Links 2013

It’s the end of 2013, and here’s what Bret fell in love with this year

I’m trying to build a jigsaw puzzle. I wish I could show you what it will be, but the picture isn’t on the box. But I can show you some of the pieces that snapped into place this year, and try to share a context for why they mattered so much to me.

If you are building a different puzzle, it's possible these pieces won't mean much to you. You might not have a spot for them to fit, or you might not yet. On the other hand, maybe some of these are just the pieces you’ve been looking for.

These are mostly about powerful seeing, and powerful representations for scientific thinking.

Reading Tip #1

It’s tempting to judge what you read:

I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those.

However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements.

Instead, you can say:

I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent.

And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don't have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it's needed.

Bruno Latour

Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together (1986)

If scientists were looking at nature, at economies, at stars, at organs, they would not see anything... Scientists start seeing something once they stop looking at nature and look exclusively and obsessively at prints and flat inscriptions...

People before science and outside laboratories certainly use their eyes, but not in this way. They look at the spectacle of the world, but not at this new type of image designed to transport the objects of the world, to accumulate them in Holland, to label them with captions and legends, to combine them at will.

Bret Victor This was the most astonishing thing I read this year. Like Mindstorms, I had to give up on extracting key quotes because I found myself transcribing the entire paper. Latour's theory of what makes for powerful scientific representations (and what it means to be scientifically powerful) was very unexpected, and feels tremendously valuable.

Thanks to Clint Heyer for suggesting this.

Andrea diSessa

Knowledge in Pieces (1988)

[Naive] physics is a fragmented collection of ideas, loosely connected and reinforcing, having none of the commitment or systematicity that one attributes to [scientific] theories...

[Galileo] saw clearly the need to find a way to extend his analysis beyond the initial context that suggested it, in order to test and develop the notion into a genuine theory.... The [naive] thinker does not develop sophisticated arguments to extend the scope of a notion, neither does he even feel the need to talk about tossing and dropping in uniform terms... [He is] used to dealing with the world on a catch-as-catch-can basis, where it is quite fair to change tactics whenever the problem is minutely varied.

Bret Victor What is the difference between scientific and non-scientific thinking? Thinking within a consistent theory versus thinking haphazardly?

I'm crucially interested in the problem of representing theory such that intuitions are fruitful and theoretically sound, and representations suggest analogies that stay true to the theory. That's not diSessa's problem, but I feel that his viewpoint has some powerful clues.

Thanks to Cassandra Xia and Mitch Resnick for suggesting this.

Douglas Hofstadter

Analogy as the Core of Cognition (2001)

I believe that all communication is via analogy. Indeed, I would describe communication this way: taking an intricate dance that can be danced in one and only one medium, and then, despite the intimacy of the marriage of that dance to that medium, making a radically new dance that is intimately married to a radically different medium, and in just the same way as the first dance was to its medium...

Imagine taking the most enthralling basketball game you ever watched... and giving a videotape of that game to a “soccer choreographer,” who will now stage all the details of an artificial soccer game that is in some sense analogous to your basketball game.

Bret Victor Or watch the talk, or skim the book. Hofstadter says that all thinking runs on analogy-making. Sounds good to me! If he's even partially correct, then it seems to me that a medium for powerful thinking needs to be a medium for seeing powerful analogies. And a medium for powerful communication needs to be designed around inducing the dance he's talking about up there.

I'm especially drawn to George Polya's cartography of analogizing.

Sherry Turkle

Simulation and its Discontents (2009)

In the 1980s at MIT, many early users of simulation genuinely could not imagine such things as designing without drawing, or thinking without a “back of the envelope” calculation. Those who had grown up accustomed to physically taking apart their laboratory instruments were upset by programs whose inner workings they did not understand.

In response to simulation's provocations, faculty and students identified areas that they hoped to keep as simulation-free zones. Architects wanted to protect drawing, which they saw as central to the artistry and ownership of design. Civil engineers wanted to keep software away from the analysis of structure; they worried it might blind engineers to crucial sources of error and uncertainty. Physicists were passionate about the distinction between experiment and demonstration...

In the past twenty years, researchers have gone from using simulation for discrete tactical purposes to working almost full-time in simulation... An older generation feels compromised by simulations that are essentially “black boxes”; using them seems an abdication of professional responsiblity. A younger generation is more likely to accept that computational transparency, in the sense that their elders speak of it, is a thing of the past.

Bret Victor A very exciting book for me, because I see the complaints of the discontents as design challenges that can be overcome. The book contrasts the intimacy, transparency, and directness of “thinking with a pencil” to the helplessness and loss of connection inherent in black-box computational tools. I believe we can design a computational medium whose transparency and directness exceeds that of paper. It sure won't look like anything that exists today.

