7 ms·

There's always the same things i find disturbing in every alan kay notes i've seen recently : it's often a bunch of anecdotal (yet interesting) data put togeth

by bsaul 8y ago

There's always the same things i find disturbing in every alan kay notes i've seen recently : it's often a bunch of anecdotal (yet interesting) data put together that don't give the impression of making the talk move forward. The general idea is often pretty vague. it doesn't go much beyond general. There's always those tiny bits of self promotion (mentioning Xerox Parc inventing everything we have today), like someone that feels that his work has been underappreciated and lacks peer recognition. It's like one of those general public TED inspirational talk except it tries to disguise itself as a scientific or philosophic one. I always end up looking at the first 20 minutes because the anecdotes are entertaining in themselves, then i realize the talk doesn't go anywhere, and i go back to work. (and then i go back to reading again the wikipedia page about alan kay to try to remember what made him so famous). PS : as a comparison, i think Bret Victor talks are immensely more interesting. They also mention general use of computers today, make you think about it quite deeply, inspire you to try new things, and actually demonstrate something new every time. And you never hear him mention his work at Apple.

3rdAccount 8y ago
I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay, but know what you mean. Either I'm too dumb to understand much of what he's trying to convey due to historical and technical ignorance or lack of intelligence, his communication skills leave room to be desired, his talks are just hot air (I don't believe this), or human language isn't the best medium for conveying his impressive and large scale ideas. I've seen people ask him great questions (or at least I thought they were) and they only got a riddle in reply. That's only acceptable if you're a dragon or a hobbit in my opinion. Instead, I'd like to see a short an concise summary of his ideas of where we are, what we're doing wrong, where we could improve...etc. It would certainly be interesting to see a future where hardware is built to run a Smalltalk os natively and you have full control all the way down, but he would probably say that I'm missing the point.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  > I've seen people ask him great questions (or at least I thought they were) and they only got a riddle in reply. That's only acceptable if you're a dragon or a hobbit in my opinion. Looking back on a lot of Alan Kay's writing, I've noticed that when he was young he tended to write extremely long winded explanations of what he was trying to do. As he got older, the explanations got more terse. Now he doesn't explain at all: he just asks a related question. In my mind, I don't think this is by accident. I've been starting to go in the same direction. I'm prone to writing extremely expansive replies to questions (just see my posting history here ;-) ). Some people read it, but most will not. I found that while I lose some fidelity with a more terse answer, I get better traction from shorter answers. However, the audience I add by making my answers more digestible tends to interpret the answers literally -- meaning that they don't think past what I've written. So I started wondering if replying with questions as Alan Kay seems to do now would be useful. It certainly has its advantages. Although it goes in the opposite direction of increasing your audience, if you feel that most people aren't going to "get it" anyway, perhaps that's not necessarily a loss. It also is a cue to say, "This is a complex issue and you need to go back and look at some fundamentals before you can understand the answer". Those people who aren't willing to do that, probably aren't willing to put the work into understanding the answer anyway. And finally, in the very likely case that my answer is not actually very good, asking a question instead allows the person to formulate a better answer than I can come up with. This latter bit is especially worth thinking about, I think. But I've resisted doing that as it is certainly intimidating and in some ways makes you look like a jerk ;-). BTW, I recently read some of his comments on what it means to be "object oriented" and I tried my best to build a system based on what he said. The results were extremely illuminating for me. Whether or not it matches his view, I found that working hard on puzzling out his comments took me in valuable directions that I had not considered before.
  - 3rdAccount 8y ago
    I kind of see what you're saying. However, I'd much rather have a real and thorough answer than a question. I start by skimming, and if I need the info it is there.
  - spindle 8y ago
    I agree ... and could we see the system you mention in your last paragraph, please, or hear more about it?
    - mikekchar 8y ago
