
Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC - skadamat
https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/?doing_wp_cron=1498868053.3908839225769042968750
======
QuadrupleA
What a bunch of of vague, hand-wavey nonsense (the article, not necessarily
the HARC lab, I couldn't make heads or tails of what they actually do). Covers
up its lack of clear thinking with an attempt to sound profound and
obfuscatory in every sentence, like many academic articles. Also full of weird
typos and misspellings (e.g. "mid 1970ties", "most currently available
imaginaries about technologies").

I love Bret Victor's talks, in them he shows real engineering work and highly
original ideas demonstrated with beautiful working prototypes. So don't want
to sound like I'm knocking him. But reading this article makes it sound like
some fool is footing the bill for endless navel-gazing and philosophizing.
Some kind of strange architecture astronaut convention
([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-
architect...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-
astronauts-scare-you/))

It's continuing the ongoing lowering of my opinion of Alan Kay too; the more I
hear about him the more he seems like a good bullshitter who happened to write
a programming language back in the day. "Kay combined them with ideas about
pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and
Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical
speculations of Marshall McLuhan." Wow, world changing stuff; if anyone knew
what the hell it meant it'd probably have a big influence on the course of
civilization.

"So Kay took all of these ideas, desires, technologies, and opportunities, and
recombined them. The results were crucial contributions to a new and emerging
sociotechnical imaginary, in many ways representing the computer as a digital
medium, which we now have today." Again, sounds really revolutionary, and
wonderfully vauge enough that you could say he predicted pretty much
everything that happened in the last 30 years. I say: ideas are cheap,
especially vague ones.

God bless the real engineers who make things work; photography and digital art
were revolutionized with the availablility of programs like photoshop, not
pseudo-philosphers bloviating about "representing the computer as a digital
medium".

~~~
wslh
I never saw the source code of Photoshop but propably uses OOP...

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Which was invented by some Norwegians in Simula 67, wasn't it?

~~~
wslh
Are companies like J.P. Morgan using Simula or Smalltalk?

------
icebraining
The lab's list of projects:
[http://harc.ycr.org/project/](http://harc.ycr.org/project/)

~~~
laxatives
Of all the orgs to have a live demo, I would have guessed Bret Victor's lab to
it. Still, looks pretty interesting.

~~~
skadamat
They're rightfully waiting until they think things are ready to show. Danger
of showing early is a recent memory in computing history (see Jobs / PARC
visit)

~~~
danblick
From what I've heard of the Jobs/PARC visit I don't think I'd characterize it
that way. In Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators" he says that Xerox had taken
an ownership stake in Apple and some higher-ups decided to give them valuable
tech.

Also, Alan Kay had a Quora answer on this:

[https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-
PARC-w...](https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-when-
Steve-Jobs-visited)

~~~
skadamat
You're right and my comment made it seem like everyone has some grudge or
something. I think in general the PARC community was weary that the takeaways
would be centered around how computers, GUI, etc. were great ways of doing old
things better (accounting, reading text, etc) instead of being captivated by
computing as a medium for thinking. This happened with print, as Alan has
discussed in some of his talks. The first 100 years of print was used to print
and distributed religious text and it took a while before ideas that could
probably only sprout in the print medium were invented (physics, calculus,
some philosophies, etc). To some degree, I think some people feel like we're
still in the "use print for spreading religious text" phase (or the "film is a
great way of recording & distributing plays" phase.

------
skadamat
Bret's talks outline the general philosophy, motivation, and framework for the
lab's work:

\- Seeing Spaces: [https://vimeo.com/97903574](https://vimeo.com/97903574)

\- Humane Representation of Thought:
[https://vimeo.com/115154289](https://vimeo.com/115154289)

------
amasad
I support this and find it really cool. However, I'd love to see less hero
worship and more evidence. On its face there is nothing wrong with all those
Alan Kay photos, but my feeling is that it's symptomatic of how much of what's
being pursued rests on appeal to authority and/or nostalgia.

