6 ms·

The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker (1985)

128 points by kick 7y ago

mathgladiator 7y ago
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)
- GuiA 7y ago
  > 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!
- hos234 7y ago
  > 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.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    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.
    - amelius 7y ago
      These comments made me wonder why the democratic principle is never used in corporations. Is it a flawed principle?
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > 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.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - pjc50 7y ago
        Corporations are democracies .. of the shareholders.
        JoeSamoa 7y ago
        Correct. Representation is the difference here. Although these days the lines seems to be blurring into democracy since corporations are getting larger horizontally and vertically.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        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.
      - someguyorother 7y ago
        "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.
- corporateslave5 7y ago
  The issue is nothing is guaranteed. What is put off til tomorrow may never come
rodolphoarruda 7y ago
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, maybe? (Saying hi to dormant Iron Maiden fans in HN)
- mellosouls 7y ago
  That's clearly the reference but it was a book! https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long-Distance_Runner https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long-Di...
amilein7minutes 7y ago
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?
- joshmarlow 7y ago
  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.
foobar_ 7y ago
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.
thallukrish 7y ago
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.
- contingencies 7y ago
  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.

128 points by kick 7y ago

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)

GuiA 7y ago
> 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!
hos234 7y ago
> 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.
- keiferski 7y ago
  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.
  - amelius 7y ago
    These comments made me wonder why the democratic principle is never used in corporations. Is it a flawed principle?
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > 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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Corporations are democracies .. of the shareholders.
      - JoeSamoa 7y ago
        Correct. Representation is the difference here. Although these days the lines seems to be blurring into democracy since corporations are getting larger horizontally and vertically.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      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.
    - someguyorother 7y ago
      "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.
corporateslave5 7y ago
The issue is nothing is guaranteed. What is put off til tomorrow may never come

rodolphoarruda 7y ago

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, maybe? (Saying hi to dormant Iron Maiden fans in HN)

mellosouls 7y ago
That's clearly the reference but it was a book! https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long-Distance_Runner https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long-Di...

amilein7minutes 7y ago

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?

joshmarlow 7y ago
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.

foobar_ 7y ago

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.

thallukrish 7y ago

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.

contingencies 7y ago
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.