I suppose Turkle is also responsible for turning me on to scientific ethnography in general, along with Edwin Hutchins.

Thanks to the MIT Press bookstore for leaving this in the bargain bin.

Kieran Egan

Why education is so difficult and contentious (2001)

Thinking about education during this century has almost entirely involved just three ideas—socialization, Plato's academic idea, and Rousseau's developmental idea... The combination of these ideas governs what we do in schools, and what we do to children in the name of education.

Our problems... are due to these three ideas each being fatally flawed and being also incompatible with one other.

Bret Victor Also see his talk. If you're going to design a system for education, it might help to understand the purpose of education in the first place. Egan points out how modern education is implicitly driven by a cargo-culty mish-mash of three lofty but mutually-incompatible goals. Good luck with that!

I'm really happy to have discovered Kieran Egan this year. Also check out his delightfully audacious Learning in Depth project (video, website).

Found via a reference in a paper by Jonathan Borwein.

Terry Cavanagh

Naya's Quest (2013)

Bret Victor A game about learning to see, when all you have are ambiguous representations. Extraordinary, beautiful, amazing.

Stewart Brand

Clock Of The Long Now: Time And Responsibility (2000)

How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? How do we make the taking of long-term responsibility inevitable? ...

Clock/Library is an extravagant project. The more over-the-top it is, the better it works. If it wants to compete for iconic power with the mushroom cloud and the photos of Earth from space, it has to match their vaulting ambition. (Let's split the atom! Let's leave Earth!) The great time-spanning precedent is the pyramids of Giza. Their massive monumentality defined when “history” began. They are a stabilizer, a frame of reference, for any culture that cares to care about them. The pyramids also demonstrate the power of folly. You can't argue with them because they're not rational.

The ambition and folly of the Clock/Library is to reframe human endeavor, and to do so not with a thesis but with a thing. All this thing can do is give permission to think long term. If it succeeds in that, the rest may follow.

Bret Victor Stewart Brand is an incredible human being, and it's a privilege to share a planet with him. The “Long Now” message of long-term responsibility has resonated with me for years, but it wasn't until I read this book that I finally “got” the clock project.

Julian Jaynes

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1977)

The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like.

When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do.

Bret Victor The freakiest thing I've read in years. Jaynes's thesis is that, until relatively recently, human beings had no sense of self, could not introspect, and made decisions by schizophrenically hallucinating voices of the gods. Muses literally sang! (The link is to an excellent summary by Erik Weijers; the book is here.) See also Snow Crash??

Thanks to John Mawhorter for mentioning this.

David Hestenes

An Interview with David Hestenes (2012)

My father gave me the greatest compliment of my life... “You have learned the difference between a mathematical idea and its representation by symbols. Many mathematicians never learn that!”...

What you understand about science depends critically on your facility with conceptual tools, representational tools, and mathematical tools. For example, if you had to do all of your calculations with roman numerals, you wouldn’t do very well, okay? Indeed, the whole history of mathematics can be understood as invention and application of better and better conceptual and mathematical tools.

Bret Victor I don’t have the words to express how much I admire and value David Hestenes. The theme of his physics work -- both the language he designed and the physical theories he's created with it -- is that you can picture what’s going on. I expect that future generations will place him with Leibnitz and Heaviside, as one whose language dramatically expanded science's thinkable territory.

I link to his modeling work below, because that's what I got into this year, but if you are interested in his language, Imaginary Numbers Aren't Real is what originally got me hooked, and also see Reforming the Mathematical Language of Physics. Unfortunately, there isn't yet a good (visual) (interactive?) introduction.

David Hestenes

Notes for a Modeling Theory of Science, Cognition and Instruction (2006)

To the grand philosophical question: “What is man?”
Aristotle answered:
“Man is a rational animal.”
Modeling Theory offers a new answer:
“Man is a modeling animal!” Homo modelus!

Bret Victor I read this some years ago, but I wasn't ready for it, and it didn't take. Reading it this year, after having struggled to clarify many of the systemic and cognitive concepts that the paper defines, I felt like I had stumbled upon All The Answers To Everything.

See also his earlier, more pedagogically-oriented paper Toward a modeling theory of physics instruction, as well as the Modeling Games paper below.

David Hestenes

Modeling Games in the Newtonian World (1991)

The great game of science is modeling the real world, and each scientific theory lays down a system of rules for playing the game...

