Enlightened Imagination for Citizens | Hacker News Reader

Enlightened Imagination for Citizens

worrydream.com

57 pointsmrzool19 comments

I often see believers-in-climate-change ricule and name-call deniers. These days convincing deniers is at best "Look at this computer print-out!"[0] or at worst "You bonehead" or "Look at this dying polar bear." Almost nobody has adequate tools to see and verify the effects of climate change.

Yes we have computer printouts and scary media images. But we don't have the equivalent of the weather forecast: you see concrete predictions about n days from now, and by waiting n days, you verify their predictions.

Nobody is a weather forecast "believer" or "denier"--we just see the prediction and adjust.

By making tools for understanding dynamical systems, "climate change" will lose its religious clothing and become something we merely see.

I'll make another loose analogy. Everybody believed that Aristotle was right about everything for a thousand years during the middle ages. Only academics had copies; they'd be called heretics for pointing out flaws in revered works. But after the printing press was invented, everybody got copies of Aristotle, Galen, the bible, and everybody saw they disagreed. This contributed to the Renaissance: dissatisfied with Aristotle, Galen, and the bible, people sought new answers.

My point is: You can't expect people to change their views unless they see things differently. Our task as technologists is to enable different seeing.

[0] I'll ridicule again computer print-outs and graphs as explanatory devices. Everybody has a feel for how statistics lie. The reason the weather forecast works is the tight-coupling between prediction and verification. Making an appeal-to-computer-print-out to a non-believer is like appealing to another religious text. It's not persuasive.

The shitty part about this method is verifying hurricanes ten times worse than Katrina. I'd rather show people the printout ;)

I saw worrydream.com and thought I was reading Bret Victor's writing; my eyes skipped the Alan Kay byline. I enjoyed the piece either way, just thought I'd point out the authorship in case anybody else based it on the site domain.

Its not the people, its the systems and beliefs.

The idea of a republic is based on representation by a few. This has been demonstrated to be flawed. Its based on an elitist worldview.

We need to scrap the elitism (classism, racism, even supposed 'merit'-ism (which is based on subjective measures and leans towards privilege and authoritarianism)).

Then we need to fundamentally re-engineer society. Focus on avoiding over-centralization while maintaining the ability to achieve holistic efficiency.

Money and government have never really been separate. So re-think money and government as technologies with a new understanding that they are part of one system.

The argument is that we need to prepare young people to think through the full space of potential consequences of their actions rather than relying on the short-term gains as a proxy for determining whether a course of action is wise.

Systems and beliefs are owned and operated by people, so the argument is "better people, better systems". It's hard to find fault with that.

An inflight rewrite is unlikely. Previous generations could rely on overthrowing an oppressive government to rewrite the rules - can anyone seriously claim that Westerners possess that ability any longer?

That's why the argument towards improving education is important - we might be able to rebuild society from the inside out if even small groups can improve their local education practices.

But that argument hinges on an elitist worldview. It suggests that the reason we have a failing system is because people aren't educated enough.

Its the same racist elitist belief system that created the flawed structures. Its not that people are too short-sighted or ignorant. Its the beliefs they have which are elitist and the systems created from those worldviews which result in short-sighted behavior.

Yes to better education, but if you continue to propagate elitism then your society's lopsided shape will echo that mentality.

Then we need to fundamentally re-engineer society.

This is a fundamentally elitist concept that led to countless deaths over the course of the 20th century. Everyone was out to help the common man and somehow ended in an equilibrium involving gulags.

What's elitist about it? 'We' need to do it together, not some select group.

I am not saying have some bloody revolution. You would have to be mindful of history and make incremental improvements.

It's elitist because realistically only a small group of people will agree on any particular redesign of society. You don't expect it to be completely unanimous, do you? And the group which pushes through their version is the elite.

My idea is you need to have base protocols or metalanguages that people can build on and freely evolve the system.

So its not a static design but a dynamic process based on a shared information systems platform. The goal is to make that platform as flexible as possible so that anyone can create new designs, but you can still automate integrations and do holistic calculations.

So maintain the status quo and change nothing?

Does anyone have more information about this essay (apart from it being written by Alan Kay)?

I can't seem to find anything that doesn't link back to the worrydream site.

There are some YouTube lectures out there from him on this topic. Specifically I remember him showing a slide with the earth on a podium, or a globe on a stand or something, and talking about the different dynamic stabilities of it being slightly kicked and wobbling or kicked hard and toppling, very similar to this from the essay:

the part where he says:

"One way to imagine “stability” is to take a bottle and turn it upside down. If it is gently poked, it will return to its “stable position”. But a slightly more forceful poke will topple it. It is still a system, but has moved into a new dynamic stability, one which will take much more work to restore than required to topple it."

Behind the cathartic whining, what happens is what people want, and I wouldn't say they're being irrational in sacrificing the environment. People don't want to lose their competitive edge, because they're more afraid of the Chinese than hurricanes. They're whining about it, just like they're celebrating heroes (in the hope that other people will buy into it, and that they don't have to act upon it). People know what they're doing, but they don't care... Invent first a man who will protect his fellow, before his genes and pleasure, and then the system will change. (call me cynical)

I'm happy you got to cathartically whine. I do that too.

But I'll disagree with your cynicism. Here are some areas where people invented ways to overcome their caveman brains:

democracy

engineering

mathematics

modern legal systems

Each of these is a response to humanity's inborn inability to do something we thought was very valuable. Each contributes to a society that "protects his fellows," to use your words. None is perfect, of course, but each is better than practical alternatives.

Not only can we invent ways to overcome huge problems, we have invented them. We have yet to invent a way for people to understand dynamical systems.

(I'm taking these ideas from videos of Alan Kay I've watched)

You're right, sorry, I have such moods. In fact, I have ideas. The problem is fear feeds competition, and competition feeds pollution. There needs more empathy between the people, and more education about each other... I thought the social scholars should figure out ways to increase bonding between cultures.

I had ideas which could seem strange, for experiment. Imagine you're told to eat a yoghurt, while looking at a foreigner eating a yoghurt. I think it could increase bonding, and empathy, ect... It's just a thought. (Don't make fun of my yoghurt.)

You say "fear feeds competition" but there's an opposing view by rhetoricians: Nothing ever gets better without at least the threat of competition. I don't often find myself defending competition, but there you go.

As to your empathic observation idea: go for it! One of my go-to heuristics is "symmetry of experience", that is, the more aligned the teacher and student are for example, the better the learning is. Symmetry happens often in communities and rarely in hyper-specialized institutions.

There's not time to educate the entire population of the United States, nor would only educating the people in the sphere of our democracy be sufficient. The environmental crisis is now.

The article mentions the importance of evidence in argument. Forgive me for my boldness: you have cited no evidence. You asserted, "the environmental crisis is now," which I can't easily verify. It sounds no different than, "the rapture is coming."

Alan Kay might say this is the problem we should be solving. Evidence-based argument feels so much better to me than slinging bloviations at one another.

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