Attention Spans for Math and Stories (2019)

Some years ago, John Collison tweeted that he realized everything he saw in the built environment had once been someone’s passion project.

I think there’s another, maybe more interesting way to say it, which is that everything built embodies a story both in how its internal parts relate to each other, and how those parts relate to the rest of the world, say, the humans who use a building.

I realized this watching my 6yo, who loves stories, place each new Lego brick into a building or vehicle and explain what it contributed, and how it would be useful. The bricks were stuck together with explanations.

Talking about this later with a friend who does design, he made me see that this is what design is. And that the stories change after the object is built, as the humans bring new needs and expectations to objects. Everything is its own Gestalt and the Gestalt is dynamic over time.

- In "What Is the Name of This Book?" he recalls being introduced to logic at the age of six.

- In "The Lady or the Tiger?" (if I remember correctly), a friend asks Raymond not to tell his child that the puzzles he's enjoying are actually math because he hates math!

Okay. I wasn’t a scout. But a good approach through storytelling!

Talented mathematicians are visibly disappointed when their child turns out more re average than them and try to compensate via clever early education schemes that are unlikely to work out given what we know about heritability of these traits.