It is widely believed that Newton's Laws are inherent in the Physical World, just waiting to be discovered, like Columbus discovered America. On the contrary, as Einstein repeatedly emphasized, the laws of physics are “free creations of the human mind”... Newton's Laws were invented to describe certain regularities in the motions of real objects. These regularities are, indeed, inherent in nature, but they could not be discovered without the invention of adequate concepts to describe them...

[Thomas Kuhn's] Normal Science plays the great modeling games strictly according to the rules. Revolutionary Science produces new games by revising the rules. What happens to mavericks who don't want to play by the rules? Usually, they lose! They are ignored by their colleagues. History shows that winning by changing the rules is rare and achieved only by individuals who have mastered play by conventional rules. Evidently, only true masters can see where the rules fail.

Bret Victor Hestenes is beautifully and valuably clear here about the distinction between the Conceptual World (invented models) and the Physical World. And representing the axioms of a theory as a game board, pieces, and legal moves is delightful.

Linked below, both Carver Mead and Alan Kay also orbit around the model vs reality theme. And a particularly incisive perspective on this distinction is in E.T. Jaynes's wonderful paper Clearing Up Mysteries.

Carver Mead

Reading Tip #2

Carver Mead describes a physical theory in which atoms exchange energy by resonating with each other. Before the energy transaction can happen, the two atoms must be phase-matched, oscillating in almost perfect synchrony with each other.

I sometimes think about resonant transactions as a metaphor for getting something out of a piece of writing. Before the material can resonate, before energy can be exchanged between the author and reader, the reader must already have available a mode of vibration at the author's frequency. (This doesn't mean that the reader is already thinking the author's thought; it means the reader is capable of thinking it.)

People often describe written communication in terms of transmission (the author explained the concept well, or poorly) or absorption (the reader does or doesn't have the background or skill to understand the concept). But I think of it more like a transaction -- the author and the reader must be matched with each other. The author and reader must share a close-enough worldview, viewpoint, vocabulary, set of mental models, sense of aesthetics, and set of goals. For any particular concept in the material, if not enough of these are sufficiently matched, no resonance will occur and no energy will be exchanged.

Perhaps, as a reader, one way to get more out of more material is to collect and cultivate a diverse set of resonators, to increase the probability of a phase-match.

Carver Mead

An Interview with Carver Mead (2001)

[Copenhagen quantum mechanics] is conceptual nonsense. You can calculate stuff with the theory, but the words people put around it don't make any sense. That had the effect of driving the more conceptually-oriented students out of physics. We have ended up with more and more mathematicians in the physics departments. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with mathematics--it's the language we use to express the precise relations of physical law. But there is an increasing tendency to mistake the language for the physics itself. Once we lose the conceptual foundations, the whole thing becomes a shell game.

Bret Victor Carver Mead is perhaps more responsible than anyone for Silicon Valley and the microchip revolution. He refers to that as his 30-year detour. Now he's back to fundamental physics and electromagnetic theory.

I love his way of thinking about electrons and “photons”, but I love even more his insistence that we can think of them, and that we must be able to think about them -- that it's our responsibility to have a sensible conceptual model, a picture in the head, not just some mystical equations that happen to match some experiments for reasons we can't ask.

David Hestenes found his “way in” through decades of learning to geometrically interpret the equations, and pursuing a mission to eliminate all “imaginary” mathematical objects. Mead found his way in through decades of learning to work with coherent-matter systems, and pursuing a mission to eliminate all discontinuities in space and time. For both, the "picture in the head" was paramount.

Carver Mead

Collective Electrodynamics (2002)

Everything can be followed in a smooth and continuous way, and we can view nature as being continuous in both space and time. This picture of nature is what Einstein wanted most. But to arrive at this picture, we had to give up the one-way-direction of time, and allow coupling to everything on the light cone. This, too, was okay with Einstein. So why was he so hung up on local causality? Why do all the textbooks state that the coupling of states unified by a light cone is a violation of relativity? In science, as in all other aspects of human endeavor, each age has its blind spots, and what is impossible to comprehend in one generation seems natural and obvious to another. So, after only one generation, Zeh could say, “There are no quantum jumps, nor are there particles.”

Bret Victor The first chapter, abbreviated, is available as a paper, but it doesn't work well as an overview. Perhaps better is his "Nature of Light" paper or talk.

Douglas Engelbart

Paul Saffo

Eulogy for Doug Engelbart (2013)

His vision of augmentation was really nothing less than a new home for the mind. A cathedral, if you will. And cathedrals take time...

He built good tools, and after the 1968 demo, others were tempted to borrow them, and Doug shared freely. By sharing, he hoped they would help move his cathedral closer to reality. What everyone built was lovely, but it was no cathedral...

