10 ms·

An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable"

135 points by endergen 13y ago

JackFr 13y ago
Took a while to understand that he didn't mean 'unthinkable' in the sense it's typically used.
- geg3 13y ago
  It is always delightful when a word seems to take on fresh meaning when deployed literally.
thewillcole 13y ago
Bret is probably an awesome teacher. tl;dr: "Right now, today, we can't see the thing, at all, that's going to be the most important 100 years from now...But whatever that thing is -- people will have to think it. And we can, right now, today, prepare powerful ways of thinking for these people. We can build the tools that make it possible to think that thing."
exratione 13y ago
All of what you do today is transient, but what lives on is the fact that you contributed to the process of building new and better technology. If you contribute to the right technologies, you might also live on in addition, but it is true that pretty much nothing you do will last in and of itself as an entity. That's fine and as it should be - if your work is lasting then progress must have halted in a field you care enough about to contribute to. That can't be good.
keithpeter 13y ago
"I will not fix your vacuum tubes. I will not invent your Darlington pair" I can fix guitar amplifiers, and I can still calculate the DC working point of a silicon bipolar based push-pull amplifier circuit. I also appreciate the general principles of negative feedback, stability and, ultimately, the unfolding of a dynamical system. I take the point being made, but the tools we use govern our learning (Heidegger, Nietzsche, hopefully not too strong for HN). There is value in the here and now as well as 100 years ahead. The Irish writer Chris Arthur writes on the theme of time passing, and his essay 'facing the family' might be of interest.
stephengillie 13y ago
I have heard that SICP calls it 'design by wishful thinking'[1]. In planning, it's called "planning for the unexpected", and can be seen i.e. in "built-in snow days" in primary school calendars [2]. Mathematicians will sometimes insert a new variable where necessary in an equation, then go back and figure out what the math should have been to make that variable work. In physics, the neutrino was something we knew must exist but didn't know what it was, so we made a placeholder [3]. I think of it as an allegory: Our forward progress is like running up a set of stairs. Yet the stairs are only half completed. Our goal is to have our foot moving downward before the stair is placed, with the confidence (or faith) that others will place and secure each stair before our foot hits it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5765447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5765447 [2] Example: http://bdtonline.com/local/x2056602588/Mercer-school-system-marks-all-built-in-snow-days-off-its-calendar http://bdtonline.com/local/x2056602588/Mercer-school-system-... [3] http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html
pdonis 13y ago
This will probably get downvotes, but this is one of those posts that just rubs me the wrong way. Your mileage may vary. I stopped short at the beginning of the second paragraph: Every talk is for an audience, and it's the speaker's responsibility to say what the audience needs to hear. Wait, what? Yes, every talk is for an audience, but that just means you have to know where your audience is coming from in order to communicate. You don't give a talk full of programming jargon to an audience of businesspeople that know nothing about programming except that they often need to hire programmers. But to me, the second part of that statement sounds like something a con man would say. You say whatever it is you came there to say; whether it's "what the audience needs to hear" is irrelevant. (Of course the audience is presumably interested in what you have to say; otherwise, how did you get the speaking gig in the first place? But to me, a speaker who worries about "what the audience needs to hear" is not a speaker I will put much credence in. I want a speaker who will say what he thinks, regardless of its impact on me.) Then there's this, later on: one of the most powerful and important statements you'll ever hear... Right now, today, we can't see the thing, at all, that's going to be the most important 100 years from now. 100 years? How about 10 years? Our inability to predict the future works on much shorter timescales than he seems to think. Why the emphasis on 100 years? Oh: I personally care about mattering 100 years from now. As another commenter here pointed out, if your work still matters 100 years from now it probably means your field has stagnated. Even getting your tools for thinking to matter 100 years from now is a longshot; are you Einstein? Are you Shannon? Sure, those are ideals to aspire to, but the very nature of large numbers means most of us won't end up there. I see the writer's general point, and I even agree with it: having better tools to think with can have a far greater impact than building one particular thing. But what's conspicuously missing from this post is any specifics on how to do that, or how to teach young people to do that. Ok, done ranting. :-)
