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Interesting insights. There's a lot to unpack here, but ultimately it boils down to working with, and creating, a "bicycle for the mind." The computer is one su

by tannerc 10y ago

Interesting insights. There's a lot to unpack here, but ultimately it boils down to working with, and creating, a "bicycle for the mind." The computer is one such example of such a technology, but so are the software programs it runs, as are art forms and language.

moxious 10y ago
I understand what you mean, but I think it goes even further than a bicycle. At the risk of abusing the comparison, a bicycle will let you do what you already can do, move about, just a little bit faster. By contrast, what I think the article is talking about is doing something fundamentally new that you couldn't do before. It's clear that overtime human beings can think about things that they didn't used to be able to think about. We can bootstrap our brains in this way, because it is all cumulative. Explaining the Internet to someone from the Middle Ages would be almost impossible, but it wouldn't be that difficult for someone from the 1950s who only understood telephones. So this phenomenon of bootstrapping into new kinds of knowledge is clearly real and powerful. It's very useful and quite meta to think about how we could do that faster or better.
- meric 10y ago
  > Explaining the Internet to someone from the Middle Ages would be almost impossible I think it's quite possible. "In the future, by pressing fingers on these letters printed on a specially built rectangular object in a pattern to invoke certain incantations, people will be able to speak directly to other people from around the world, as well as control machines in factories to produce stuff with little or no manual labor." Do make it clear you have no part in any of it, to avoid getting hanged or burned, but I'm sure they'll understand you.
  - shostack 10y ago
    I'm in the middle of the second "Off to be the Wizard" books and this is exactly how they deal with it. Really it just comes down to abstracting away everything under hood and relating to existing concepts and ideologies. Even today, most people wouldn't get how a car functions, but they would understand that you push this and turn that and this moves you.

by tannerc 10y ago

moxious 10y ago

I understand what you mean, but I think it goes even further than a bicycle. At the risk of abusing the comparison, a bicycle will let you do what you already can do, move about, just a little bit faster. By contrast, what I think the article is talking about is doing something fundamentally new that you couldn't do before. It's clear that overtime human beings can think about things that they didn't used to be able to think about. We can bootstrap our brains in this way, because it is all cumulative. Explaining the Internet to someone from the Middle Ages would be almost impossible, but it wouldn't be that difficult for someone from the 1950s who only understood telephones. So this phenomenon of bootstrapping into new kinds of knowledge is clearly real and powerful. It's very useful and quite meta to think about how we could do that faster or better.

meric 10y ago
> Explaining the Internet to someone from the Middle Ages would be almost impossible I think it's quite possible. "In the future, by pressing fingers on these letters printed on a specially built rectangular object in a pattern to invoke certain incantations, people will be able to speak directly to other people from around the world, as well as control machines in factories to produce stuff with little or no manual labor." Do make it clear you have no part in any of it, to avoid getting hanged or burned, but I'm sure they'll understand you.
- shostack 10y ago
  I'm in the middle of the second "Off to be the Wizard" books and this is exactly how they deal with it. Really it just comes down to abstracting away everything under hood and relating to existing concepts and ideologies. Even today, most people wouldn't get how a car functions, but they would understand that you push this and turn that and this moves you.