to really understand (e.g. a black box containing the
behavior of a human brain), you've hit a wall with this approach.

The other thing I can imagine is building up 'bicycles' which have parts of
proven-correct medium complexity, arranged together in a single higher-level
system also of proven-correct medium complexity (where medium complexity is:
more complex than bike parts, but still with readily human-comprehensible
semantics). I'd characterize these systems as sort of like Iron Man suits.
Maybe that doesn't really add anything of practical benefit beyond the
original bicycle analogy though ;)

~~~
zardo
>If we could assume the oracle would fulfill its function perfectly, there
would be no real reason to prefer the bicycle

The bicycle might be more fun to ride

~~~
joelg
Not only might it be more fun, but you'd build a better intuition about what
to expect from it (or even how it works).

It's like how people often make fewer mistakes with slide-rules or abacuses
than pocket calculators, since the former two require you to check your answer
against your intuition, while the latter just tells you "the answer" to your
(potentially ill-formed) query. Trusting a black box can be quite dangerous.

------
westoncb
Part of this reminds me of a project idea I've had in the past: figuring out
how to teach people an 'abstract visual relationship' language. I'll quote
from the article:

> _... he immediately responded that when he taught algebra courses, if he was
> discussing cyclic subgroups of a group, he had a mental image of group
> elements breaking into a formation organized into circular groups._

Jacque Hadamard once conducted a study of how mathematicians approach their
work, which can still be found in a book called "The Psychology of Invention
in the Mathematical Field". Here's an excerpt:

> _Indeed, every mathematical research compels me to build such a schema,
> which is always and must be of a vague character, so as not to be deceptive.
> I shall give a less elementary example from my first researches (my thesis).
> I had to consider a sum of an infinite number of terms, intending to valuate
> its order of magnitude. In that case, there is a group of terms which
> chances to be predominant, all others having a negligible influence. Now,
> when I think of that question, I see not the formula itself, but the place
> it would take if written: a kind of ribbon, which is thicker or darker at
> the place corresponding to the possibly important terms; or (at other
> moments), I see something like a formula, but by no means a legible one, as
> I should see it (being strongly long-sighted) if I had no eye-glasses on,
> which letters seeming rather more apparent (though still not legible) at the
> place which is supposed to be the important one._

It seems to me that this is a surprisingly common approach to dealing with
highly abstract subject matter. I first noticed myself doing it while reading
_Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ and later used it intentionally in
working on math and CS stuff.

My experience with it so far leads me to believe it can be
taught/strengthened. I've written a much more in depth essay on this in the
past, but it's fairly unfinished. I still wonder about it though...

~~~
srcreigh
Please release your essay! You don't even have to finish it. You could even
email it to me without commentary, and I would ask you questions about it.

------
Animats
This is interesting, but combines about five ideas. Expanding any one of those
would be useful. The notion of a "transformative interface" seems to combine
two concepts - "Wow factor" and "representation that yields insight". Those
are different. The latter is more useful (but the former is more profitable.)
Feynman diagrams come to mind.

Sussman's talk on how to think about circuits is here.[1] Here are the
slides.[2] The video shows Sussman's talking head and him pointing at an off-
screen display of the slides, which is not too helpful.

[1] [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-
How-...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-
Compute) [2] [http://web.mit.edu/xtalks/Sussman-
xTalk-3-2-16.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/xtalks/Sussman-xTalk-3-2-16.pdf)

~~~
chewxy
often though, representations that yield insight have some wow factor to them,
especially if the world hasn't seen it before.

Between Nielsen and Bret Vector, I'm kinda jealous about what my future kids
can learn with much more ease.

------
bcheung
One things that I think would enable the kind of thinking necessary to come up
with new interfaces for exposing concepts is to have a library of existing
patterns.

I have seen various books and resources that come close (Edward Tufte books
for example) but I think there could be much more work done.

There seem to be quite a few books on mechanical motion that are basically an
encyclopedia of patterns that can be used to create new devices but I haven't
really seen much type of this work done for computer interfaces.

If anyone has any good references please share.

~~~
moxious
You should have a look at books about the TRIZ system, such as this one

And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem
Solving
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0964074028/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0964074028/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_)

It is rather hard to describe quite simply, but I would try like this: TRIZ is
about all of the patterns and heuristics found in the invention of mechanical
engineering elements. It purports to provide an algorithm for innovation, but
you don't have to accept that grand of a claim in order to find the content
fascinating.

~~~
bcheung
I'll check it out. Thanks.