- ableal 13y ago
  > Ok, done ranting. :-) OK, I'll take it from here ;-). Me, I paused at these words: "the intent is always to influence" Well, yes, I suppose so. Except, perhaps, for the non-fools (actually Johnson said blockheads) who wisely spin entertaining stories for money. But the word "influence" always reminds me of a story that my mother recounted. Many moons ago, there was a bit of social and labor unrest around our parts, and there was a general workers assembly at the factory where she worked. One of the workers speaking at the meeting said his piece, and finished by remarking: "But this is just my opinion, and anyone who lets himself be influenced is a fool". That simple remark still gives me pause today, when I contemplate all the "influencers" busily emulating Genghis Khan, trying to insert their ideas into as many brains as possible.
tel 13y ago
It's really important to note what he only barely says here—he's not disinterested in software engineering because he doesn't think it's valuable today—he's only interested in it because it's an okay model for how powerful tools get built for children. I feel like HN is a terrible audience for this message. Not because there aren't people here who will love it—and to them, disregard the rest—but instead because so much of the community is about making value with the technology that exists today. We're trying to be presentists and do good jobs with the problems and tools that we have in front of ourselves. That's why MVPs and marketing for traction make sense. That's why we can argue for oh so long about the javascript framework of the moment or best practices for software design. Because that stuff is important and has really tangible relation to our ability to generate value today. I respect the hell out of Bret Victor, but also recognize that he's targeting something different. Something that makes him a little more of a mathematician than a programmer. A little more of an artist than a builder. Something that drives him to teach children instead of adults. I personally struggle with this a lot, a lot. I want to build perfect software, not because I care about that program, or because I think it'll make me more money and thus give me more freedom. I strive for it because whenever I make a step in that direction I realize I'm communing with something unearthly. Something I don't understand. Personally, I know I want to teach some day, but I couldn't stand academia because the academia I found was chasing after efficiency in achieving a notion I didn't believe in. For that reason, I'm so glad Bret does what he does and tells the world about it. I believe in him, strangely enough. I think because even though we cannot know at all what he's striving toward, it's a value that I can come to respect much more than the entirety of "tech" today. Truly, I hope a lot of people think that's foolish.
- sas 13y ago
  I know he really doesn't identify with "teaching children." Making tools that will be a useful basis for technology 100 years from now is different, but related, to caring about pedagogy.
  - tel 13y ago
    Perhaps, I wrote that as much for myself as for my interpretation of Bret's work. That said, I don't think anything I've read in the last 5 years has impacted me as much as Papert's Mindstorms, which I believe is a strong influencer of Bret's work. Papert here is not teaching children because of pedagogy but instead because he believes, as I do, that children and true experts see the world in the same way. So that's really what I meant when I highlighted teaching children. Not changing school curricula (and I mean, who pretends today that schools are really in it to teach children anyway?) but instead connecting with minds like children sometimes are before they become afraid to learn.
drcube 13y ago
Claude Shannon was a physicist. He got paid to think about the big century-defining ideas. Engineers are supposed to think about the concrete here and now, that's our whole purpose. Shannon was an extremely important person, a genius, and one of my heroes. But he didn't build the Bell Telephone System, engineers did.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Engineers are allowed to think of whatever they want on their own time. Do I need to remind you what Einstein was "supposed" to be thinking about when he figured out special relativity?
  - nijk 13y ago
    We have no need for 7 billion Einsteins. Humanity is a team project.
  - nglevin 13y ago
    nijk, I'd like to upvote your comment, but you've been hellbanned. For those who can't see the dead; "We have no need for 7 billion Einsteins. Humanity is a team project."
    - andrewflnr 13y ago