To make this more concrete. Consider one of their projects
([http://harc.ycr.org/project/](http://harc.ycr.org/project/)), the Block-
based programming: what's the evidence that this is a superior way for
learning programming? What's the evidence that so-called computational
thinking enhances cognitive ability or is transferrable to day-to-day
thinking?

Furthermore, much of their computer-based education ideas are based on Seymour
Papert's research and ideas which in turn was based on Piaget's theories on
mental development. Those theories, however, have been thoroughly challenged
and is all but outdated.

EDIT: this was the top comment and actively upvoted, now it seems that the
mods have placed it at the end just before comments with negative points. I
had heard of YC's sensitivity towards any criticism but this seems extreme.
Whats the point discussions without criticism.

~~~
jarmitage
Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism
at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world

Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are
arguing for
[http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/](http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/)

~~~
Cybiote
The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in
reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal
operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason
logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies
often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated,
_Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant
staring, without making an abduction at every step._

A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with
high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to
~9 years olds but couched in the language of _permission_ , the children are
able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the
individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing)
significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting
the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and
more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of
reasoning aren't ever reached.

amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of
Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas
wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning.
The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore
more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability
to ask better questions.

~~~
jacobolus
Even if we assume that all of Piaget’s theories about developmental timelines
are bunk, how does that invalidate the concept of teaching constructively in a
child-centered, problem-centered way? Those seem like mostly orthogonal
concerns.

As for block-based programming: that seems like something we can test
empirically, and indeed there’s quite a bit of literature about it (which I
have not read and am not familiar with, sorry).

~~~
Cybiote
I was directly replying to the asked question. But, it is not just the
developmental timeline that was off. There's also its hypothesis of what
children learn and how they reason or what they are capable of that is
inaccurate.

Child centered, problem centered is vague. More practically, the big things
are: you want material that's novel to the learner but also somewhat familiar
(this is true, regardless of age). Children's attention is more distributed
and worse at blocking out irrelevancies. Therefore, more complex tasks (such
as math) should be presented in a way such that the signal meant to be learned
can be extracted with minimal ambiguity (less extraneous information in
presentation). Few other things have replicated.

~~~
jarmitage
Thanks for your replies, which intuitively make sense and appear to come from
a knowledgeable background. As in my question I would really like to read the
peer-reviewed / field leading work that you're basing your statements on, same
as the comment I replied to. Or even just names of people / labs / journals to
search.

~~~
dhess
Yes, please do provide some citations. This is interesting stuff.

------
Pulcinella
Bret Victor also gave a presentation at the Santa Fe Institute but I haven't
seen a recording or transcript of it.

[https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-
explaining...](https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining-
and-understanding-dy)

~~~
skadamat
Yeah wasn't able to find a recording either :(

~~~
kennethfriedman
While I don't think there's a public recording of this version, BVic's talk
with the same title "Words are Obsolete" was recorded in 2015[0]. I'm not sure
if the demos were the same, but it's something.

[0]: [https://vimeo.com/114252897](https://vimeo.com/114252897)

~~~
skadamat
You're probably right actually.

------
jarmitage
On the "don't let the prototype out of the lab too early" theme, it would be
interesting to read an alternative history novel about a world where the
Mother of All Demos never happened. And Von Neumann never spoke about his
architecture. Etc.

What are some good examples of prototypes or even mediums in the sense
discussed here that were "let out" at "just the right time" or "too late"?

~~~
skadamat
It's definitely an interesting thought. To some degree, it's maybe impossible
to avoid the filtering down / reductionism of a big vision, even if you wait
until things are polished. I think the hope with the Mother of All Demos was
to try to shift people's thinking about computing and try to change where
efforts were directed. You could imagine researchers attracted to the vision,
working on problems there, and eventually working with commercial partners (or
doing it themselves) to solve some of the technical, scale, and other problems
that occur when a research vision goes through the filter of reality.

------
germinalphrase
Victor has indicated that his Realtalk group[0] at HARC is trying to release
new research by the end of the year - so maybe we won't have to wait too long
before learning a little more than this article provides.

