
The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker (1985) - kick
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/09.html#Chap09
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mathgladiator
One of the things that I find challenging is getting people to think beyond a
few months. We really are victims of short-term thinking, and this spoke to
me.

The challenge of course with having visions is whether or not they are
relevant to the world.

My hope is to retire and be absolutely prolific without having to constrain
myself by a shared engineering discipline (i.e. I'll write my own language and
ship code that people will not understand without a heavy investment of time;
market failure for sure, but I'll be happy because it is my art)

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hos234
> One of the things that I find challenging is getting people to think beyond
> a few months. We really are victims of short-term thinking.

That's why we evolved groups to overcome individual weakness. Then bigger
groups to overcome group weakness. Understanding how and why groups
form/evolve/break/merge etc will change how you think about what can and can't
be done by yourself.

Check out Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation, and Complexity of
Cooperation.

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keiferski
I don’t know, groups seem more prone to short-term thinking than isolated
individuals. Groups tend to be stuck in a local maximum, whereas an
independent individual can more easily make a broad survey of existence.

~~~
amelius
These comments made me wonder why the democratic principle is never used in
corporations. Is it a flawed principle?

~~~
pjc50
Corporations are democracies .. of the shareholders.

~~~
JoeSamoa
Correct. Representation is the difference here.

Although these days the lines seems to be blurring into democracy since
corporations are getting larger horizontally and vertically.

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amilein7minutes
I have a theory as to why Engelbart (and in general, some other thinkers far
ahead of their time) have trouble being appreciated and why "serious" computer
scientists (in general, academics) of their time met them with a "thundering
silence".

Quoting from the article, Engelbart's 1963 work has these lines:

"This hypothetical writing machine permits you to use a new process for
composing text. For instance, trial drafts can rapidly be composed from
rearranged excerpts of old drafts, together with new words or passages which
you insert by hand typing. Your first draft may represent a free outpouring of
thoughts in any order, with the inspection of foregoing thoughts continuously
stimulating new considerations and ideas to be entered. If the tangle of
thoughts represented by the draft becomes too complex, you can compile a
reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you to accommodate more
complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that
suits your needs."

The year was 1963 and the first word processors such as WordPerfect, came in
1979, 16 years later, and the mouse demo only took place 5 years later.
Basically, Engelbart talked about word processors in the punch card era when
there was no human-computer interaction, only programmer-computer interaction,
and that too, in minimal amounts.

In comparison, Turing was taken seriously by serious mathematicians of his
time, although he wrote in the 1940s about the idea of stored programs, in an
era where the punch cards themselves didn't exist. This might be because his
central idea was purely theoretical, and only required a construction of a
hypothetical machine (a Turing machine), and thus, academics could interpret
it as a thought experiment. Thought experiments are and were always considered
"serious".

On the other hand, when the central idea is not theoretical, but involves
construction of machines, it is interpreted as philosophical or useless. I'm
saying ideas that essentially rest on engineering constructions that do not
yet exist, are often dismissed in the academic space, but purely theoretical
ones are found to be interesting, although they also require imagination of
the non-existent.

Just a theory, I may be wrong. I just got to wondering if Engelbart had
presented the idea of breaking down complexity with a more theoretical
framework (e.g., constructed a mathematical model for augmented memory or
something like that), would he have found NSF funding sooner?

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DonaldFisk
Punched cards predate electronic computers by a long way. They were used in
the Jacquard loom (1804) and Hollerith tabulating machines (1889). Other paper
instruction storage included paper rolls, used for weaving by Bouchon (1725)
and for playing music by Gavioli (1892).

IBM introduced the 80 column punched card in 1928, and that's what computers
have been using until recently. Gavioli's book music is a precursor of MIDI.

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foobar_
I think long-distance thinkers solve hard problems in a way but the solutions
they come up with tend to have dire short term consequences, because of which
(realistically perhaps) their solutions are rejected in favour of the current.

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thallukrish
The main idea here is that information is connected seamlessly. The idea of
Web and its hyper links. But the pages on the Web grew enormously than the
linking itself. Google sort of acts as the link in the middle. This is not a
desirable state certainly. This needs to be fixed.

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rodolphoarruda
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, maybe? (Saying hi to dormant Iron
Maiden fans in HN)

~~~
mellosouls
That's clearly the reference but it was a _book_!

[https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long-
Di...](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long-
Distance_Runner)

