
Media for Thinking the Unthinkable - espeed
http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/
======
systemtrigger
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17455578/unthinkable_tho...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17455578/unthinkable_thoughts.png)

"Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in
some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts."

Which prompts today's startup idea:

1\. Use Silk Road imitators to send hallucinogens to Amazon Mechanical Turk
workers

2\. Ask workers to solve impossible problems

3\. Pass responses into machine learning algorithm

4\. Gain godlike insight

5\. Rescue humanity from self-destruction

~~~
thatthatis
Your algorithm becomes a bit implausible at step 4 & 5.

------
dmazin
How inspiring it is that Bret Victor diligently designs the presentation of
his content: to me this is one of the reasons he's apart from others, where
often even a great design thinker simply leaves a talk or slides or an essay
to be presented however it will, like a philosopher who sets aside her
inquisitive attitude in real life.

------
6ren
Counterpoint: he notes our techniques are based on writing, but it goes
deeper: our symbolic writing (including mathematical notation) is based on
speech, for which we have dedicated linguistic structures in our brains, much
as we have a visual center. It is deep-seated, and many have argued
fundamentally entwined with sapience. Thus, even if it's not theoretically the
best way, it might be the best way _for us_. But I'm going to argue it _is_
the theoretically best way:

Linguistic descriptions have a key advantage over pictorial in that they
represent or reference rather than show. This enables them to be compact, and
omit unnecessary detail. (Of course, showing rather than telling is a strength
of visual representation).

Yes, you can have a hierarchy of visual systems, and zoom-in or hide. But a
fundamental problem here I think is in _choosing_ the hierarchy - that is, the
way the system is modularized.

Different modularizations of the same system are often appropriate for
different uses of that system, or for considering different aspects of it. For
even a slightly complex system, there are a huge number of different
modularizations possible, and not all of them are useful. Often, you'll start
with a poor one, and eventually have insights moving you towards the ideal
one. (Of course, sometimes the "right" modularization is obvious, especially
for well-known families of problems).

All this is very difficult. My point is that it is easier to switch
modularities linguistically than pictorially, by changing your concepts.
Without the right modularity, it's difficult to pictorially show just the
aspects of interest instead of the whole picture. In contrast, one can
linguistically omit detail by referencing it (implicitly, as a separate
module).

Maybe it's possible to do this visually, though I suspect it thereby would
have _become linguistic!_

[Though the above is a counterpoint, I'm very impressed with the talk. He's
working both ends of abstraction, with concrete working software demonstrating
cool useful practical techniques that, while not universal, would be helpful
in many domains; and also framing it within, and using it to illustrate, the
deep universal and philosophical idea of unthinkable thoughts. BTW e.g.
uncomputable numbers.]

~~~
natural219
My gut reaction is to say that all three of these ways of thinking
(interactive, visual, and symbolic) are all useful and should be used where
their advantages can be best applied. As a shallow example, I think that the
basic visual/interactive representations can be fantastic teaching tools, and
once you get an intuitive feel for how the system behaves, you can then switch
to symbolic representation and move on to the more higher-order systems which
those building blocks are composed of.

I thought it was interesting that when he compressed the paragraph describing
an equation to is algebraic representation (x2 + 2x = 10), we immediately
grokked the algebraic version better, because we have loads of experience
reading and manipulating the algebraic expression. If I think back to my own
learning career, however, I learned the basic tenets of algebra using -- you
guessed it -- interactive and visual representation through Hands-On Equations
[1]

[1] [http://www.borenson.com/](http://www.borenson.com/)

(now that I think about it, Hands-On Equations serves as a very nice "tldr"
for this speech and the related concepts)

------
seivan
Bret Scares me. He makes feel inadequate on so many levels. Am I alone on
this? I don't care for most 'successful' startup people and others, but Bret
in particular - is amazing.

~~~
jacobolus
Bret is a lovely and amazing person, but don’t sell yourself short. I
guarantee you if you come up with a topic or problem to work on, and devote
10+ years to full time reading/tinkering/inventing/implementing in the field,
allowing yourself to be creative, sweating the tiny details, and worrying more
about making your inventions wonderful than profitable, you will be able to
amaze yourself and all of the rest of us with what you make.

