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We are "story creatures" and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from "fond stories and beliefs" to "actually think things through". That the mo

We are "story creatures" and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from "fond stories and beliefs" to "actually think things through". That the moon shot was just a political gesture -- and also relevant to ICBMs etc -- was known to every scientist and most engineers who were willing to think about the problem for more than a few seconds. We hoped that the -romance- of the shot would lead to the very different kinds of technologies needed for real space travel (basically it's about MV = mv, and if you don't want to have to carry (and move) a lot of M, you have to have very high V (beyond what chemical reactions can produce). If you have to have a large M you use most of it to move just it! This has been known for more than 100 years. But the real romance and its implications didn't happen in the general public and politicians.

scroot 9y ago
And the story we tell ourselves today is, frankly, a dismal one. It's that all of computing should be invented and put into the service of "the economy" rather than people. Instead of a culture of "computational literacy" in which human thought is extended to another level to the same effect as written literacy hundreds of years ago, we have an environment of complex technologies that cater to our most base evolutionary addictions and surveil us for profit. Our universities are no longer institutions where people learn how to think, but rather where they learn how to "do" -- usually "doing" involves vocational practices that already exist, especially those that some manager (ie provost or dean) deems economically important. This is why you have generations of programmers bitching about type systems instead of the very politics, history, and social consequences of their own wares. We don't have funding like ARPA/IPTO anymore and the devices and software of our world show it. Everything is some iteration on ideas that came from that period, good or bad – iterations whose goal is always "efficiency" in some form. Our current political culture prevents big initiatives like this, because how on Earth would they benefit the economy in the short or medium term, the limits of our new horizon? Because these technologies have been created in service of an economic system that has proliferated social problems, they can never be a meaningful solution to those problems. Sure, we might invent some new systems for dealing with environmental catastrophe, but they are always predicated on the assumption that people should consume more and more. We are at the behest of billionaires – smart ones, mostly – who understand complex systems but also have an interest in ensuring that they remain complex. It is unlikely that we will achieve a new kind of transcendent way of computing until we change the way we think about politics and economics. That is our environment. That is the "fit" that our technical systems have, as you say.
- alankay1 9y ago
  Clear thoughts and summary!
- mmiller 9y ago
  Great description of the problem (and great description of what we could have instead)! What came to mind as I read what you said here was a bit that I caught Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about from 8 years ago. As I heard him say this, I thought he was right on point, but I also felt sad that it's pretty obvious we're not thinking like this in computing. It turns out this is not just a problem in computing, but in science funding generally. That's what he was talking about, though he was quite polite about it: https://youtu.be/UlHOAUIIuq0?t=22m30s https://youtu.be/UlHOAUIIuq0?t=22m30s It strikes me that a very corrosive thought process in our society has been to politicize the notion of "how competitive we are" economically. Sure, that matters, but I see it more as a symptom than a cause of social problems. I hate seeing it brought up in discussions about education, because sure, competition is going to be a part of societal living, and in many educational environments, there's some aspect of competition to it (a story I heard from my grandfather from when he entered medical school was, "Look to your left. Look to your right. Only one of you will be graduating with a medical degree," because that was the intended ratio along the bell curve), but bringing economic competitiveness into education misses the point badly. I understand where the impulse to focus on that comes from, because globalization tends to produce a much more competitive economic landscape, where people feel much more uncertain about basic questions they have to answer. Part of which is creating the life they want, but often people end up missing a significant part of actually creating it (if it's even feasible. What I see more often is a compromise, because there are only so many hours in a day, and only so much effort can be put into it) in the process of trying to create it. They get caught up in "doing," as you said. As I've thought back on the '60s, it seems like while there was still competition going on, the emphasis was on a political competition, internationally, not economic. There was a significant technological component to that, because of the Cold War/nuclear weapons. The creation of ARPA and NASA was an effect of that. My understanding is we underwent a reorientation in the 1980s, because it was realized that there was too little attention paid to the benefits that a relatively autonomous economy can produce, killing off bad ideas, where what's being offered doesn't match with what people need or want, and allowing better ones to replace them. That's definitely needed, but I'm in agreement with Kay that what education should be about is helping people understand what they need. Perhaps we could start by telling today's students that if and when they have children, what their children need is to understand the basic thought-inventions of our society in an environment where they're more likely to get that. Instead, what we've been doing is treating schools like glorified daycare centers. Undergraduate education has been turned into much the same thing.
mmiller 9y ago
"We are 'story creatures' and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from 'fond stories and beliefs' to 'actually think things through'." What your analysis did for me was help put two and two together, but yes, it "collided" with my notions of what an accomplishment it was, and what I had been led to believe that would lead to. What you exposed was that the reality of "what that would lead to" was quite different, and it explained the reality that was unfolding. I knew that Apollo was a big rocket (ironically, that was one thing that impressed me about it, but I thought how amazing it was that such a thing could be constructed in the first place, and work. Though, I thought many years later about just what you said, that the more fuel you add, the more the fuel is just expending energy moving itself!), and that there were only three people on it, though the "efficiency" perspective, relating that to how it did not contribute to further knowledge for space travel, didn't occur to me until you laid it out. I also knew from listening to Reagan's science advisor that NASA was heavily influenced by the goals of military contractors that had done R&D on various technologies in the '60s, and which exerted political pressure to put them to use, to get return on investment. He said something to the effect of, "People worry about the Military Industrial Complex. Well, NASA IS the Military Industrial Complex! People don't think of it that way, but it is." Not too long after I heard you talk about this, I happened to hear about a simulator called the Kerbal Space Program (commonly referred to as KSP), and someone posted a video of a "ludicrous single-launch vehicle to Mars (and back)" in it. Even though I think I've heard that KSP does not completely use realistic physics, it drove your point home fairly well. Though, people would point out that none of the proposed missions to Mars have talked about a single-launch vehicle from surface to surface. All of the proposals I've heard about have talked about constructing the vehicle in orbit. KSP, though, assumes chemical propellant. https://youtu.be/mrjpELy1xzc https://youtu.be/mrjpELy1xzc "the real romance and its implications didn't happen in the general public and politicians." In hindsight, I've been struck by that. When I took the time to learn about the history of the Apollo program, I learned that Apollo 11 made a big impression on people all over the world, but that was really it. I think as far as the U.S. was concerned, people were probably more impressed that it met a political goal, JFK's bold proclamation that we would get men to the Moon and back, and that it was a historic first, but there was no sense of, "Great! Now what?" It was just, "Yay, we did it! Now onto other things." There's even been some speculation I've heard from politicos, who were in politics at the time, that we wouldn't have done any of the moon shots if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, that it was sympathy for his legacy that drove the political will to follow through with it (if true, that's where the romance lay). Hardly anybody paid attention to it after 11, with the exception of Apollo 13, since there was the drama of a possible tragedy. Apollo 18 never got off the ground. The rocket was all set to go, but the program was scrubbed. People can look at the rocket, laid out in its segments sideways, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

