
Alan Kay’s reading list - jacobolus
http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
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jodrellblank
One thing I've been pondering lately, is the more general purpose of reading
books.

I used to read quite a lot of books, library books and personal books. Mostly
fiction and popular science, I hesitate to admit (not hesitate to read them,
just hesitate to admit because they are 'lesser' books). There are a lot of
things that I couldn't tell you whether I have read or not, let alone what the
main points were. Now I mostly read online and read pages every day that are
forgotten within hours.

Every day or two I find somethings really interesting and hold onto those
ideas for a while, but they fade. How many great ideas did I read from Kathy
Sierra? Lots... I think. As long as you don't ask what they were.

Am I really doing this just to feel good about saying "I've read that!"? Am I
reading for the occasional "ooh, I read something interesting about that
once... where was it?" feeling of contribution?

Am I missing something fundamental about reading and remembering that other
people get - ought I to be studying books instead of skimming them? Ought I to
remember more of the content?

Am I really a better person for having read more books? For having been
exposed to certain ideas?

~~~
frossie
_Am I really a better person for having read more books? For having been
exposed to certain ideas?_

Yes. Even if you can't directly recall what you have read, if you understood
it while you were reading it you would have internalised some of the world
view, if not the blow-by-blow account.

As somebody else replied, discussing it with your friends (or, making friends
of the people who would discuss such books with you) is a great way of
integrating the ideas into your thinking.

As to the list: Anybody interested in reading Arthur Koestler (and he is
really worth reading) might want to start with The Sleepwalkers. It is a very
readable account of the development of science - if you like it you will be
motivated to delve into some of his other work.

~~~
Radix
I was going to say this. Specifically that this is particularly true when you
are young. I recall discussing Atlas Shrugged with a friend not long ago. I
can see that book permanently influencing someone's world view. (For better or
worse, positively or negatively, I cannot say.)

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michael_nielsen
This was posted 18 months ago (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92007> ).
No problem with a repost - this is an absolutely wonderful list of books -
just mentioning it because there are a couple of interesting comments on the
earlier posting.

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michael_nielsen
It's striking how broadly engaged Kay is with the world. He finds ideas,
problems and inspiration everywhere. To know how to write a program, all you
need to know is APIs, algorithms, and tools. But to design breakthrough
software - to know what program to write - it obviously helps to also be
broadly engaged with the world.

~~~
jacobolus
Some part of this is that Kay is more concerned with cognition and learning,
and especially in children, than he is with computer programming as such.
Programming happens to be a uniquely exciting way to engage with mathematics,
and computers happen to be wonderful tools in many types of learning, so he
has devoted of his career to inventing programming environments and interfaces
for kids.

Because all programming – even to some extent pure numerical algorithm
design/optimization – is an exercise in communication and human-usable
abstraction, most programmers should probably spend more time on developmental
psychology than they do currently.

~~~
david927
I think he understands many things we'll only recognize much later, and one of
these is that kids need clarity. (Not simplicity; people talk down to kids all
the time.) And clarity is orthogonality, it's structure, it's everything we
need in our funny little industry and nothing we have.

There are 20 people I admire in this field and the first seven are Alan Kay.

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jballanc
Oh man...I was totally with him until I saw "Selfish Gene". Please, speaking
as an evolutionary biologist, don't read that book. Dawkins oversimplifies the
important and complicates the obvious. If you want a good book on an
analytical approach to evolution, might I recommend "Evolutionary Dynamics" by
Nowak in its place.

~~~
10ren
The "Selfish Gene" seemed well-written to me, though I'm not an evolutionary
biologist. I would appreciate it if you could note down a couple of things he
oversimplified or complicated, please.

~~~
jballanc
Heh... unfortunately, I've been very busy, and a thorough look into everything
that's wrong with "Selfish Gene" would require more time than I have. It is
well written, and that's one of the problems with the book, and Dawkins in
general. That is, many people are willing to accept his views because they are
well written and do not take the time (or have the background) to question
their scientific validity.

For starters, very early on Dawkins acknowledges the current lack of consensus
as to the exact definition of a "gene" (i.e. does it include
promoter/enhancer/other regulatory sequences? should each polymorphism count
as one gene? or do we group them together? and if so where, in the continuum
of small differences between "genes" do we draw the line?). His proposed
solution is to take as a gene any combination of genetic elements which gives
rise to an expressed trait.

He then expands on this basic definition to describe how it leads to genes
which are "selfish". That is, they are interested only in their own
continuance, and so the traits they code for will be optimized around this
goal. Unfortunately, this is dangerously close to circular logic. You see, the
physical traits that appear in organisms rarely have a simple one-to-one
correspondence with a particular subset of the genome. Effects such as
epistasis, where the action of one gene masks the effect of another, nullify
Dawkins' simplistic definition.

Or, if you would have it another way, genes which have epistatic effects would
need to be included in with the original "gene" according to Dawkins'
definition. Unfortunately, the network effects that give rise to higher plants
and animals would eventually necessitate including the entire genome of an
organism in one "Dawkins gene", making the unit of selection not the gene, as
Dawkins would have it, but the individual.

As for topics which he over-complicates, the first that comes to mind is kin
selection. Admittedly, I don't think his over-complication is intentional, but
rather his exploration of the topic is hindered by his presumption that genes
are selfish. In fact, kin selection can arise in evolving individuals without
the need for the concept of a "gene" at all! Rather, any evolving individual
which evolves in a mixed population will eventually acquire various kin
selection traits.

As I said at the start, I'm not surprised that Dawkins' ideas are so commonly
held as true. He is well written, and most of the work that would refute his
claims is usually presented in language inaccessible to most laypeople.

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jacobolus
I prefer this to any of the similar lists I’ve found around the web (e.g. the
one discussed at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663662> ). Nearly
everything from this list that I am familiar with is wonderfully insightful.

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Alex3917
Has anyone here actually read Piaget? I've heard that he was such a bad writer
that even his closest disciples often had no idea what he was talking about.
I'm tempted to read these books, but on the other hand I'm worried it will
make it even harder to understand his ideas.

~~~
b-man
If you want an advice, read Seymour Papert's articles and books
(<http://www.papert.org/works.html>, also take a look at
[http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget...](http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf))

Papert's style is very accessible, and he was, at least in my view (and in
Piaget's view) the guy who grok his ideas the most.

~~~
Alex3917
Thanks, I'll check these out.

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steveeq1
Read Lateral Thinking. I saw it on his list and read it. Very good for
teaching you how to think outside the box.

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quizbiz
Does anyone know of any article/essay length readings that one can read in one
sitting of on par quality?

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gabeybaby
There goes my next four weekends. Damn you!

