This is a part of my Knowledge Management and Mind Bending thinking areas that I need to expand on; it's got a lot of dead links in it since it came out of TiddlyWiki. open threads to plumb out these links
subtitle: how to become educated enough to invent the future
The "future of coding future of coding guy" has lunch with Alan Kay Alan Kay and has his mind bent.
Before the meeting, I asked a few mutual friends for advice on the meeting. Universally, I was warned that he would do a lot of the talking. This proved to be the case. I later joked to my parents that I got to ask four questions, and each one took him an hour to answer.
Maybe there’s a fraction of a percent chance that I have the potential to help the field and so Alan was there to nurture that chance. In other words, he was getting lunch with me in for pure benevolence.
idealism idealism is important, and benevolence benevolence more so.
“Reading a couple hundred books a year is the bare minimum. It’s just the baseline. You also need to be embedded in a community of others who have diverse perspectives to bounce these ideas off of.”
God what a thing, that's a whole ass lot. he says that university and grad work is better than an "oral culture oral culture" or being an autodidact being an autodidact.
The key for autodidact-types is to set up ways to avoid insularity avoid insularity.” He recommends that autodidacts institute a “learning tax learning tax” on themselves: a decent percentage of one’s learning should be in areas other than the ones you are most interested in.
connectiveness connectiveness is The Thing The Thing building against insularity.
It's only once you give up on absolute truth and certainty that you can make progress. Once you fully recognize your limited and faulty senses, you build tools to get around those limitations. You build models, maps of reality, and then test those models against reality to see how close they come.
Before this lunch, I thought I was noble in forsaking Silicon Valley riches to achieve non-profit dominance akin to Jimmy Wales’s Wikipedia Wikipedia Mitch Resnick’s Scratch Scratch Guido’s Python or Linus Torvald’s Linux and git git. But Alan showed me how I simply replaced one form of vapid success for another. My admiration of those non-profit tools is “misplaced Darwinism” (a.k.a. “worse-is-better-ism worse-is-better-ism”), equating popularity with goodness.
The author describes this as being turned away from the flame everyone else was transfixed by. equating popularity with goodness.
What the world needs now is so much grander than what so-called-problem-solvers propose. What we need today (or yesterday) is “real education as though we are in a war, to deal with the climate problem as though we are in a war, world health, human rights, etc. as though we are in a war.”
We so-called computer scientists live in a pop culture. We aren’t doing science and we can’t tell you a single thing about our history. As a field, we are suffering from a “resource curse”: there’s too much money in computing and it “dilutes our field with carpetbaggers.”” Alan worries that the Silicon Valley mentality of VCs and startups is “soul stealing.” Those people may be “lost forever” in an “anti-richness” culture.
For the few computer idealists among us, we are so lucky to have the legacy left to us by Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush J.C.R. Licklider J.C.R. Licklider Douglas Engelbart Douglas Engelbart Alan Perlis Alan Perlis John McCarthy John McCarthy Edsger Dijkstra Edsger Dijkstra John Backus John Backus Ivan Sutherland Ivan Sutherland and Alan Kay Alan Kay.
“Better and Perfect are the Enemies of What Is Actually Needed (WIAN).”
I’m also going to more closely follow what Juan Benet Juan Benet is up to, because he’s been talking in this Alan-Kay-style for years now.
action items:
Read more early computer history, and stories about people who made the world better (Organizing Genius Organizing Genius)
read Neil Postman Neil Postman
tags::Knowledge Management Essays Technology Innovation Innovation Mind-bending