      To nijk: That's good, because we can't have that many. We'll take all we can get. But if potential Einsteins don't bother because of some idea of what they're "supposed" to think about, then we wouldn't get any. Then again, you probably can't stop them with snide internet comments, so this discussion is fairly moot. Besides, why wouldn't a Team Humanity of 7 billion Einstein-level intelligences, with the same diversity of specific skills, be better than what we have now?
jonmc12 13y ago
Video is available now: http://vimeo.com/67076984 http://vimeo.com/67076984
- nswanberg 13y ago
  Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5783106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5783106
  - michael_nielsen 13y ago
    It's been submitted at least three times. All three submissions disappeared off the front page, and two are dead, because it's being flagged. The fact that it's being flagged -- multiple times, I believe -- makes me sad.
charlieflowers 13y ago
I think a lot of comments here missed Bret's point entirely. Here's what I think his point is: The most powerful thing we know of is the human intellect. Therefore, the most effective thing we can do is to figure out how to augment and amplify that intellect, to help us think the unthinkable as naturally, and intuitively as possible. And since it was a "personal note", Victor is saying, "Feel free to focus on whatever problems you want ... this is the problem I want to focus on."
- sas 13y ago
  +1
- lukifer 13y ago
  I've long been moved by the analogy that a human on foot has a terrible speed-to-energy ratio, but that a human on a bicycle has the best in all of nature. We've barely begun to scratch the surface of expanding the capacity of natural human intellect.
- nsomaru 13y ago
  This is a key idea behind the "ladder of fall" (of man) presented in the Bhagavad Gita Ch2, verses 62 & 63, which I will quote here for your convenience: 62. A man musing on objects develops attachment for them, from attachment arises desire, from desire arises anger.[1] 63. From anger arises delusion, from delusion confusion of memory, from confusion of memory loss of intellect, from loss of intellect he perishes.[1] There is a simple but powerful metaphysical system underlying these verses and I apologise to the uninitiated reader, but would be happy to briefly outline this system should anyone wish it so. While I will avoid vague (undefined between myself and the reader) terms such as 'natural' or 'intuitive' thinking, readers who accept that the intellect is that which conceives solutions will also be able to entertain the possibility that by improving/strengthening the intellect we improve our ability to solve the problems that face us. This improving of the intellect is the meta-solution to all problems, and (caution: opinion) it should be a requirement for all human beings that they develop this faculty (as the only known living beings with access to higher reasoning faculties). Failing such, you are not living up to the name 'human'. Perhaps this is a hardline stance. Education (formal) fails us here. We are provided with material to think with and about, but scarcely are we conducted through the arenas of thought by those who have made it further than we. Instead, education seems to be a way to simply 'make a living' by learning a skill and applying it in exchange for money.[2] A noteworthy read on this is the Cardinal JH Newman's thoughts on how British universities in the early 1900's were moving away from pure 'intellectual' development and became more utilitarian. A brilliant intellect allowing us access to his thoughts.[3] Suffice to say, things have worsened much since then. [1] From "The Bhagavad Gita" by A Parthasarathy. As an aside, I cannot recommend his book "The Fall of the Human Intellect" enough. [2] I'm making a generalisation here. If you happened to have someone teach you who opened up your mind, you're one of the lucky few in the world. [3] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/ http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/
espeed 13y ago
A few weeks ago after Bret gave the talk at MIT Media lab, he tweeted... "An MIT prof after my talk: "It's as if you showed us how to climb Everest, and then at the end you say, 'We need to go to the moon'" (https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/321830848196390912 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/321830848196390912).
espeed 13y ago
Here is a talk and paper where Alan Kay presents the Nile language Bret referenced in his talk... "Programming and Scaling" (http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/) "Programming and Programming Languages" http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2010001_programm.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2010001_programm.pdf
evangineer 13y ago
Seems to me there's a deeper point being made here about deciding what one's purpose in life is and choosing to pursue it wholeheartedly.