~~~
calinet6
This is quite astute. Truly, I only dream of what the world would be like were
we free to pursue our most profound curiosities instead of only our most
profitable ones.

~~~
otisfunkmeyer
We are.

~~~
kevinflo
The we you're referencing includes very few people in the world.

~~~
IanCal
I would think the number of people who are free to do this is significantly
higher than the number of people who actually do it.

~~~
calinet6
Freedom is a continuous unit. Just because I can take risks doesn't mean I
will, or that I am necessarily "free" to do so, or that that freedom isn't
highly limited (for example, I may be free to start a company with a 2-year
ramp and some expected gain, but I'm not able to take 10 years with no income
to pursue some ideas that interest me).

If so many people are truly free to pursue higher callings, why don't they?
Look at reality, not theory. Find some answers to that question and you'll
start to discover the wide and complex range of restrictions on true freedom.

------
spion
I'm always torn whenever I see a Bret Victor talk.

On one hand, I agree with almost everything he says in the talk, amazed by the
prototype tools he presents, the concepts he discovered to make those tools
usable. And I can see that in each talk he has some new insights to present,
deeper connections, better and more general creations - and thats really
exciting.

On the other hand, his attitude that he doesn't plan to turn the tools into
products, that they're just prototypes, that he expects someone else to come
and create actual products - that rubs me the wrong way.

The thing is, we've found excellent collaboration platforms exactly for these
kind of prototypish things that we don't plan to make a product of yet we
would like other people to toy around with the general idea. The most recent
incarnation is GitHub.

So why not publish some of these prototypes? Its not about the code, its about
forming a community that will build upon those ideas. Its about kick-starting
the construction, setting it in motion. As far as I can see, that is what
Victor is hoping for - people taking these ideas close to their hearts and
building them in reality.

Is the idea not ready yet? Not exactly polished enough or general enough to be
published? The visualization drawing / exploration tool looks like an awesome
start to me...

I don't understand.

Edit: Oh wait.
[https://github.com/damelang/nile](https://github.com/damelang/nile) contains
the presented Nile viewer. Nevermind.

~~~
austenallred
One particular tweet from Victor explains his point of view quite poignantly,
in what he calls the dichotomy between industry and research:

"An 'Industry vs Research' dichotomy that I sketched at a conference. I
probably should elaborate on it sometime.
[https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/pho...](https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/photo/1")

One can understand why, given the options as viewed by Victor, one would
choose "research" if given the choice.

~~~
chm
I get an error that the page doesn't exist.

~~~
austenallred
The last " is sticking to the link. Delete that and it works.
[https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/pho...](https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/photo/1)

------
anigbrowl
This got posted to HN twice in April and died with only a few points and no
comments. glad to see it's finally finding an audience here.

~~~
espeed
Yeah, the video got posted a while back, but at the time he hadn't created the
interactive page. It's cool to see how much thought he puts into presenting
each idea. He doesn't stop with just the talk.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Bret Victor also has many other amazing and thought provoking talks:

 _Inventing on Principle_ :
[http://vimeo.com/36579366](http://vimeo.com/36579366)

 _Stop Drawing Dead Fish_ :
[http://vimeo.com/64895205](http://vimeo.com/64895205)

 _Drawing Dynamic Visualizations_ :
[http://vimeo.com/66085662](http://vimeo.com/66085662)

 _The Future of Programming_ :
[http://vimeo.com/71278954](http://vimeo.com/71278954)

------
l33tbro
IMO - Abstraction is almost a prerequisite for creating anything interesting
or innovative.

Meaning: my best ideas always come from playing in non-traditional
representational systems within a certain medium. Particularly drawing. I find
sketching/scribbling/drawing things generates ideas that I could not have
thought of by just writing/brainstorming. You may even be able to apply it to
the example of how software development models have jumped paradigms into
mainstream business management (eg, agile teams). Bret's onto something here.

------
rhinoe
The scientific paper isn't designed for people who need
explanation/visualisation of a logarithmic curve. People who read that paper
should be able to quickly decipher what the authors have written – their
writing is consistent with normal mathematical instruction.

The electrical drawing would be obvious to anyone who is used to working with
them.