      I hate to link to my unfinished work, but here goes :-) I started out by deciding to write a blog post. Here is my rambling second draft: https://github.com/ygt-mikekchar/oojs/blob/master/oojs.org#re-examining-object-oriented-programming-with-javascript https://github.com/ygt-mikekchar/oojs/blob/master/oojs.org#r... However, as I was writing this blog post, it became obvious to me that I needed something better than Shape/Rectangle toy explanations. I needed to build something real. So I decided to build a test framework. Here it is: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy I wrote a quick explanation of the design I was using here: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/design.md https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/design.md You can read that first if you just want to see what I was doing and don't want the long winded explanation of how I got there from the blog post. While I was writing this code, I decided to make a coding standard for myself because sometimes it helps to add constraints to examine how things are working. The coding standard is here: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/coding_standard.md https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/coding_standa... I suppose TL;DR: Objects should not represent ADTs. Instead they hold state. The object is really a collection of operations on that state (bundled together to give you better cohesion). The state is encapsulated in the object and should be inaccessible except through the operations. Objects should probably be immutable as well -- especially as it enforces that encapsulation. The best way to think about it is that the object itself is a monad (and it literally is). The methods on the object are functions that you would normally pass to bind. The "." that does the dispatch is essentially bind. I found that I never actually reached for subclass polymorphism (even though it was easy to implement). Instead I used essentially traits and I think this is in keeping with the modern idea that OO should encourage composition over inheritance. Why do this instead of FP? Well, as you can see, my code is really FP with "FP Objects". I think the thing I liked about this is the idea that the objects created a nice abstraction for cohesive code. It's not that different than type classes (and I always think it's funny that type classes are usually implemented with virtual function tables). However, it is slightly more restricted in terms of generic functions. In a system without static type checking, I think it's easier to reason about this code. YMMV. In the end, I found this way of programming very enjoyable. The code is still quite crufty, so please don't judge me ;-) I was just writing it to explore the ideas. It's not production code. I considered going on and finishing Testy and possibly building something else with that style of programming, but it turns out that all current implementations of JS are quite inefficient when using closures (and may even leak memory!), so I decided to work on something else. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to fire away.
- chongli 8y ago
  Either I'm too dumb to understand much of what he's trying to convey I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay too but what you're hinting at is something that's bothered me about him for a long time: his "solution" for almost every problem is for everyone to be as smart as his Xerox PARC dream team. He's like the Phil Jackson of technology: sure he's deserving of a ton of respect, but he wouldn't win anything with the 2012 Bobcats. Well that strategy doesn't work with society at large. You've got to work with the people who are, not those you wish would be.
  - mdparker89 8y ago
    One of the main takeaways in this talk addresses this directly. He's not advocating for everyone being smart, in fact being smart counts for very little. So how do we move forward as a species? The big ideas. However, it's hard to get adults to change and start using the big ideas so teaching kids is our best move.
dangom 8y ago
His talk is exactly what he talks about: he presents ideas at a level of understanding of those listening to him. Instead of being scientific or philosophic, he gives interesting examples such that people immediately get it. Alan's all about looking at the big picture and not getting lost in irrelevant details. He tries to get his point across right away by showing how NIMH is so focused on canonical mental health problems that they don't think about where these problems come from, nor about even bigger mental "problems"(such as the 99,77% if you watched through the talk) and what mental means in the first place. He may not know how to fix healthcare, but he shows what is necessary for us to think about if we ever want problems to be solved. He then follows with examples from the areas he's more familiar with, namely tech and education, to show how to get to solutions without brute force. Human critical thinking at its very best.
- bsaul 8y ago
  Have you looked at all the video ? This talk is actually about children education ( to build a better future). But then he brings deatchcamps, his dentist not removing plastic protection often, francis bacon new science, aristotle not knowing the number of teeth of his own wife, brings some statistics in the middle about mental disorder, etc etc. It may be human critical thinking, but then please it needs some structure and a feeling of progression in a reasonning, actually leading somewhere ( and if that something could be anything new, more than just « computers could be better learning device » that would actually help).
  - justaaron 8y ago
    or you could put the slightest modicum of effort into trying to see the very clear picture he has painted...
    - bsaul 8y ago
      which is ? People make mistakes ? People are unperfect and need to improve ? i don’t see any other common point among all those examples, and the talk didn’t give me any either...
- 8y ago
lcuff 8y ago
I think this talk addresses the question "What do we need to do so that children born today have a healthy world to live in when they're 82, in the year 2100? Bret Victor is amazing and interesting, but he's not addressing the same issues. Nor are the issues he addresses nearly as important. If you only watched the first 20 minutes of this, you probably missed the point of needing to radically change how we educate children, and Alan Kay's ideas for how to do that, which as far as I'm concerned, are dead on the money.