135 points by endergen 13y ago

JackFr 13y ago

Took a while to understand that he didn't mean 'unthinkable' in the sense it's typically used.

geg3 13y ago
It is always delightful when a word seems to take on fresh meaning when deployed literally.

thewillcole 13y ago

Bret is probably an awesome teacher. tl;dr: "Right now, today, we can't see the thing, at all, that's going to be the most important 100 years from now...But whatever that thing is -- people will have to think it. And we can, right now, today, prepare powerful ways of thinking for these people. We can build the tools that make it possible to think that thing."

exratione 13y ago

All of what you do today is transient, but what lives on is the fact that you contributed to the process of building new and better technology. If you contribute to the right technologies, you might also live on in addition, but it is true that pretty much nothing you do will last in and of itself as an entity. That's fine and as it should be - if your work is lasting then progress must have halted in a field you care enough about to contribute to. That can't be good.

keithpeter 13y ago

"I will not fix your vacuum tubes. I will not invent your Darlington pair" I can fix guitar amplifiers, and I can still calculate the DC working point of a silicon bipolar based push-pull amplifier circuit. I also appreciate the general principles of negative feedback, stability and, ultimately, the unfolding of a dynamical system. I take the point being made, but the tools we use govern our learning (Heidegger, Nietzsche, hopefully not too strong for HN). There is value in the here and now as well as 100 years ahead. The Irish writer Chris Arthur writes on the theme of time passing, and his essay 'facing the family' might be of interest.

stephengillie 13y ago

I have heard that SICP calls it 'design by wishful thinking'[1]. In planning, it's called "planning for the unexpected", and can be seen i.e. in "built-in snow days" in primary school calendars [2]. Mathematicians will sometimes insert a new variable where necessary in an equation, then go back and figure out what the math should have been to make that variable work. In physics, the neutrino was something we knew must exist but didn't know what it was, so we made a placeholder [3]. I think of it as an allegory: Our forward progress is like running up a set of stairs. Yet the stairs are only half completed. Our goal is to have our foot moving downward before the stair is placed, with the confidence (or faith) that others will place and secure each stair before our foot hits it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5765447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5765447 [2] Example: http://bdtonline.com/local/x2056602588/Mercer-school-system-marks-all-built-in-snow-days-off-its-calendar http://bdtonline.com/local/x2056602588/Mercer-school-system-... [3] http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html

pdonis 13y ago

This will probably get downvotes, but this is one of those posts that just rubs me the wrong way. Your mileage may vary. I stopped short at the beginning of the second paragraph: Every talk is for an audience, and it's the speaker's responsibility to say what the audience needs to hear. Wait, what? Yes, every talk is for an audience, but that just means you have to know where your audience is coming from in order to communicate. You don't give a talk full of programming jargon to an audience of businesspeople that know nothing about programming except that they often need to hire programmers. But to me, the second part of that statement sounds like something a con man would say. You say whatever it is you came there to say; whether it's "what the audience needs to hear" is irrelevant. (Of course the audience is presumably interested in what you have to say; otherwise, how did you get the speaking gig in the first place? But to me, a speaker who worries about "what the audience needs to hear" is not a speaker I will put much credence in. I want a speaker who will say what he thinks, regardless of its impact on me.) Then there's this, later on: one of the most powerful and important statements you'll ever hear... Right now, today, we can't see the thing, at all, that's going to be the most important 100 years from now. 100 years? How about 10 years? Our inability to predict the future works on much shorter timescales than he seems to think. Why the emphasis on 100 years? Oh: I personally care about mattering 100 years from now. As another commenter here pointed out, if your work still matters 100 years from now it probably means your field has stagnated. Even getting your tools for thinking to matter 100 years from now is a longshot; are you Einstein? Are you Shannon? Sure, those are ideals to aspire to, but the very nature of large numbers means most of us won't end up there. I see the writer's general point, and I even agree with it: having better tools to think with can have a far greater impact than building one particular thing. But what's conspicuously missing from this post is any specifics on how to do that, or how to teach young people to do that. Ok, done ranting. :-)