There are obvious places where this would work– dissemination of material is
always useful in many different forms. But this is NOT an answer to a question
that is being asked. Rather, it is an alternative form of dissemination to an
alternative audience.

~~~
lstamour
Fully admitting I've only read the website's summary bullets: I disagree. The
point to me is not as much dissemination of material but thinking through
materials in a language other than left to right words or symbols. It harkens
back to renaissance books in which words and scribbles mixed together in what
was, for the times, a coherent mixture. We're talking note-taking for
instruction, tools to think about and optimize problem solving ... tools for
thinking rather than sharing, even if the source appears to be sharing or
instruction right now. That may not be true in the future... I, for one, am
sick of OneNote being "the best thing since lined paper" and living otherwise
with notepad.exe alternatives. What, precisely, will bring the tablet from its
consumption roots into a true work/thinking device? There's a lot of room for
more visual note-taking apps, and eventually that will be the new low-hanging
fruit of computer vision and natural language input. Someday, for some tasks,
at least.

------
anfedorov
I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's thinking, but this part struck me as indicative
of the criticisms he'll receive:

 _" here, they are discussing some relationships: the regular latice, L grows
linearly with n, we see L growing linearly with n, and we see C is staying
constant. In the random network, L grows logarithmically, and we see L growing
logarithmically, we see C going as a reciprocal relationship. When we read the
word "logarithmic", we don't need to reconstruct that relationship in our
head, you can just see it"_

Does the average reader of Nature need to be shown a graph of what a linear,
constant, logarithmic, and inverse relationship looks like? I don't think so.

That said, I imagine there are highly terse and technical ideas that cannot be
simply represented in the current mediums of publication and which could
benefit greatly using a presentation using an interactive widgets, making more
complex ideas more easily communicable.

~~~
swalsh
The point is now someone who isn't the average reader of Nature can understand
the concept...

Sometimes I feel like nerds kind of enjoy the exclusivity provided by
"cryptic" notation. What Bret is doing is not genius level stuff, he's just
doing what a lot of people don't have the balls to do. Attempt to make "hard"
things easy enough for "regular" people to understand by appealing to the
right side of their brain.

~~~
felipeerias
Sorry, but that is not the point.

This is not just about simplifying scientific notation so it is easier to
digest for an untrained audience: it is about using tools to remove as much
cognitive "shit work" as possible, so that our minds (including those of
experts) are free to think the "unthinkable thoughts" of the title.

~~~
nightski
But you see, once you get the point where no one can draw pretty pictures
about what you are working on requires your mind to be trained in this
cognitive shit work (imagination?). So we'll develop a generation of people
who never really learn to think creatively. Everything is just handed to you
in a pretty little interactive diagram.

Learning is hard, but that is a good thing. It's like exercise. The more you
work at it, the easier it becomes.

~~~
felipeerias
Yours is a very sad comment.

The author gives a good example here, if you choose to read it:

[http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.ht...](http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.html)

Basically, Claude Shannon was able to create his information theory because he
could use things like calculus, probability, stochastic processes and graph
theory to aid his thought process. He needed those tools to be able to think
things that would have been unthinkable without them.

~~~
nightski
Of course I read it. Just like I watched all of his videos. There is no
substance. Of course he was able to create information theory because of
calculus, probability, stochastic processes, and graph theory. Yet for none of
those did he need Brett Victor's cute little animations. I am merely stating
that Brett is adding nothing to the equation here.

------
mrottenkolber
Didn't know about this. Blew me away. The editor looks really awesome. What is
the software called?

I am somewhat intrigued by the idea to represent arbitrary systems. I wonder
where you might hit a wall within the editor, and how you can extend the
editor to be able to visualize what might be possible to vizualize now. Like
Emacs paired with these capabilities?

~~~
saraid216
AFAIK, it's just a prototype Bret built to illustrate his point.

------
dirkk0
Bret Victor is awesome. Check out his website - when I first discovered it, I
spent hours there, reading even his poems.

ALBATROSS gave me the chills.

~~~
JeroenRansijn
Same here! His thinking had a huge impact on my thinking.

------
jgamman
i know you all hate on mathematica but isn't this what the CDF computable
document format is all about? text, systems modelling and dynamic movement all
in the one language/system? (NB i'm not a mathematica user but have always
wanted an excuse to get into it)

------
jdmitch
> _This page is an attempt to "explode" a demo-driven talk into a skimmable,
> browsable, gistable form, where individual ideas can be quickly referenced
> later._

This reminds me of another tool, Korsakow[0], which attempts to do a similar
thing in a different way with documentary material, by presenting it in
"shortest narrative units" or SNUs that relate to each other. It is one of a
number of "interactive documentary" tools (like Mozilla's Popcorn [1] to some
extent) but I wonder if it could be repurposed to "explode" a talk in a
slightly more digestible way that could be reproduced by those of us who don't
have Bret Victor's skillz.