- bsaul 8y ago
  I did end up watching the whole talk, just to make sure i didn’t miss the point. What do you mean by his ideas on how to educate children ? Not dumbing down , and in the process use computers ? I don’t think this in itself is anything original, unless you provide some examples on how that would look today ( the video sample in the talk shows a child manipulating a computer interface from the early 90s so i couldn’t tell how old that video was). But more importantly why spend the first 40 minutes on general pseudo-scientific anecdotal statements, if you’re eager to talk about that ? Do you think people really need to be convinced education is important ?
  - discreteevent 8y ago
    Yes people really need to be convinced that good education is more important than most things. I know this at some level but the talk but a lot of things together. And it motivated me to at least think about the value of passing on some of the things I know (and to try do that in the 'honest, directed' way he described) rather than using that knowledge to just make a living.
  - lcuff 8y ago
    > What do you mean by his ideas on how to educate children ? Not dumbing down , and in the process use computers ? Well, I took away a lot more than 'not dumbing down'. One of the key things he described is the fact that very few people can sustain their attention for ingesting information, and that getting anyone engaged in practice and exploration at the right level is crucial to them successfully mastering concepts. The 't-ball for x' idea. Whether teachers are teaching stuff that's dumbed down or not turns out not to make a difference: People learn stuff by grappling with it in a 'hands on' way. Getting real mathematicians and scientists involved to create these kinds of environments is part of this. He led with saying this has been said before. My own take is that he said it very well, but clearly that's not everyone's experience. What were the pseudo-scientific statements that stand out for you? My detector didn't go off on anything as pseudo science.
spindle 8y ago
I agree, and there are only maybe half a dozen people in the whole world whose tidbits of wisdom are so good, and so well delivered, and so inspiring, that I don't mind them having this vagueness. Alan Kay is one of them. If everyone was like this (and I agree, a lot of TED speakers are), I'd go crazy.
- justaaron 8y ago
  vagueness? he's simply discussing comparative pedagogical models and techniques! jumping around a bit = we've been culturally ok with that since mtv circa 1993 or the beatnik authors of the late 50's or virtually any film or literature that jumps around in the narrative timeline.
  - justaaron 8y ago
    ... I'll grant you, the Bret-Victor-esque "scratch demo" stuff was a bit of a non-sequitur. Once he got back to the limits of human cognition stuff and the "t-ball for human sciences" part, I felt we were on track for a proper lesson from an elder.
justaaron 8y ago
I dunno, it ties together rather well, IMO. It's only our future, intellectual honesty, social divides, and everything wrong with society addressed with the wisdom and distillation of decades of well formed thought condensed into presentation form. No big deal. This is like a holy revelation and you don't get it????
armitron 8y ago
I have always found interesting how some people seem to make an effort to justify to themselves - in all sorts of ways - their failure to grasp something. Alan Kay is a supreme genius, there can be no question about that, but also an original and deep thinker who is not afraid of not falling inline with the prevailing ideology of the day. He is deeply rooted in the outside, the sphere of human thought and potential that iconoclastic transformative ideas spring from. And, here you come, unfavorably comparing him to Bret Victor rather than seeking to fill the gaps within you that do not let you appreciate what the genius is plainly talking about. In a way you are testament to the point Alan Kay is making. Your inability to grasp simple - yet unpopular and certainly not easy - ideas and your preference for easily-digestible material demonstrates the degree of cultural erosion in play today. In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored, languages like JavaScript and PHP proliferate whilst the best ideas behind Smalltalk and Lisp are still not widely used because the armies of 9-5 for-money “coders” are not in a position to appreciate them, in such a world you have people reaching for Bret Victor and describing an Alan Kay talk as boring. Sad state of affairs.
- david927 8y ago
  In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored Well, to be fair, Alan is a Turing Award recipient since 2003. He's hardly ostracized and if he's ignored, it's because his cause is ignored. He speaks of a broken present leading to a wider broken future. And to conceive that things are broken requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're looking at. Is you car currently horribly inefficient? You probably (like me) would have no idea. It would require knowing what every part does and what was it designed to do and why. That's a big ask. It requires a deeply fundamental understanding of it all. And this -- this -- is what he's talking about in the lecture. He's gone from proselytizing the brokenness to preaching how to build the new mindset that can recognize it, which is the first and best shot at addressing it.

