4 ms·
I especially like that Chiang's "Story of your Life" is included there. I found both the story and the movie personally significant, and the dance notation that
by motohagiography 8y ago
I especially like that Chiang's "Story of your Life" is included there. I found both the story and the movie personally significant, and the dance notation that Edward Tufte included in either, Envisioning Information and Quantitative Display is very good. Other examples might include how Feynman diagrams changed how we thought about atoms, state diagrams how we thought about algorithms. Sequence diagrams are vastly underappreciated for their expressive power.
Inspired by Chiang, I think tree graphs as taxonomies can massively accelerate how quickly people can absorb concepts. As a notation, it allows for breadth-first understanding of linked ideas and the 'whys', instead of patching together bits of depth-first competence. I've played with them for introducing complex topics and people are shocked at being able to absorb things that took others years to apprehend. The knowledge is not competence, just as the map is not the territory, but exploring territory with a map is very efficient.
My own interest in representing concepts led me to my current project where, I found that the poor quality of security assessments was more an artifact of how we represent systems and risk, and not the knowledge of the person doing it.
Like Wolfram, Chiang's story, and others in the OPs list, or even the Luther Bible, a translation from Greek and Latin to regional German, notation can have the same effect as automation, and the challenge of a new notation is that it disrupts the equilibrium in the economy of people who were gatekeepers to the previous one.
In this way, notations aren't just a detail, I'd say they are technologies themselves. It's such an important area.
- bangonkeyboard 8y agoDo you have an example of a tree-oriented concept explanation?
- azeirah 8y agoI think mind-maps fit into that category, although I think /u/motohagiography is referring to something more specific than that.
- DonHopkins 8y agoProbably not quite what /u/motohagiography was referring to by that term, but illustrating what he meant by visually grokking vast trees with interesting structures: The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata: An Atlas of Basin of Attraction Fields of One-Dimensional Cellular Automata. By Andrew Wuensche (Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico) and Mike Lesser (International Ecotechnology Research Center, Bedford, United Kingdom). Published by Addison-Wesley in 1992. ISBN 0-201-55704-1. Author's web page: http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/gdca.html http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/gdca.html PDF file: http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/global_dynamics_of_CA.pdf http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/global_dyn... This is a beautiful geeky coffee table book! They've developed a wonderful way to graphically display the converging state space topologies of cellular automata basin of attraction fields. It shows basins of attraction as loops, and garden of eden nodes at the tips of dendrites. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cellular_Automata/Global_Dynamics https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cellular_Automata/Global_Dynam... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_automaton) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_autom... The book includes some intriguing black and white illustrations and color plates, as well as a floppy disk with software to generate your own images on an IBM-PC. Key to Basin Field Presentation: https://i.imgur.com/UfzbR7s.png https://i.imgur.com/UfzbR7s.png Color plates: https://i.imgur.com/ByKC6AS.png https://i.imgur.com/ByKC6AS.png https://i.imgur.com/mzOTW8w.png https://i.imgur.com/mzOTW8w.png https://i.imgur.com/hzj2aik.png https://i.imgur.com/hzj2aik.png https://i.imgur.com/OA1FfPa.png https://i.imgur.com/OA1FfPa.png https://i.imgur.com/cyq46MW.png https://i.imgur.com/cyq46MW.png https://i.imgur.com/D009cVU.png https://i.imgur.com/D009cVU.png https://i.imgur.com/vZlvMbX.png https://i.imgur.com/vZlvMbX.png
- motohagiography 8y agoTo test the concept, I put together a taxonomy of a topic few people understand (dressage, or essentially, riding horses), which can be mystifying from the ground up. A taxonomy is right in the middle of an unstructured mind map, and a logically parseable ontology. So maybe, a directed acyclic mindmap?:) The practical parts of this are in the "Movements" branch of the tree, and when you have expanded it, consider that most people learn this topic from right to left, instead of left to right. https://www.qtra.io/hn-comment-answer https://www.qtra.io/hn-comment-answer It uses code directly from the d3 example pages. I just wrote something for parsing a csv file into a tree, which I think is now native to a few packages. It doesn't give you physical competence (which can take decades), but a map of the logic of categories is useful.
- bangonkeyboard 8y agoThat's a very impressive and tactile answer, thanks for taking the time to put it together. This seems to tie into the old debate of top-down versus bottom-up pedagogies. A high-level map of a topic is indisputably valuable, but I personally find it most useful as a guide for where to dive deep and back out, to make concrete the abstractions; a more directed patching-together of competencies, as you put it.
- motohagiography 8y agoThank you. Indeed, the top-down/bottom-up view of education is analogous to the efficiency of breadth-first vs. depth-first searches in different problems. Depends on what you want to achieve. The reason I use these is I think a lot of suffering comes from (or can be defined as) churning on deep-node problems without information from higher level concepts, and a notation that "locates" meaning in an broader ontology can relieve some of it, and yield new understanding. I think this is a theme Ted Chiang is on to as well, as it appears in the literary world as well as STEM.
- Noumenon72 8y ago"Story of your Life" is included but the link is broken -- https://mathisgasser.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/ted-chiang_story-of-your-life_2000.pdf https://mathisgasser.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/ted-chiang_...
- its_the_future 8y agoWorking link is http://www.kameli.net/~raimu/rnd/ted-chiang-story-of-your-life-2000.pdf http://www.kameli.net/~raimu/rnd/ted-chiang-story-of-your-li...
- rjeli 8y agoDoes anyone remember, there was a link posted here a few weeks ago to a DAG of math knowledge?
- motohagiography 8y agoWould love to see it. Had a plan to see how much of one could be created using a tree of category theory concepts as the notation.