Media for Thinking the Unthinkable (2013)
worrydream.com
worrydream.com
Even knowing and understanding programming, you'll have to spend a considerable amount of time to create such interactive media. This might be worth it if you have an online learning company and you're selling educational content for mass audiences. For the one off technical paper or write-up, the dozens to hundreds of hours it might take to produce interactive media (assuming you already have those hard-earned skills) describing your topic is too much for most.
So often computer/software/platform designers use inappropriate metaphors. If you want people to truly be able to "compute" dynamic media with your system, but you trap them in ideas of bits, bytes, words, or today's data structures, you have already lost.
(You wouldn't ask a carpenter to build you a table using quantum mechanics).
What's perhaps most depressing about all of this is that we had better systems (like Hypercard) two decades ago for allowing regular users to do this kind of stuff. Today it's more difficult.
You believe a non-programmer could use them effectively?
[1] www.blockstud.io
The second one is the current open-source leader in academic instruction, since it enables live feedback between code changes and the instructional notebook. It has attracted a large community of academic users, but I don’t know if it’s suitable for long term projects.
But the reality is probably simpler in the sense that complex things are just that: complex, and modeling them is at least as complex, so it will always be hard, and it's only the meta-ideas that can have lasting applicable value. And he's pretty great at disseminating his meta-ideas.
As a non-academic and a web developer, if I were to publish some work of mine, I have always known that I would do it in the form of a webpage. That way, I can make it as dynamic as I need it to be.
I recall reading that a measure of the complexity of a thing (formally) is the shortest possible non-lossy description. This suggests that your insight is correct. The question is how much further can we go in automating parts of the descriptions.
"How to fold a Julia fractal": https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
"To Infinity... And Beyond!": https://acko.net/blog/to-infinity-and-beyond/
I was exposed to this in the beginning of my university period and at the time found it mindblowing. But now, many years later, do I actually regret it and wish I hadn't taken this as seriously as I did. Wishing everything I was learning was visualized, and ignoring means of teaching that weren't styled to "my type of learning" (i.e. visual) – primed by posts like this – actually prevented me from taking the effort to learn how to learn via more traditional methods, like through books. It's only now that I've realized that learning purely from visualizations (rather than being just a small aid at the end of personal sweat and effort) deprives you from reaching an end-state of utter subconscious comfort with the thing you're trying to learn. Reading and forcing yourself to parse and make sense of a book brings about a much richer, personal, and flexible understanding which is more interconnected with other things you already grok (and this is not a skill anyone is born with; though different people might have different starting positions).
Visualizations are great for shared intuition, but it should only be used at the end of a long personal struggle which should involve hours upon hours of undistracted effort, preferably involving something tactile like a pen and pencil.
Another problem with visualizations is that they essentially act as a certificate for "final understanding". People play with a visualization and think they understand the thing (like eigenvalues) because someone said this is what you need grok in order to understand the thing. But as any pure mathematician knows, that isn't where true learning ends. Only if you're personally convinced by a proof, without any need for external authority, should you stop making it any clearer. It can take multiple iterations of a linear algebra course to reach full enlightenment of what eigenvalues are. True understanding only comes after you've seen it from many perspectives.
There is a classic Alan Kay talk that touches on this very issue, called "Doing With Images Makes Symbols." It discusses what the true power of HCI really is: that complex ideas (or even "unthinkable" ones) can be expressed via HCI using some combination of visual, kinesthetic, and symbolic reasoning.
The whole talk is well worth watching, but here is the part I feel is most relevant for Victor's point: https://youtu.be/p2LZLYcu_JY?t=1h7m10s