We were standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.

Ted Nelson

Eulogy for Doug Engelbart (2013)

Of course he was naïve! Gandhi and Martin Luther King pretended to be naïve, but Doug was the real thing -- a luminous innocent, able to do in all innocence what sophisticates could not, would not, dare.

Bret Victor A transcript is here, but you really, really need to hear it. Just about everything that Ted Nelson writes or presents is magnificent, and here he says what no one else would dare.

Douglas Engelbart

The Engelbart Hypothesis: dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (2009)

I often say, “Well, it's just over on the other side of that canyon. So all we have to do is go.” It is always surprising to me that other people would expect me to tell them how we're going to get there directly. That it is not enough to say, “Well, it would be important to get there and there is probably a way. Let's go.” ...

My boss gave me quite a lecture one day. He said, “Look, here's eight pages you've gone through to describe this thing you want to do and it's still all faint. Bill has just written this proposal, on one page, very concise, clear, describing exactly what he wants to do with his research.” The model proposal was very detailed in an intellectual domain that was already thoroughly beaten out. What he was proposing was a very narrow research question pursuing a tiny sub-domain.

I tried to explain to my boss that I was interested in opening up an entirely new approach for which there is no vocabulary. Later, people used the term “paradigm shift” to describe a fundamental change in assumptions and thinking. If you're really dealing with something in a different paradigm, the vocabulary of almost everything you're trying to say is different. You have to somehow establish the terms as stepping-stones to arrive at what you're trying to say.

Douglas Engelbart

Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future (2003)

The good news is that it is possible to build an infrastructure that supports discontinuous innovation. There is no need at all to depend on mystical, invisible hands and the oracular pronouncements hidden within the marketplace. The alternative is conscious investment in an improvement infrastructure to support new, discontinuous innovation.

Bret Victor I thought that the best way to honor Engelbart here would be to call attention to his more recent work. Even the most ardent Engelbart-fans often haven't looked beyond his 1962 paper or 1968 demo. His three-tiered organizational strategy -- (A) do the work, (B) build tools to improve the doing of the work, (C) build tools to improve the improving -- is painfully relevant and badly needed.

Alan Kay

Reading Tip #3

Misunderstandings can arise when an author is thinking in a broader context than the reader. A reader might be thinking tactically:

How can I do a better job today?

while the author is thinking strategically:

How can we make a better tomorrow?

The misunderstanding becomes especially acute when real progress requires abandoning today's world and starting over.

We are ants crawing on a tree branch. Most ants are happy to be on the branch, and happy to be moving forward.

But there are a few special ants that, somehow, are able to see a bigger picture. And they can see that this branch is a dead end.

They can see that if we really want to move forward, we'll have to backtrack a long ways down.

They usually have a hard time explaining this to the ants that can only see the branch they're on. For them, the path ahead appears to go on forever.

Alan Kay

Putting Turing To Work (2013)

Normal Considered Harmful (2009)

SCIx keynote presentation (2012)

The Center of “Why?” (2004)

Bret Victor Several “big idea” thinkers have shown up on this list, and I love them all, but Alan Kay's idea is bigger than any of them. It's almost too big an idea to see, and many people don't see it.

Part of the problem is that Kay talks about computers a lot, so computer people think he's talking about computers. But he's thinking of computing-as-a–medium, not computing-as-technology. I'll try to clarify with an analogy:

Wikipedia (printing press) The invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as among the most influential events in the second millennium, revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they live in, and ushering in the period of modernity...

In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class.

Bret Victor The cultural importance of the printing press doesn't have much to do with the technology -- the ink and metal type -- but rather how print acted as a medium to amplify human thought in particular ways.

Print was directly responsible for the emergence of a literate and educated society, which (for example) made possible the idea of societal self-governance. The US Constitution could only exist in a literate print culture, where (for example) the Federalist papers and Anti-Federalist papers could be debated in the newspapers.

As you read and watch Alan Kay, try not to think about computational technology, but about a society that is fluent in thinking and debating in the dimensions opened up by the computational medium.

Don't think about “coding” (that's ink and metal type, already obsolete), and don't think about “software developers” (professional scribes only make sense in a non-literate society).

Think about modeling phenomena, modeling situations, simulating models, gaining a common-sense intuition for nonlinear dynamic processes. Then think about a society in which every educated person does these things, in the computational medium, as easily and naturally as we today read and write complex logical arguments in the written medium.

Reading used to be reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses. Today, it's just what everyone does. Think about a society in which science is not reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses, but is just what everyone does.