Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC
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I love Bret Victor's talks, in them he shows real engineering work and highly original ideas demonstrated with beautiful working prototypes. So don't want to sound like I'm knocking him. But reading this article makes it sound like some fool is footing the bill for endless navel-gazing and philosophizing. Some kind of strange architecture astronaut convention (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...)
It's continuing the ongoing lowering of my opinion of Alan Kay too; the more I hear about him the more he seems like a good bullshitter who happened to write a programming language back in the day. "Kay combined them with ideas about pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical speculations of Marshall McLuhan." Wow, world changing stuff; if anyone knew what the hell it meant it'd probably have a big influence on the course of civilization.
"So Kay took all of these ideas, desires, technologies, and opportunities, and recombined them. The results were crucial contributions to a new and emerging sociotechnical imaginary, in many ways representing the computer as a digital medium, which we now have today." Again, sounds really revolutionary, and wonderfully vauge enough that you could say he predicted pretty much everything that happened in the last 30 years. I say: ideas are cheap, especially vague ones.
God bless the real engineers who make things work; photography and digital art were revolutionized with the availablility of programs like photoshop, not pseudo-philosphers bloviating about "representing the computer as a digital medium".
"pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics" are all well-defined terms with non-bullshit meanings. Montessori, Papert and Bruner are well-known names whose theories would be familiar to anyone with a background in learning theory. McLuhan (the "medium is the message" guy) is similarly well-known in media circles, and if you want to understand why Alan Kay thinks he's important, he wrote about it: https://kokonautlabs.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/alan-kay-on-ma...
I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike the article or Kay, but the way that you got there seems to be by saying "they rely on a bunch of bullshit that nobody understands". How are you, presumably lacking a background in the ideas they are talking about, able to determine the difference between good theory and bullshit?
If you want to reason about something, like how people learn, or how technology shapes thought, how would you do that without building a theory about it? How would you build that theory without ideas? How would you refer to those ideas without names? Is your criticism anything more than just that you don't know the names in a field you aren't familiar with?
God bless the real engineers who make things work; programming and the personal computer were revolutionized with the availability of hardware like TTL ICs, not pseudo-engineers bloviating about "structured programming".
But I've seen the code written by real engineers, and they could perhaps use a little less pragmatism and a little more theory. Thinking in abstractions can certainly lead to bullshit, but I'd rather that than no thinking at all.
I guess I've come to be suspicious of pure philosophy, or theory divorced from practice. A broad idea can be wonderful when it's used alongside actual practice (like Bret Victor's explorations of immediate visual feedback and interactivity in creative tools and programming tools). But when it stays in the theoretical realm it can get insidious: perhaps designed to impress rather than inform. I haven't deeply dived into Alan Kay's work except for learning a bit of smalltalk (and enjoying it), but everything I've come across since leaves me scratching my head wondering if there's much substance under all the semi-profound and abstract talk.
So I guess I'm expressing my growing antipathy towards pure theorizing divorced from practical implementation. Together they can be wonderful, but if grand ideas are floated around in a vaccum too long they start to stink.
1. He needs grants. Grand theories and "bullshit" sell at that context.
2. Basic research isn't a tool to gain working systems. It's a tool to gain knowledge, including negative knowledge. And to some extent a fair way to judge a basic researcher is "What have you tried? How seriously did you try it?".
And yes, even though i think Kay is definetly full of himself, He does achieve to do ambitious and interesting basic research(like the VPRI steps program, trying to build a full compute stack ala windows in 10K LOC via DSL's).
I've seen an early alpha version of GP during the Scratch conference of 2016 (the 2017 conference is wrapping up tomorrow), and it worked awesomely, like a supercharged version of Scratch. A fun thing about it is that it features a very small VM, and the rest of the interface and blocks are written in GP itself, and can be readily inspected and modified.
Also, Alan Kay had a Quora answer on this:
https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-w...
- Seeing Spaces: https://vimeo.com/97903574
- Humane Representation of Thought: https://vimeo.com/115154289
To make this more concrete. Consider one of their projects (http://harc.ycr.org/project/), the Block-based programming: what's the evidence that this is a superior way for learning programming? What's the evidence that so-called computational thinking enhances cognitive ability or is transferrable to day-to-day thinking?
Furthermore, much of their computer-based education ideas are based on Seymour Papert's research and ideas which in turn was based on Piaget's theories on mental development. Those theories, however, have been thoroughly challenged and is all but outdated.
EDIT: this was the top comment and actively upvoted, now it seems that the mods have placed it at the end just before comments with negative points. I had heard of YC's sensitivity towards any criticism but this seems extreme. Whats the point discussions without criticism.
Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/
A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to ~9 years olds but couched in the language of permission, the children are able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing) significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of reasoning aren't ever reached.
amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning. The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability to ask better questions.
> .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind.