by bsaul 8y ago

3rdAccount 8y ago

I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay, but know what you mean. Either I'm too dumb to understand much of what he's trying to convey due to historical and technical ignorance or lack of intelligence, his communication skills leave room to be desired, his talks are just hot air (I don't believe this), or human language isn't the best medium for conveying his impressive and large scale ideas. I've seen people ask him great questions (or at least I thought they were) and they only got a riddle in reply. That's only acceptable if you're a dragon or a hobbit in my opinion. Instead, I'd like to see a short an concise summary of his ideas of where we are, what we're doing wrong, where we could improve...etc. It would certainly be interesting to see a future where hardware is built to run a Smalltalk os natively and you have full control all the way down, but he would probably say that I'm missing the point.

mikekchar 8y ago
> I've seen people ask him great questions (or at least I thought they were) and they only got a riddle in reply. That's only acceptable if you're a dragon or a hobbit in my opinion. Looking back on a lot of Alan Kay's writing, I've noticed that when he was young he tended to write extremely long winded explanations of what he was trying to do. As he got older, the explanations got more terse. Now he doesn't explain at all: he just asks a related question. In my mind, I don't think this is by accident. I've been starting to go in the same direction. I'm prone to writing extremely expansive replies to questions (just see my posting history here ;-) ). Some people read it, but most will not. I found that while I lose some fidelity with a more terse answer, I get better traction from shorter answers. However, the audience I add by making my answers more digestible tends to interpret the answers literally -- meaning that they don't think past what I've written. So I started wondering if replying with questions as Alan Kay seems to do now would be useful. It certainly has its advantages. Although it goes in the opposite direction of increasing your audience, if you feel that most people aren't going to "get it" anyway, perhaps that's not necessarily a loss. It also is a cue to say, "This is a complex issue and you need to go back and look at some fundamentals before you can understand the answer". Those people who aren't willing to do that, probably aren't willing to put the work into understanding the answer anyway. And finally, in the very likely case that my answer is not actually very good, asking a question instead allows the person to formulate a better answer than I can come up with. This latter bit is especially worth thinking about, I think. But I've resisted doing that as it is certainly intimidating and in some ways makes you look like a jerk ;-). BTW, I recently read some of his comments on what it means to be "object oriented" and I tried my best to build a system based on what he said. The results were extremely illuminating for me. Whether or not it matches his view, I found that working hard on puzzling out his comments took me in valuable directions that I had not considered before.
- 3rdAccount 8y ago
  I kind of see what you're saying. However, I'd much rather have a real and thorough answer than a question. I start by skimming, and if I need the info it is there.
- spindle 8y ago
  I agree ... and could we see the system you mention in your last paragraph, please, or hear more about it?
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    I hate to link to my unfinished work, but here goes :-) I started out by deciding to write a blog post. Here is my rambling second draft: https://github.com/ygt-mikekchar/oojs/blob/master/oojs.org#re-examining-object-oriented-programming-with-javascript https://github.com/ygt-mikekchar/oojs/blob/master/oojs.org#r... However, as I was writing this blog post, it became obvious to me that I needed something better than Shape/Rectangle toy explanations. I needed to build something real. So I decided to build a test framework. Here it is: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy I wrote a quick explanation of the design I was using here: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/design.md https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/design.md You can read that first if you just want to see what I was doing and don't want the long winded explanation of how I got there from the blog post. While I was writing this code, I decided to make a coding standard for myself because sometimes it helps to add constraints to examine how things are working. The coding standard is here: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/coding_standard.md https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/coding_standa... I suppose TL;DR: Objects should not represent ADTs. Instead they hold state. The object is really a collection of operations on that state (bundled together to give you better cohesion). The state is encapsulated in the object and should be inaccessible except through the operations. Objects should probably be immutable as well -- especially as it enforces that encapsulation. The best way to think about it is that the object itself is a monad (and it literally is). The methods on the object are functions that you would normally pass to bind. The "." that does the dispatch is essentially bind. I found that I never actually reached for subclass polymorphism (even though it was easy to implement). Instead I used essentially traits and I think this is in keeping with the modern idea that OO should encourage composition over inheritance. Why do this instead of FP? Well, as you can see, my code is really FP with "FP Objects". I think the thing I liked about this is the idea that the objects created a nice abstraction for cohesive code. It's not that different than type classes (and I always think it's funny that type classes are usually implemented with virtual function tables). However, it is slightly more restricted in terms of generic functions. In a system without static type checking, I think it's easier to reason about this code. YMMV. In the end, I found this way of programming very enjoyable. The code is still quite crufty, so please don't judge me ;-) I was just writing it to explore the ideas. It's not production code. I considered going on and finishing Testy and possibly building something else with that style of programming, but it turns out that all current implementations of JS are quite inefficient when using closures (and may even leak memory!), so I decided to work on something else. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to fire away.
chongli 8y ago
Either I'm too dumb to understand much of what he's trying to convey I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay too but what you're hinting at is something that's bothered me about him for a long time: his "solution" for almost every problem is for everyone to be as smart as his Xerox PARC dream team. He's like the Phil Jackson of technology: sure he's deserving of a ton of respect, but he wouldn't win anything with the 2012 Bobcats. Well that strategy doesn't work with society at large. You've got to work with the people who are, not those you wish would be.
- mdparker89 8y ago
  One of the main takeaways in this talk addresses this directly. He's not advocating for everyone being smart, in fact being smart counts for very little. So how do we move forward as a species? The big ideas. However, it's hard to get adults to change and start using the big ideas so teaching kids is our best move.