------
tannerc
Interesting insights. There's a lot to unpack here, but ultimately it boils
down to working with, and creating, a "bicycle for the mind." The computer is
one such example of such a technology, but so are the software programs it
runs, as are art forms and language.

~~~
moxious
I understand what you mean, but I think it goes even further than a bicycle.
At the risk of abusing the comparison, a bicycle will let you do what you
already can do, move about, just a little bit faster. By contrast, what I
think the article is talking about is doing something fundamentally new that
you couldn't do before.

It's clear that overtime human beings can think about things that they didn't
used to be able to think about. We can bootstrap our brains in this way,
because it is all cumulative. Explaining the Internet to someone from the
Middle Ages would be almost impossible, but it wouldn't be that difficult for
someone from the 1950s who only understood telephones.

So this phenomenon of bootstrapping into new kinds of knowledge is clearly
real and powerful. It's very useful and quite meta to think about how we could
do that faster or better.

~~~
meric
> Explaining the Internet to someone from the Middle Ages would be almost
> impossible

I think it's quite possible. "In the future, by pressing fingers on these
letters printed on a specially built rectangular object in a pattern to invoke
certain incantations, people will be able to speak directly to other people
from around the world, as well as control machines in factories to produce
stuff with little or no manual labor." Do make it clear you have no part in
any of it, to avoid getting hanged or burned, but I'm sure they'll understand
you.

~~~
shostack
I'm in the middle of the second "Off to be the Wizard" books and this is
exactly how they deal with it. Really it just comes down to abstracting away
everything under hood and relating to existing concepts and ideologies.

Even today, most people wouldn't get how a car functions, but they would
understand that you push this and turn that and this moves you.

------
eddieone
Imagining is the easy part if you ask me. What would you do, if you could
program your own mind? My first app would probably be some more manual control
over the body. Sure would be nice to have a 75 bpm in a stressful situation.

~~~
pas
More consistency.

If I like something, let's like it more consistently. Let's really eat pizza
for 3 days for every meal. So I can order the large one and pop slices into
the microwave and enjoy the fuck out of them.

More motivation for progress.

If I decide I want to build a house let's not lose enjoyment after 1 hour of
searching the net for floorplans, materials, warehouses, plots of land, and so
on.

Also, better [internal] metrics. And naturally better interrupt management.
Both internal and external. With better metrics we could see whether what we
were doing (and possible what we can do) was (would be) effective/good/useful
and how much. And with more efficiency we could reschedule more frequently
(not just after we spent a day fiddling with something) so we'd be more
effective overall.

And so on.

And probably a lot of these are pretty hackable, as in sprinkle cocaine on
that pizza, alaways a bit more the longer it was in the fridge. And probably
physiologically it's possible to make a pill that'd give you focus for one
hour, we already have a dozen or so ADD/ADHD pills used as attention enhancer
nootropics. And we have drugs that alter our view of our own life. Bam,
instant feedback on your life. Are we going the right way? Yes, good, keep
doing.

Is that too mechanical? Sure, yet sometimes that'd be pretty useful.

And in general, what if you could take a pill to feel in love with someone for
500 days? You get together things are okay, but emotionally something is
bothering you a bit, both of you take a pill, and done. Instant good
relationship.

The same could go for not getting dragged down by half-hearted relationships.

And that's basic limbic system efficiency, nowhere near mind-hacking. We'd
benefit a lot from better pattern matching, better memory (faster, more
accurate, etc.), better associations, better theory of mind. A bit of raw
working memory, maybe a numeric submodule, something for proper alarms,
alerts, better introspection, and so on.

~~~
shanusmagnus
All of these assume that the conscious "you" knows better about optimizing
some meta-objective function than does the limbic "you." Except the latter has
been proved out to be species-useful for tens of millions of years, and even
more if cross-species evolutionary conservation is considered.

So the interesting question from my PoV is: beyond the immediate reward you
hope to enjoy (e.g., loving the pizza as much on day 3 as on the first bite;
easy relationships for 500 days) what would the consequences be of these
overrides? I'm betting they're all catastrophic, but it's fun to think about
the nature of the catastrophe.

~~~
jamii
> Except the latter has been proved out to be species-useful for tens of
> millions of years, and even more if cross-species evolutionary conservation
> is considered.

One of the things that makes humans dominate the planet so thoroughly is that
we are programmable, so we can evolve culturally on a scale of decades,
instead of genetically on a scale of centuries.

The side effect of this is that that parts of us that aren't programmable are
not keeping up with rapidly changing environment eg being _both_ cognitive
misers _and_ obese
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547044/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547044/)).

It does lead to a neat heuristic though - if some easy change improves
intelligent/memory/whatever, it should be expected to have side effects that
would have been a poor tradeoff in our ancestral environment, otherwise it
would have been selected for already -
[https://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics](https://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics)

