If I had more time I would write a better comment, apologies. - - - - I doubt it requires big research to make good tools. Inventing "zero" wasn't done by co

If I had more time I would write a better comment, apologies. - - - - I doubt it requires big research to make good tools. Inventing "zero" wasn't done by committee. In any event, the research has been done. It is steadfastly ignored. E.g. something as simple and straightforward as Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" applied uncreatively would measurably improve the majority of user interfaces out there. There's a near total disconnect between good UI design and what gets inflicted on IRL users. Evidence: every change ever made to every app or web app that made the users scream. Heck, "Google backtracks on search results design (techcrunch.com)" is on HN front page as I type this. At best people are fucking UI/UX to make a buck, but most of them do it because they suck at their jobs. This isn't limited to UI design. E.g. MLs have had type algebra for decades and yet it's only just barely gaining traction among "professional" programmers today in A.D. 2020. Instead of flying cars we have Rube Goldberg machines made out of other Rube Goldberg machines. That's why "When small groups of motivated people [try] they make rapid progress." Because what we're using now is refried merde. It doesn't scale either because people are stubborn about giving up crap[1] -or- it just hasn't been let. Canon killed the Cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat Dynamicland may be fantastic but you can't buy it for money. ([1] This might be the real problem: People just don't give a fuck. Thinking takes energy- calories -and so, as an evolved animal, if you can get by w/o it, you will. "The Internet is for porn.") I've known what I wanted to make ever since reading Ted Nelson's "Dream Machines" and that was twenty-odd years ago (it was published way earlier, that's just when I got ahold of it.) Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" was even earlier. (I've been playing with a very simple UI demo that incorporates elements from Raskin and from Wirth's Oberon OS. Its backing store is a git repo and all changes are autosaved. It's dreamy. Raskin warns that excellent UIs are addictive in the sense that once you get used to them it's like withdrawal if you have to go back, and he's right. Mac, Windows, X et. al., it's all so painful and clunky now.) So yeah, with a little work, and standing on the shoulders of giants and not on their toes, you can make something fantastically better than current tools/OSs. It's not hard. It might even make money in the marketplace, eh? - - - - > What's needed is the development of a powerful praxis, a set of core ideas which are explicit and powerful enough that new people can rapidly assimilate them, and begin to develop their own practice. We're not yet at that stage with tools for thought. Speak for yourselves, eh? Here's where I think they fall into the same trap as so many people do (philosophers, psychologists, designers-of-tools-for-thought, etc.) when talking about thought: They do not define the term. What is thought? (As an aside the only place I've seen that can begin to claim to have a concrete mathematical theory of intelligence amplification is "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby.) Anyhow, the folks who have the goods on the structure of subjective experience work under the rubric of "Neurolinguistic Programming" (the other NLP). Unfortunately the school of thought is still seen as pseudoscience! Oh well, what a world... Anyway, the "machine code" of thought is called "submodalities" in NLP jargon, an (outmoded) model of "microcode" is called "strategies" but that's deprecated (I don't know how to succinctly describe the replacement models, and many of them don't have names), etc. Using the patterns and algorithms discovered or reified by the NLP folks you can rapidly and easily reprogram your mind. [2] At that point you don't really need external "tools of thought" but if that's your thing you're in a much better place to make them. (I.e. if you want to make mind-machine interfaces and such like, or design audio/visual/kinesthetic UIs and UX flows.) Here you're going to want to pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" to get a handle on the finer points of cognition and storytelling. See also Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre". [2] For example there's a spelling "strategy" that involve using visual memory to recall the word (as a picture) and a kinethestic check for correctness. In other words, remember the word, feel that it's right, then read it off from the picture in your mind. Most good spellers use that strategy, most bad spellers do something else. You can take someone who is bad at spelling, teach them to use the proper "strategy", and suddenly they are good spellers. It's analogous to replacing a buggy spellcheck subroutine with a correct one. Spelling isn't hard, we have just been teaching badly. We are in a transition time in psychology similar to when alchemy became chemistry.