[0][https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/](https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/)

~~~
DonHopkins
I recently asked Brett:

"It's such a delight to introduce somebody to your work for the first time!
I’m mentoring somebody at work in the ways of user interface design, and I
just linked him to your classic “Magic Ink” article, and I am indulging myself
by reading it again. You’ve written so much since then, that I have a lot of
catching up to do. Any suggestions where I should start?"

He referred me to these two articles: "If you're looking for something of mine
to read, I'm partial to this one and this one."

[http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/](http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/)

[http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/](http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/)

And here's a "secret internet video" (oops! ;) which Brett shared, "which
doesn't really talk about what we're working towards but maybe gives some
flavor of the material we're working with. (You might notice Chaim Gingold in
a few shots -- the table with pinball etc. was his project.) Here's a vague
description of the current system under development."

[http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-
teaser-2017-02-2...](http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-
teaser-2017-02-21.mov)

[https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/](https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/)

~~~
Pulcinella
Video is gone :(

------
throeaweigh
i was fortunate enough to get a tour of HARC from Götz

after the tour he asked me what i thought

i explained the place looked like my 'play room'

he pressed me, 'what does that look like?'

'an ideal, a sort of messy utopia'

------
mapcars
It's good to see that development of such projects with innovative ideas
exists and can transform our whole life experience into something completely
different like technologies from the 70s did.

------
isnotchicago
This is the first I had heard of Limn, and it looks like a really interesting
magazine. What other great non-mainstream tech/design magazines are out there?

~~~
utanapishtim
I thought so as well, I hope to see more answers to this post.

I don't know if it is mainstream or not, but idn magazine is a great design
mage; see here:
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.idnworld.com/mags/&ved=0ahUKEwiSksHvyprVAhVQ2GMKHemsDD4QFggnMAA&usg=AFQjCNGS18DhsPqdRHFrzBZdi-
Kfx0jEqw).

------
djtriptych
I think I found a new dream job.

~~~
skadamat
I heard from Alan that HARC is quite open and anybody can just drop by!

------
jecel
I was confused about [and after 250 pages of thinking through a “reactive
engine,” it culminates in a “handbook” for an imaginary “Flex Machine”: a
first iteration of a set of ideas that culminated a few years later in Kay’s
vision for a “DynaBook” (1972)] since as far as I know the Flex was actually
built and tested on normal users (who didn't like it, according to Alan).

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sn9
I was really confused by the repeated use of "imaginaries" in the piece, but a
quick Google suggests it's a case of sociological jargon:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_\(sociology\))

------
hyperdunc
Not directly relevant to the article, but I love Bret's previous work in UX
and data visualization[1].

[1] [https://worrydream.com](https://worrydream.com)

------
007panda
I love academics who describe the technical work of engineers. I think this
type of translation work is totally needed.

------
sushisource
Not a comment on the content of the article, but I find it pretty obnoxious
when an author uses a word like "hereodox" which has a much more commonly
known nearly-exact synonym "unorthodox". It's hard to imagine any reason for
that beyond "look at how clever of a writer I am".

~~~
dang
Nearly-exact is definitely not exact. To my ear 'heterodox' connotes
difference and pluralism while 'unorthodox' is more of a negation. (Of course
other mileages may vary.) But different words always exist for a reason—if
they didn't, one would have fallen out of use. Pretentiousness is not enough
to keep a word alive!

~~~
justin66
I wonder if you can offer a pair of online dictionary definitions that
illustrates what you see as the difference in meaning between the two words.
(I bet you can't)

~~~
dang
Look closely enough and you'll see that they all do. One meaning for
'heterodox' is 'holding unorthodox opinions'. That's an attribute of the
person, not the opinion.

The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is
etymology, and there the difference is plain. Hetero = different, dox =
opinion, ortho = correct. So the distinction here is something like "diverse
opinion" vs. "incorrect opinion", which to me seems clearly meaningful.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is
> etymology

No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means
(either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be
completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.

~~~
DonHopkins
How is heterodoxophobia more nuanced than literally meaning being afraid of
different opinions?

[http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2010/05/homodoxuals-and-
hetero...](http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2010/05/homodoxuals-and-
heterodoxuals-in-the-church.html)