scroot 9y ago

And the story we tell ourselves today is, frankly, a dismal one. It's that all of computing should be invented and put into the service of "the economy" rather than people. Instead of a culture of "computational literacy" in which human thought is extended to another level to the same effect as written literacy hundreds of years ago, we have an environment of complex technologies that cater to our most base evolutionary addictions and surveil us for profit. Our universities are no longer institutions where people learn how to think, but rather where they learn how to "do" -- usually "doing" involves vocational practices that already exist, especially those that some manager (ie provost or dean) deems economically important. This is why you have generations of programmers bitching about type systems instead of the very politics, history, and social consequences of their own wares. We don't have funding like ARPA/IPTO anymore and the devices and software of our world show it. Everything is some iteration on ideas that came from that period, good or bad – iterations whose goal is always "efficiency" in some form. Our current political culture prevents big initiatives like this, because how on Earth would they benefit the economy in the short or medium term, the limits of our new horizon? Because these technologies have been created in service of an economic system that has proliferated social problems, they can never be a meaningful solution to those problems. Sure, we might invent some new systems for dealing with environmental catastrophe, but they are always predicated on the assumption that people should consume more and more. We are at the behest of billionaires – smart ones, mostly – who understand complex systems but also have an interest in ensuring that they remain complex. It is unlikely that we will achieve a new kind of transcendent way of computing until we change the way we think about politics and economics. That is our environment. That is the "fit" that our technical systems have, as you say.