dangom 8y ago

His talk is exactly what he talks about: he presents ideas at a level of understanding of those listening to him. Instead of being scientific or philosophic, he gives interesting examples such that people immediately get it. Alan's all about looking at the big picture and not getting lost in irrelevant details. He tries to get his point across right away by showing how NIMH is so focused on canonical mental health problems that they don't think about where these problems come from, nor about even bigger mental "problems"(such as the 99,77% if you watched through the talk) and what mental means in the first place. He may not know how to fix healthcare, but he shows what is necessary for us to think about if we ever want problems to be solved. He then follows with examples from the areas he's more familiar with, namely tech and education, to show how to get to solutions without brute force. Human critical thinking at its very best.

bsaul 8y ago
Have you looked at all the video ? This talk is actually about children education ( to build a better future). But then he brings deatchcamps, his dentist not removing plastic protection often, francis bacon new science, aristotle not knowing the number of teeth of his own wife, brings some statistics in the middle about mental disorder, etc etc. It may be human critical thinking, but then please it needs some structure and a feeling of progression in a reasonning, actually leading somewhere ( and if that something could be anything new, more than just « computers could be better learning device » that would actually help).
- justaaron 8y ago
  or you could put the slightest modicum of effort into trying to see the very clear picture he has painted...
  - bsaul 8y ago
    which is ? People make mistakes ? People are unperfect and need to improve ? i don’t see any other common point among all those examples, and the talk didn’t give me any either...
8y ago

lcuff 8y ago

I think this talk addresses the question "What do we need to do so that children born today have a healthy world to live in when they're 82, in the year 2100? Bret Victor is amazing and interesting, but he's not addressing the same issues. Nor are the issues he addresses nearly as important. If you only watched the first 20 minutes of this, you probably missed the point of needing to radically change how we educate children, and Alan Kay's ideas for how to do that, which as far as I'm concerned, are dead on the money.

