
Alan Kay: Power of Simplicity [video] - tnorgaard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs
======
mpweiher
Around 9:30:

"What's the expense of getting simplicity? [..] You get simplicity by finding
a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of.
It's when you go for a simple building block that anyone can understand with
common sense that you start screwing yourself right and left."

~~~
duncanawoods
I found that interesting as well.

After thinking about it for a while, I struggled to get anything profound out
of it. I feel his point is equivalent to saying "a higher level of abstraction
can make problems more tractable" which is something we do all the time in all
contexts.

Finding good abstractions is an art but I don't think this really maps to
insights like Copernicus though. I see a slightly different process happening
i.e. discovering a new perspective on a problem. A new perspective can be a
different way to decompose a problem but I don't think it necessitates
anything about the sophistication of the building blocks. Instead, a revealing
change is often because it changes the type of relationships between the
building blocks in a radical way that enables new inferences.

~~~
calibraxis
Don’t know if this applies to your post, but I got a lot more out of Alan Kay
talks when I stopped trying to look for profundity, and assumed he's mostly
talking about how we're being morons.

~~~
wodenokoto
I think that too is wrong way of looking at it.

What he basically says is, you need an organizational framework that works 10
years at a time in order to get a result in 7 years. The people working in
this framework, needs 5 years windows and you need to hire absolute geniuses
and have the trust that they'll do the right thing.

If you do that, you will get long term, world changing inventions relatively
cheap.

I don't think anyone is being a moron for utilizing a staff of less than
stellar geniuses to get work done in a time frame less than 7-10 years.

~~~
calibraxis
I believe there's a lot of evidence we're collectively morons. Consider how
close we are to a transformed world. Hunger, wage slavery, environmental
destruction, etc could be a thing of the past if enough of us decided right
now to be serious... countering absurd ways of thinking.

Are people really afraid of death? Then we should invite people to organize to
solve that. Support each other regardless of gender or other insignificant
differences, to accomplish such goals; any menial work can be shared equally.
What huge percentage of humanity would go for that?

But currently we organize ourselves in moronic ways. Alan Kay's vision seems
actually quite narrow and corporate-friendly; many go further in seeking to
liberate imagination. [http://thebaffler.com/blog/david-graeber-defiantly-
having-fu...](http://thebaffler.com/blog/david-graeber-defiantly-having-fun-
at-the-baffler-no-22-release-party)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The moronism comes from a corporate culture that prioritises short-term gain
over the invention of ultra-profitable long-term game-changers.

How many of the advances in computing have been inspired by MBAs demanding
quarterly growth?

We have no formal tools for valuing our collective future.

Incubators and accelerators come closest, but the emphasis is still on
believable prospects for profitability - hence investing in the team, instead
of good ideas - and not on open research.

~~~
kbutler
Or is it a rational discounting of uncertain distant future results compared
to the relatively more certain short-term gains?

Or taking another look - how much of your income are you investing for
retirement vs current consumption? Why?

------
staunch
> _" The big problem with Xerox is they only wanted to make billions. And
> that's the problem with most companies. When you're doing kind of stuff
> you're actually in the trillion-dollar range."_

~~~
wodenokoto
Yeah, he is really selling his new research division hard.

~~~
sp332
The quantity of world-changing tech that came out of the late 70's has never
been matched. In fact it's hard to come up with more than a handful of
innovations in tech of the same magnitude that have happened since.
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-
in...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-
in-computing-since-1980)

~~~
hga
The World Wide Web. Yep, plenty of antecedents, I personally start with
Vannevar Bush's Memex for the idea, and there were many attempts with varying
levels of un-success, until Tim Berners-Lee put together a winning, massively
network effects positive solution.

Which, along with search engines, have resulted in significant, qualitative
changes in information publishing and access; in the '70s (or perhaps earlier)
Jerry Pournelle was looking forward to the day when you could quickly find the
answer to any question that had an answer, and this is one of the biggest
steps towards that.

To the point I rank it near computers _per se_ ; from Wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology)):

 _General-purpose technologies (GPTs) are technologies that can affect an
entire economy (usually at a national or global level). GPTs have the
potential to drastically alter societies through their impact on pre-existing
economic and social structures. Examples include the steam engine, railroad,
interchangeable parts, electricity, electronics, material handling,
mechanization, control theory (automation), the automobile, the computer, and
the Internet._

This was the step that made the Internet into a "monster". So even if it only
counts as one invention, it's as big as many of those preceding GPTs.

~~~
kragen
I think the revision of the NSFNet AUP in 1994 (?) to allow commercial use,
and the decommissioning of the NSFNet in 1995, was what made the internet into
a "monster". Even if people were "only" running NNTP, email, and anonymous
FTP, the internet would have taken off massively at that point. This was
obvious to me from the time I joined the internet in 1992.