(a tangent, but perhaps interesting)
As for block-based programming: that seems like something we can test empirically, and indeed there’s quite a bit of literature about it (which I have not read and am not familiar with, sorry).
Child centered, problem centered is vague. More practically, the big things are: you want material that's novel to the learner but also somewhat familiar (this is true, regardless of age). Children's attention is more distributed and worse at blocking out irrelevancies. Therefore, more complex tasks (such as math) should be presented in a way such that the signal meant to be learned can be extracted with minimal ambiguity (less extraneous information in presentation). Few other things have replicated.
from Götz' writeup:
> Simply building prototypes with prototypes would not be a smart recipe for radical engineering: once in use, prototypes tend to break; thus, a toolset of prototypes would not be a very useful toolset for developing further prototypes. Bootstrapping as a process can thus only work if we assume that it is a larger process in which “tools and techniques” are developing with social structures and local knowledge over longer periods of time.
a lot of the ideas, or prototypes, in harc are half finished and or completely abandoned
sometimes an implementation's best contribution is the ancillary knowledge gained by attempting or developing
also, i think kay's presence is less 'hero worship' and more a reminder of shared goals(o) as well as a default standin
Götz's first contribution to a project in the space was to create an animation using cutouts from multiple copies of a picture of kay that were lying around
would you call lenna 'hero worship'?(i)
Is it hero worship or having a wise, hardened bad-ass on the team?
HAR 2009 Lightning Talk Transcript: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity, by Don Hopkins.
http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Tran...
Chaim Gingold, who also works at HARC, discussed my work open sourcing SimCity and his own work analyzing and using the source code to teach game design, in his PhD thesis on Play Design:
Open Sourcing SimCity - excerpt from Chaim Gingold’s PhD dissertation on Play Design, University of California Santa Cruz, June 2016.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DNAvqvKsuLGih8dWz9feEjea...
Abstract: http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=ABS
PDF Viewer: http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI
https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining...
What are some good examples of prototypes or even mediums in the sense discussed here that were "let out" at "just the right time" or "too late"?
"It's such a delight to introduce somebody to your work for the first time! I’m mentoring somebody at work in the ways of user interface design, and I just linked him to your classic “Magic Ink” article, and I am indulging myself by reading it again. You’ve written so much since then, that I have a lot of catching up to do. Any suggestions where I should start?"
He referred me to these two articles: "If you're looking for something of mine to read, I'm partial to this one and this one."
http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/
And here's a "secret internet video" (oops! ;) which Brett shared, "which doesn't really talk about what we're working towards but maybe gives some flavor of the material we're working with. (You might notice Chaim Gingold in a few shots -- the table with pinball etc. was his project.) Here's a vague description of the current system under development."
http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-teaser-2017-02-2...
after the tour he asked me what i thought
i explained the place looked like my 'play room'
he pressed me, 'what does that look like?'
'an ideal, a sort of messy utopia'
I don't know if it is mainstream or not, but idn magazine is a great design mage; see here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://....
I am fairly confident that I have never seen the word heterodox used before.
http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure
by Chip Morningstar, June 1993
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain. Hetero = different, dox = opinion, ortho = correct. So the distinction here is something like "diverse opinion" vs. "incorrect opinion", which to me seems clearly meaningful.
Is it? (to either of those things). In current English usage, 'unorthodox' doesn't mean 'incorrect' and doesn't connote 'incorrect'.
No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means (either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.
http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2010/05/homodoxuals-and-hetero...
An Austrian school economist, or an Arianist in the early Christian church, would be called "heterodox" but probably not "unorthodox". It has the connotation of following a definite tradition that is not the main tradition in the field. "Unorthodox" means something more like "doing your own thing", so Steven Levitt (the Freakonomics guy) might be called an "unorthodox economist" because he studies unusual topics like drug dealers, but not a "heterodox economist" because he studies these strange topics using mainstream theories.
I think "heterodox" fits reasonably well in this article, it suggests that these engineers are following a distinct tradition, not just "doing their own thing".
"...defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming Information Age..." [1]
Presumably Victor's research group is working in opposition to this conventional thinking, making them... unheterorthodox?
1. 'THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY' - http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-i...
you can look at your complaint from at least two perspectives
first, he is german and english is a second, or possibly third or fourth, language
as the saying goes 'there's a perfect german word for that', but in this case Götz was able to find the perfect word in a second language
second, one of his favourite revelations from his time at HARC was the inhabitants', and i argued many 'creators', nearly obsessive, nearly detrimental, preoccupation with 'naming things'
every new idea, every new prototype, every new function, every new variable needs a name and Götz would watch as the team labored over 'what to call it'
a practice that fascinated Götz and when he recalled it to the room and those of us who had been there confirmed the same preoccupations he erupted in glee
so to call out Götz for naming something exactly as it was meant to be conveyed i think would engender in him a pride of assimilating this ritual