ableal 13y ago
> Ok, done ranting. :-) OK, I'll take it from here ;-). Me, I paused at these words: "the intent is always to influence" Well, yes, I suppose so. Except, perhaps, for the non-fools (actually Johnson said blockheads) who wisely spin entertaining stories for money. But the word "influence" always reminds me of a story that my mother recounted. Many moons ago, there was a bit of social and labor unrest around our parts, and there was a general workers assembly at the factory where she worked. One of the workers speaking at the meeting said his piece, and finished by remarking: "But this is just my opinion, and anyone who lets himself be influenced is a fool". That simple remark still gives me pause today, when I contemplate all the "influencers" busily emulating Genghis Khan, trying to insert their ideas into as many brains as possible.

tel 13y ago

It's really important to note what he only barely says here—he's not disinterested in software engineering because he doesn't think it's valuable today—he's only interested in it because it's an okay model for how powerful tools get built for children. I feel like HN is a terrible audience for this message. Not because there aren't people here who will love it—and to them, disregard the rest—but instead because so much of the community is about making value with the technology that exists today. We're trying to be presentists and do good jobs with the problems and tools that we have in front of ourselves. That's why MVPs and marketing for traction make sense. That's why we can argue for oh so long about the javascript framework of the moment or best practices for software design. Because that stuff is important and has really tangible relation to our ability to generate value today. I respect the hell out of Bret Victor, but also recognize that he's targeting something different. Something that makes him a little more of a mathematician than a programmer. A little more of an artist than a builder. Something that drives him to teach children instead of adults. I personally struggle with this a lot, a lot. I want to build perfect software, not because I care about that program, or because I think it'll make me more money and thus give me more freedom. I strive for it because whenever I make a step in that direction I realize I'm communing with something unearthly. Something I don't understand. Personally, I know I want to teach some day, but I couldn't stand academia because the academia I found was chasing after efficiency in achieving a notion I didn't believe in. For that reason, I'm so glad Bret does what he does and tells the world about it. I believe in him, strangely enough. I think because even though we cannot know at all what he's striving toward, it's a value that I can come to respect much more than the entirety of "tech" today. Truly, I hope a lot of people think that's foolish.

sas 13y ago
I know he really doesn't identify with "teaching children." Making tools that will be a useful basis for technology 100 years from now is different, but related, to caring about pedagogy.
- tel 13y ago
  Perhaps, I wrote that as much for myself as for my interpretation of Bret's work. That said, I don't think anything I've read in the last 5 years has impacted me as much as Papert's Mindstorms, which I believe is a strong influencer of Bret's work. Papert here is not teaching children because of pedagogy but instead because he believes, as I do, that children and true experts see the world in the same way. So that's really what I meant when I highlighted teaching children. Not changing school curricula (and I mean, who pretends today that schools are really in it to teach children anyway?) but instead connecting with minds like children sometimes are before they become afraid to learn.

drcube 13y ago

Claude Shannon was a physicist. He got paid to think about the big century-defining ideas. Engineers are supposed to think about the concrete here and now, that's our whole purpose. Shannon was an extremely important person, a genius, and one of my heroes. But he didn't build the Bell Telephone System, engineers did.

andrewflnr 13y ago
Engineers are allowed to think of whatever they want on their own time. Do I need to remind you what Einstein was "supposed" to be thinking about when he figured out special relativity?
- nijk 13y ago
  We have no need for 7 billion Einsteins. Humanity is a team project.
- nglevin 13y ago
  nijk, I'd like to upvote your comment, but you've been hellbanned. For those who can't see the dead; "We have no need for 7 billion Einsteins. Humanity is a team project."
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    To nijk: That's good, because we can't have that many. We'll take all we can get. But if potential Einsteins don't bother because of some idea of what they're "supposed" to think about, then we wouldn't get any. Then again, you probably can't stop them with snide internet comments, so this discussion is fairly moot. Besides, why wouldn't a Team Humanity of 7 billion Einstein-level intelligences, with the same diversity of specific skills, be better than what we have now?