alankay1 9y ago
Clear thoughts and summary!
mmiller 9y ago
Great description of the problem (and great description of what we could have instead)! What came to mind as I read what you said here was a bit that I caught Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about from 8 years ago. As I heard him say this, I thought he was right on point, but I also felt sad that it's pretty obvious we're not thinking like this in computing. It turns out this is not just a problem in computing, but in science funding generally. That's what he was talking about, though he was quite polite about it: https://youtu.be/UlHOAUIIuq0?t=22m30s https://youtu.be/UlHOAUIIuq0?t=22m30s It strikes me that a very corrosive thought process in our society has been to politicize the notion of "how competitive we are" economically. Sure, that matters, but I see it more as a symptom than a cause of social problems. I hate seeing it brought up in discussions about education, because sure, competition is going to be a part of societal living, and in many educational environments, there's some aspect of competition to it (a story I heard from my grandfather from when he entered medical school was, "Look to your left. Look to your right. Only one of you will be graduating with a medical degree," because that was the intended ratio along the bell curve), but bringing economic competitiveness into education misses the point badly. I understand where the impulse to focus on that comes from, because globalization tends to produce a much more competitive economic landscape, where people feel much more uncertain about basic questions they have to answer. Part of which is creating the life they want, but often people end up missing a significant part of actually creating it (if it's even feasible. What I see more often is a compromise, because there are only so many hours in a day, and only so much effort can be put into it) in the process of trying to create it. They get caught up in "doing," as you said. As I've thought back on the '60s, it seems like while there was still competition going on, the emphasis was on a political competition, internationally, not economic. There was a significant technological component to that, because of the Cold War/nuclear weapons. The creation of ARPA and NASA was an effect of that. My understanding is we underwent a reorientation in the 1980s, because it was realized that there was too little attention paid to the benefits that a relatively autonomous economy can produce, killing off bad ideas, where what's being offered doesn't match with what people need or want, and allowing better ones to replace them. That's definitely needed, but I'm in agreement with Kay that what education should be about is helping people understand what they need. Perhaps we could start by telling today's students that if and when they have children, what their children need is to understand the basic thought-inventions of our society in an environment where they're more likely to get that. Instead, what we've been doing is treating schools like glorified daycare centers. Undergraduate education has been turned into much the same thing.

mmiller 9y ago

"We are 'story creatures' and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from 'fond stories and beliefs' to 'actually think things through'." What your analysis did for me was help put two and two together, but yes, it "collided" with my notions of what an accomplishment it was, and what I had been led to believe that would lead to. What you exposed was that the reality of "what that would lead to" was quite different, and it explained the reality that was unfolding. I knew that Apollo was a big rocket (ironically, that was one thing that impressed me about it, but I thought how amazing it was that such a thing could be constructed in the first place, and work. Though, I thought many years later about just what you said, that the more fuel you add, the more the fuel is just expending energy moving itself!), and that there were only three people on it, though the "efficiency" perspective, relating that to how it did not contribute to further knowledge for space travel, didn't occur to me until you laid it out. I also knew from listening to Reagan's science advisor that NASA was heavily influenced by the goals of military contractors that had done R&D on various technologies in the '60s, and which exerted political pressure to put them to use, to get return on investment. He said something to the effect of, "People worry about the Military Industrial Complex. Well, NASA IS the Military Industrial Complex! People don't think of it that way, but it is." Not too long after I heard you talk about this, I happened to hear about a simulator called the Kerbal Space Program (commonly referred to as KSP), and someone posted a video of a "ludicrous single-launch vehicle to Mars (and back)" in it. Even though I think I've heard that KSP does not completely use realistic physics, it drove your point home fairly well. Though, people would point out that none of the proposed missions to Mars have talked about a single-launch vehicle from surface to surface. All of the proposals I've heard about have talked about constructing the vehicle in orbit. KSP, though, assumes chemical propellant. https://youtu.be/mrjpELy1xzc https://youtu.be/mrjpELy1xzc "the real romance and its implications didn't happen in the general public and politicians." In hindsight, I've been struck by that. When I took the time to learn about the history of the Apollo program, I learned that Apollo 11 made a big impression on people all over the world, but that was really it. I think as far as the U.S. was concerned, people were probably more impressed that it met a political goal, JFK's bold proclamation that we would get men to the Moon and back, and that it was a historic first, but there was no sense of, "Great! Now what?" It was just, "Yay, we did it! Now onto other things." There's even been some speculation I've heard from politicos, who were in politics at the time, that we wouldn't have done any of the moon shots if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, that it was sympathy for his legacy that drove the political will to follow through with it (if true, that's where the romance lay). Hardly anybody paid attention to it after 11, with the exception of Apollo 13, since there was the drama of a possible tragedy. Apollo 18 never got off the ground. The rocket was all set to go, but the program was scrubbed. People can look at the rocket, laid out in its segments sideways, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.