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)
> 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.
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.
"A broad survey of existence" may be the wrong way to look at it. Think about a group of people searching for the bathroom in a completely darkened apartment, or breadth-first vs. depth-first search.
The group of people scatter out from their starting point but have to remain close enough to communicate their results (or lack of) to each other. The alternative is a depth-first search that immediately heads for a likely location, but that is hard to parallelize.
Democracy’s killer feature as a system of government is peaceful alteration of power. Counting heads to see who the likely winner of a civil war would be is much cheaper in terms of bloodshed and property damage than actually having a civil war. Corporations don’t have a monopoly on the use of violence like states do so this advantage is irrelevant. Democracy isn’t really that great as an organizing principle except insofar as it promotes stability and order. Fantastic in a state, pretty meh for a corporation which seeks to maximize profit.
> These comments made me wonder why the democratic principle is never used in corporations
It is used in some corporations.
Labor coops are usually corporations. So are labor unions. So are consumer coops, which also apply the democratic principle with a different constituency.
"Governing the Firm" by Gregory Dow is all about that exact question. Why aren't labor coops more common? What's holding them back, in game theory economics terms?
One reason is that it's much easier to capture entrepreneurial rents for a capital-managed firm. A capitalist with a grand plan can hire a lot of workers and realize his plan. In a labor coop, a majority has to agree that the plan is sound - and if it's a first-mover thing, it's hard to keep some workers from starting their own business and getting there first. Dow gives some other reasons too.
Labor coops do exist, but they're usually not startups, and some types of business are much more common than others.
As I understand it (from reading [0]), that would have historically been called "socialism" (the term changed a bit to mean command economies during the Cold War).
The Mondragon [1] corporation organizations around these lines.
In general - as I understand it - you could view Unions and Coops as attempts to apply democratic processes to operating a business.
Rationality has nothing to do with what I said. I said that groups tend to coalesce around short-term, immediate concerns. Imagination and the capacity to dream is an individual, not group, activity. It often takes a true outsider to expand the bounds of a culture's thinking or time perspective. This by definition can't come from a group.
Nor is rationality itself necessarily an ideal end goal. In fact, this obsession with rationality (exemplified by sites like Less Wrong and in general by scientism-adherents) is itself a perfect example of my point - a group of individuals stuck in their worldview, incapable of seeing beyond the walls of their own local culture.
Newton wasn't sitting and dreaming under a tree in the Serengeti. There was a particular group that identified, nurtured, challenged and protected him for his dreams to reach their full potential.
For all we know there are a lot of top notch dreamers sitting in the Serengeti today that are going to die there because the groups they are surrounded by can't help them in anyway.
Without the right group surrounding the individual good luck realizing dreams and changing the behavior or thinking of any other group.
Well that sort of proves my point - Newton was an individual. Yes, he needed the support of a community to reach his full potential, but it wasn't the community that came up with his ideas - it was him.
And for a contrarian example, consider someone like Nietzsche. Probably in the top 5 most influential philosophers of the past ±150 years and yet he wrote most of his books alone while wandering Europe. He also published most of them at his own expense and didn't have much of a readership until near his death, at which point he had gone mad from syphilis. There was no group around him and no community helping him. Yet here we are, deeply influenced by his ideas.
Change your word selection from group to community and your point is more effective. Your point about newton is exactly right and you can see it again in the physicist community that unraveled the secrets of the atom. You can see it again in the creation of the internet and again in Silicon Valley today. Communities do matter but not in the collective organizing sense that most people think of when they read the word.. more in the rapid feedback and competition for ideas.
> 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
Perhaps not a great way to make money, but likely a good way to get a cult following!
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?
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.
You may be on to something. My first feeling on reading "this hypothetical writing machine..." is, "pffft; call me when you have something tangible."
The difference, I think, between a thought experiment and a hypothetical engineering construction is that the former have solid rules. You can argue for or against it without introducing new hypotheses. A Turing Machine is literally impossible because you cannot get unbounded amounts of memory, but the "rules of the game" are given; a word processor in 1963 is (probably) possible, but that is really all you know.
For example, take your quote. How is that different from a stack of note cards, a technology common in 1963? In that it is different from a stack of note cards, can modern word processors do what he describes ("compile a reordered draft quickly", from a too-complex tangle of thoughts)?
You are right that it is the style of how you communicate something that matters as well as understanding your place in history. Perhaps Turing resonated and Engelbart didn’t is because of when they spoke. But there’s another aspect to this and that is perhaps engelbart didn’t understand his audience. By comparison jobs went to the computer club not to seek acceptance but to sell. Once he realized they were not his audience he moved on to an audience that would. But in engelbart’s case he kept selling.
This may not be limited to academia. It sounds very similar to the startup community; everyone is always looking for a sexy idea, but there are so many older and inefficient industries that are likely ripe for disruption.
It kind of feels like an uncanny valley effect - an effort that's immediately doable isn't as interesting (perhaps because anyone could do it). But a more radical notion is more fun.
I think the main difference between the Engelbart work you cite and Turing, for example, is the ambiguity of their ideas. It's a lot easier to come up with some futuristic idea about _what_ is being done, then a specification of _how_ that futuristic thing is done. There are so many interesting ideas that can be found in science fiction (and many of them end up being implemented decades later), but they are not very useful without the knowledge of how to actually build these things.
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.
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.
Early era websites were full of links to other sites.
This sort of confuses two different purposes, however: navigation (and thus assumptions about context, use and train of thought in the viewer) is confused with data (actual content).
The semantic web tried and failed to fix this, probably because any solution to a puzzling situation involving educating people, asking them to put in substantially more effort, and assuming they have the capacity and foresight to think clearly and abstractly at multiple levels is fundamentally flawed.
Thus, search engines are not bad: it would be best if they were less centralized, however. In a sense, this is becoming the case: people search less as they obtain better results from their browser history, QR codes, etc.
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)