The Complexity of 'Simplicity'
newmediacampaigns.com
newmediacampaigns.com
If people could just see and understand how complex one Google query actually is then maybe the world would be a better place.
All sarcasm aside, let's not forget that technology is not an end unto itself, it is a means to an end. It needs to help people accomplish things, not hinder them.
>>>We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.<<<
One of the big reasons I spent a year working as an intern for One Laptop Per Child is that I strongly believe that getting as many kids as possible even a bit of exposure and experience with programmable computing environments (and ideally then also with some simple hardware hacking such as plugging various sensors into the audio in jack) is a sure way to plant the kind of approach to problems that is required to understand modern technology or work in science.
* * *
It's somewhat off the subject, but I've been reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and it’s truly wonderful to see his mind at work. Not only is he constantly carefully observing the culture, geology, weather, flora/fauna, fossil record, etc. that he comes across on the trip, but also for nearly every observation he provides at least a speculative hypothesis and references various other people’s theories which are supported or contradicted by the observation in question, and also usually suggests further experiments or observations which would test or corroborate the hypothesis. (Occasionally there’s even a footnote explaining that his hypothesis at the time was later shown to be false.)
It’s the scientific method as clearly and purely as I’ve ever seen it working, and the result is that nearly every page has some kind of insight. I’m left with tons of my own questions in response, even in subject areas I’m not especially experienced in and don’t usually think much about, and the reading is quite exciting, even apart from the amusing situations he finds himself in.
I don’t know what the best way is to provide that kind of spark to children, but I’m completely sold on the notion that it’s desperately needed, and the most important thing a school could teach.
This is probably my favorite problem. I think about it every day. It started a few years ago when it really began to dawn on me that almost every single sociological problem that a society develops can be traced back to errors in its educational system. I began to imagine -- as realistically as possible -- just what kind of societies might develop based on different kinds of educational systems.
There's a neat sub-problem though that you allude to: since we assume that education feeds into sociological tendencies which feed back into education, how can you dramatically alter the direction of an education system once it has been moving in a particular way for several decades?
I think the answer is best exemplified in games of strategy, like Go. In general, any time you're faced with an overwhelmingly powerful opponent, you try to find a niche they don't care about, you establish a small, self-supporting base in that niche, and then you grow it as quietly as possible for as long as possible. So, for example, if you tried to attack the current education system head-on, in the form of essays or books or school boards or legislation, you will probably fail. But, what if:
1. You start with one or two after-school, extracurricular activities;
2. You develop some rigorous, detailed, well-thought-out goals and methods for teaching them;
3. You slowly add on more programs;
4. You centralize them into a single facility;
5. You begin to offer a not-worthless certificate at the successful end of each program thanks to (2).
Well, now you've just gone and launched something which can push against the current educational system a little bit. If you make this successful, you can begin to -- a little tiny bit at a time -- publicly ask questions like, "Why don't public schools have programs like this?"
It may be slow, but after spending a lot of brain time considering a large number of various ways of changing an educational system, this is the approach that I think has the best chances of success.
I've been putting a lot of energy recently into growing my business, so that I can finance a small store in the next 9 months or so, so that I can have an appropriate space to offer a fun, basic mechatronics program next Summer, which is my step #1.
I've been thinking about doing something like this too. Albeit not in the concrete way you've put forward, but something analogous to it.
If my startup takes off and I am at a stable plateau then I think that I can run a program like this on the premises. I could ask the people who are working with me to tutor/mentor kids by building stuff with them. Further, by having a hiring bias I can choose people with a personality that makes them more suited for such a thing.
In the longer run wouldn't it be awesome to fund a Xerox PARC that doubles up as a school? It's an amazing way to create long lasting partnerships with a community. You are giving back and receiving precious talent in return.
P.S. - Is there anyway I can help you out with your project?
I had to think about this for a day. The short, immediate answer was "Yes! absolutely!", but I wasn't really sure in what ways.
I think I need three things right now:
1. Links to people with experience in mechatronics and/or teaching such things to small groups of kids age 12 to 16 (or thereabouts). I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron, reasonably proficient at programming, and have taught rock climbing to groups of kids that age. So, I think I've got all the pieces, but any hints would be appreciated. I intend to use Arduino and the course syllabus will involve making a small, automated, maze-navigating robot over the course of a couple of months in the Summer. They will get to keep their robot. I will build one of my own starting early next year to make sure I have a good idea of what to expect in assembling it.
