The Shocking Truth About Doug Engelbart: Silicon Valley's Sidelined Genius | Hacker News Reader

The Shocking Truth About Doug Engelbart: Silicon Valley's Sidelined Genius

siliconvalleywatcher.com

51 pointssmacktoward12 comments

The article is alltoo true. Engelbart's work was an enormous influence on my own. But when I gave credit to him in conference papers, and business proposals I was pulled aside and told that it wasn't a good idea to tie yourself too closely to Engelbart because he was viewed as being too "out there". I always had the same reply. "Have you actually /read/ and of Englebart's papers?" In almost every case the answer was no. And when they did answer yes, it was always along the lines, "well all he was talking about was hypertext which is the same as the Web." Silicon Valley loves to talk about changing the world, but that's largely bullshit. Engelbart is far from the only genius that is being ignored today who will never get funded. You can make obscene amounts of money building another photo sharing or dating app, but try to work on an important problem and you'll starve to death.

Maybe a more appropriate tribute is actually HN itself as a manifestation of his Collective IQ, from http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html "Collective IQ" is a special set of collective capabilities, built upon our basic human capabilities, such as sensory, perceptual, cognitive, motor, etc. Any significant collective capability is achieved by "augmenting" such basic human capabilities by means of training, enculturation, etc. in operational use of: (a) appropriately coordinated systems of artifacts and tools (the "Tool System"); and (b) vocabulary, conventions, roles, organizational structures, values, rules of conduct, methods of cooperation and education, etc. (the "Human System"). Together the Tool and Human Systems comprise the "Augmentation System." The purpose of the bootstrapping strategy is to accelerate the natural co-evolution of our Tool and Human Systems toward ever-more powerful Augmentation Systems enabling increasingly effective Collective IQ

I can't decide whether this is gibberish or just pretentious. You should give up writing until you have learnt to express yourself clearly (and have ideas worth sharing).

You know he's quoting Engelbart, right?

/ignore epo

Did someone hack your account? Because that level of irony just can't be so easily lost.

Well, I am not sure if epo is a troll but he does have a point. If you give the original comment a quick read it sounds like gibberish. The language is very 'heavy' like in academic papers. Academic papers to me are a big turn off and I hardly understand what they say most of the time. It also shows how little of academia reaches the common programmers - they are largely inaccessible. (compare number of papers to numbers that actually end up in real software)

Respectfully, the ratio of "papers to systems" has less to do with communication and more to do with tenure and promotion. Most professors couldn't care less if their papers are implemented, or even read.

Academia reaches out to the common programmer and student all the time; they write books.

Academic research papers are aimed at other researchers, i.e. people who are up to speed with the concepts and terminology, if you or I don't understand the latest research on machine vision, then though luck, we just lack the necessary background, and that's discounting the fact that we are different audiences and seek for different content and form from each other.

How often are we programmers interested in detailed proofs? Or even sketch proofs? If you decide to helpfully include code samples and they are full of boost::this or ApacheFooXMLFactoryThat, would that be of help to an academic who only implements his algorithms in isolation and doesn't know of massive APIs, or to researchers 20 years from now?

Thank you - please never stop posting because of comments like epo's

I'm not sure HN would really fit; he expressed considerable dissatisfaction with message boards, which HN seems to be an instance of (both culturally and technologically).

Here are a few of his thoughts on what would be better:

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/oad-2221.html

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-133186.html

He made 2 mistakes. Had more than 30 years and never wrote rockstar ninja on his resume.

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