bsaul 8y ago
I did end up watching the whole talk, just to make sure i didn’t miss the point. What do you mean by his ideas on how to educate children ? Not dumbing down , and in the process use computers ? I don’t think this in itself is anything original, unless you provide some examples on how that would look today ( the video sample in the talk shows a child manipulating a computer interface from the early 90s so i couldn’t tell how old that video was). But more importantly why spend the first 40 minutes on general pseudo-scientific anecdotal statements, if you’re eager to talk about that ? Do you think people really need to be convinced education is important ?
- discreteevent 8y ago
  Yes people really need to be convinced that good education is more important than most things. I know this at some level but the talk but a lot of things together. And it motivated me to at least think about the value of passing on some of the things I know (and to try do that in the 'honest, directed' way he described) rather than using that knowledge to just make a living.
- lcuff 8y ago
  > What do you mean by his ideas on how to educate children ? Not dumbing down , and in the process use computers ? Well, I took away a lot more than 'not dumbing down'. One of the key things he described is the fact that very few people can sustain their attention for ingesting information, and that getting anyone engaged in practice and exploration at the right level is crucial to them successfully mastering concepts. The 't-ball for x' idea. Whether teachers are teaching stuff that's dumbed down or not turns out not to make a difference: People learn stuff by grappling with it in a 'hands on' way. Getting real mathematicians and scientists involved to create these kinds of environments is part of this. He led with saying this has been said before. My own take is that he said it very well, but clearly that's not everyone's experience. What were the pseudo-scientific statements that stand out for you? My detector didn't go off on anything as pseudo science.

spindle 8y ago

I agree, and there are only maybe half a dozen people in the whole world whose tidbits of wisdom are so good, and so well delivered, and so inspiring, that I don't mind them having this vagueness. Alan Kay is one of them. If everyone was like this (and I agree, a lot of TED speakers are), I'd go crazy.

justaaron 8y ago
vagueness? he's simply discussing comparative pedagogical models and techniques! jumping around a bit = we've been culturally ok with that since mtv circa 1993 or the beatnik authors of the late 50's or virtually any film or literature that jumps around in the narrative timeline.
- justaaron 8y ago
  ... I'll grant you, the Bret-Victor-esque "scratch demo" stuff was a bit of a non-sequitur. Once he got back to the limits of human cognition stuff and the "t-ball for human sciences" part, I felt we were on track for a proper lesson from an elder.

justaaron 8y ago

I dunno, it ties together rather well, IMO. It's only our future, intellectual honesty, social divides, and everything wrong with society addressed with the wisdom and distillation of decades of well formed thought condensed into presentation form. No big deal. This is like a holy revelation and you don't get it????

armitron 8y ago

I have always found interesting how some people seem to make an effort to justify to themselves - in all sorts of ways - their failure to grasp something. Alan Kay is a supreme genius, there can be no question about that, but also an original and deep thinker who is not afraid of not falling inline with the prevailing ideology of the day. He is deeply rooted in the outside, the sphere of human thought and potential that iconoclastic transformative ideas spring from. And, here you come, unfavorably comparing him to Bret Victor rather than seeking to fill the gaps within you that do not let you appreciate what the genius is plainly talking about. In a way you are testament to the point Alan Kay is making. Your inability to grasp simple - yet unpopular and certainly not easy - ideas and your preference for easily-digestible material demonstrates the degree of cultural erosion in play today. In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored, languages like JavaScript and PHP proliferate whilst the best ideas behind Smalltalk and Lisp are still not widely used because the armies of 9-5 for-money “coders” are not in a position to appreciate them, in such a world you have people reaching for Bret Victor and describing an Alan Kay talk as boring. Sad state of affairs.

david927 8y ago
In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored Well, to be fair, Alan is a Turing Award recipient since 2003. He's hardly ostracized and if he's ignored, it's because his cause is ignored. He speaks of a broken present leading to a wider broken future. And to conceive that things are broken requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're looking at. Is you car currently horribly inefficient? You probably (like me) would have no idea. It would require knowing what every part does and what was it designed to do and why. That's a big ask. It requires a deeply fundamental understanding of it all. And this -- this -- is what he's talking about in the lecture. He's gone from proselytizing the brokenness to preaching how to build the new mindset that can recognize it, which is the first and best shot at addressing it.