2. I really need "help finding help". I've got that affliction where I'm used to being self-sufficient and providing help to other people. As a result, I'm not very good at finding or getting help with things. F'r instance, I have no idea how to motivate someone else to be interested in what I'm up to, and I don't know how to ask for help, or how to respond to offers of help.
3. Finally, the same old yarn about needing resources. I didn't have any savings when I started my business a few years ago. I've grown it literally out of nothing, and it's pretty healthy, but its growth potential is limited mostly by my lack of capital resources at the moment. So, if you know of anyone that might have a passing interest in helping me sort that out, that would be nifty.
Thanks for your interest! I'll post an update to HN once this thing gets rolling, hopefully in a few months. The main focus right now is to get my hands on a small building, which is requiring me to step up my revenue a bit.
For any who have not read that book, I highly highly recommend the whole thing, and for hackers especially the chapter containing that quotation (it’s somewhere near the beginning). St. Ex. provides one of the most insightful/“true ringing” defenses of technology I’ve ever read.
That point number that everyone seems to want to attach to everything these days has absolutely nothing to do with measuring worth.
It is merely a measure of popularity, and popularity doesn't even correlate well to value.
As an analogy, gold would be a worthless piece of metal, if it wasn't for its popularity. Worth is an illusory, human-defined concept and just like anything "the worthiness of something" is ecided by majority. Perhaps because those who don't subscribe to majority's value system are weeded out in the process of evolution, unless their value system offers some incredible evolutionary advantage. And by incredible I mean "everyone is dead and unable to reproduce except for those who think that karma points are bullshit".
In reality, reality is merely a construct of our minds, and all value systems are created by consensus on which hallucinations are advantageous and which are disadvantageous. Thus, if we decide by unspoken consensus that karma points are worthy of construction of smart comments then karma points are valuable.
I would love to sit here and debate this with you, but I have a Saturday lunch meeting in a few minutes with my old high school's football captain and prom queen. I hear that they've accomplished some amazingly valuable things. We're probably going to eat at McDonald's. We will probably spend some time discussing the latest Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele novels. After that, I will come home and watch Fox News for a few hours, followed by some sitcoms.
Gosh, it's a good thing all these are so popular! Otherwise, I would have no idea what was valuable and what wasn't.
Oh, and by the way: gold would not be worthless. It has certain intrinsic properties -- like its resistance to corrosion, its malleability, its conductivity, and its low melting point -- which have made it valuable for many uses.
As an extreme example, consider value system of a heroin addict, for instance. He or she values heroin above all. You might say his value system is inferior to yours, but how would you defend that statement? Speaking from utilitarian point of view, it's not necessarily that a heroin addict decreases society's happiness or pleasure, if he uses it as a constructive stimuli.
Speaking from a physiological point of view, we are not much different from heroin addicts. My opinion is that value systems are psychological routes by which we can get an endogenous high. Our brains have built a series of quests for us to accomplish, after which they reward us with various pleasurable chemicals.
Some people get high watching Fox News, some people get high debating philosophy, some people get high from heroin. The value of each activity is (non-verbally) agreed upon, by spending time on that activity and hanging around people who spend their time on the activity.
If you mistakenly click the wrong one of the two very miniscule arrows for a vote, there is no way to fix this mistake;
New users can make unpopular comments which will auto-ban all of their future comments -- even when they say things worth discussing -- and there is no way for them to crawl out of that hole (and worse, they often don't even realize that it's happening);
Reply pages tend to expire while writing long, well-researched, carefully-considered comments, requiring those rare commenters to copy-paste the contents of their reply (and worse, inadvertently discouraging deep discussions);
Users are never notified of replies to their comments or submissions, which in effect motivates people to spend more time on the site polling it (as opposed to a useful push-type notification), and also effectively limits discussions to a du jour shallowness because an active user is unlikely to notice any reply made to them a few days later.
I'm not so certain that the author of that article would find this little forum to be a suitable example of his kind of "complex simplicity". I think it's actually a bit the opposite: the internals are simple, which requires more complex behavior on the part of the users.