[0] www.korsakow.org

[1] www.popcornjs.org

~~~
ridicter
Thanks for posting both of these! I'm very interested in tools that allow you
to switch between the linearity of narrative (e.g., a film) but then break out
into the non-linearity of systems.

I think these tools could be especially useful for helping people understand
systems like climate change.

------
lstamour
I wonder if Powerpoint (or Visio, OneNote, VS) will eventually evolve this
way. My prediction? We'll see lots of bad examples for 10+ years once software
for this takes off, until people actually write up what better ways exist
through documenting the good stuff. Oh and geeks will use Latex-style power
tools that no one else can figure out :) Perhaps I'm talking about the web
once alternative layouts and HTML5 component libraries start taking off...
Maybe we'll see the return of Quartz Composer someday. When Apple actually
takes non-linear programming seriously.

------
richardv
If you don't have enough time to watch the entire video, just watch the
"Linked representations" which starts at 24 minutes (4 minutes long).

It's on a 2D graphing library but his visualizations are incredible.

------
SnowProblem
I knew the name sounded familiar. Bret Victor also gave a great talk called
Inventing on Principle
([http://vimeo.com/36579366](http://vimeo.com/36579366)).

~~~
espeed
If you enter through the home page, you can see a list of his other talks:
[http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple](http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple)

------
mbrock
I think one major reason why Victor's talks are so appreciated is that he
shows a deep and serious engagement with humanism, tapping into the same vein
as Christopher Alexander, Alan Kay, Jef Raskins, Seymour Papert, and others.

------
flyrain
Where can I get the tool he showed? Did he publish it?

~~~
zhemao
A friend of mine asked him this after we saw it in his "Inventing on Principle
Talk". Here is his response:

> Thanks! The tools I showed were just prototypes that I made for the talk. I
> don't have plans to make them into products myself. (But someone else
> might!)

~~~
flyrain
Thanks, I can not wait for it. Anybody take this job?

~~~
zhemao
Not that I'm aware of, which is rather unfortunate. One way to do this might
be to take an existing open source SPICE implementation such as NGSPICE
([http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/](http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/)) and build
a GUI around it that provides the real-time visualization of the signals.

In the meantime, if you're looking for a free, easy-to-use circuit simulation
tool, I've used LTSpice
([http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/](http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/))
in the past for my EE classes. The Windows version runs pretty well under Wine
and the UI isn't too shoddy. It's pretty far away from Bret Victor's vision
though, as you need to rerun the simulation again in order to see a new plot
of the node voltages and currents.

------
pasiaj
Is anyone else having trouble with the video on Vimeo?

~~~
Walkman
yes, but you can just download it and watch it with VLC :)

------
tsopi
This will for sure speed up research. Thinking all the extensions of this
technology is impossible... or is it? ;)

------
MarcusBrutus
I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already
exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has
been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind willing to spend the
effort to parse it has never failed to convey the unthinkable, the sublime or
the transcendent.

~~~
saraid216
So, it would suck to introduce you to this guy named Ludwig Wittgenstein.

~~~
MarcusBrutus
Inability to hold educated conversation on Wittgenstein should not be taken to
reflect badly on anyone's intellect.

------
AnaRizaMae
brilliant!

------
gd9
Haven't watched the whole thing, but scrolling down and reading his closing
makes me not want to watch it. He complicates the simple procedure "Completing
the Square"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square)).
Take half of the b coefficient, square it, and add it to both sides gives x^2
+ 10x + 25 = 64 or the completed square (x+5)^2 = 64 or x+5 = 8 or x=3.

~~~
dcre
That's a quote from al-Khwārizmī[1], the medieval Persian mathematician whose
name the word "algorithm" comes from.

Victor didn't complicate the process. He used that quote to illustrate his
claim that it's precisely because of innovations in symbolic representation
(i.e., representing the equation as x^2 + 10x + 39) that you are able to think
of the process as simple.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-
Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB)