jonmc12 13y ago

Video is available now: http://vimeo.com/67076984 http://vimeo.com/67076984

nswanberg 13y ago
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5783106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5783106
- michael_nielsen 13y ago
  It's been submitted at least three times. All three submissions disappeared off the front page, and two are dead, because it's being flagged. The fact that it's being flagged -- multiple times, I believe -- makes me sad.

charlieflowers 13y ago

I think a lot of comments here missed Bret's point entirely. Here's what I think his point is: The most powerful thing we know of is the human intellect. Therefore, the most effective thing we can do is to figure out how to augment and amplify that intellect, to help us think the unthinkable as naturally, and intuitively as possible. And since it was a "personal note", Victor is saying, "Feel free to focus on whatever problems you want ... this is the problem I want to focus on."

sas 13y ago
+1
lukifer 13y ago
I've long been moved by the analogy that a human on foot has a terrible speed-to-energy ratio, but that a human on a bicycle has the best in all of nature. We've barely begun to scratch the surface of expanding the capacity of natural human intellect.
nsomaru 13y ago
This is a key idea behind the "ladder of fall" (of man) presented in the Bhagavad Gita Ch2, verses 62 & 63, which I will quote here for your convenience: 62. A man musing on objects develops attachment for them, from attachment arises desire, from desire arises anger.[1] 63. From anger arises delusion, from delusion confusion of memory, from confusion of memory loss of intellect, from loss of intellect he perishes.[1] There is a simple but powerful metaphysical system underlying these verses and I apologise to the uninitiated reader, but would be happy to briefly outline this system should anyone wish it so. While I will avoid vague (undefined between myself and the reader) terms such as 'natural' or 'intuitive' thinking, readers who accept that the intellect is that which conceives solutions will also be able to entertain the possibility that by improving/strengthening the intellect we improve our ability to solve the problems that face us. This improving of the intellect is the meta-solution to all problems, and (caution: opinion) it should be a requirement for all human beings that they develop this faculty (as the only known living beings with access to higher reasoning faculties). Failing such, you are not living up to the name 'human'. Perhaps this is a hardline stance. Education (formal) fails us here. We are provided with material to think with and about, but scarcely are we conducted through the arenas of thought by those who have made it further than we. Instead, education seems to be a way to simply 'make a living' by learning a skill and applying it in exchange for money.[2] A noteworthy read on this is the Cardinal JH Newman's thoughts on how British universities in the early 1900's were moving away from pure 'intellectual' development and became more utilitarian. A brilliant intellect allowing us access to his thoughts.[3] Suffice to say, things have worsened much since then. [1] From "The Bhagavad Gita" by A Parthasarathy. As an aside, I cannot recommend his book "The Fall of the Human Intellect" enough. [2] I'm making a generalisation here. If you happened to have someone teach you who opened up your mind, you're one of the lucky few in the world. [3] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/ http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/

espeed 13y ago

A few weeks ago after Bret gave the talk at MIT Media lab, he tweeted... "An MIT prof after my talk: "It's as if you showed us how to climb Everest, and then at the end you say, 'We need to go to the moon'" (https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/321830848196390912 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/321830848196390912).

espeed 13y ago

Here is a talk and paper where Alan Kay presents the Nile language Bret referenced in his talk... "Programming and Scaling" (http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/) "Programming and Programming Languages" http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2010001_programm.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2010001_programm.pdf

evangineer 13y ago

Seems to me there's a deeper point being made here about deciding what one's purpose in life is and choosing to pursue it wholeheartedly.