Rotating what's around you
weekly links #5
皆さん、
More on the theme of culture today with some short riffs on The Power of The Context, a famous set of remarks by Alan Kay. Kay gave these remarks while accepting the Draper Prize along with 3 other members of ARPA/PARC, a research lab within Xerox that invented much of modern computers. Just, you know, things like the laser printer, graphical user interfaces, object-oriented programming, the mouse, Ethernet.
He goes into why he thinks it was such a productive scene of people – what is sometimes termed ‘scenius’.
The most important trait of the members of a scenius is described near the beginning:
every engineer, mathematician and scientist — every artist — knows that the greatest privilege is being able to do the work, and the greatest joy is to actually turn yearnings into reality.
Finding work where this is the case, and ideally others who feel similarly, is the goal of this blog.
Point of view
Kay describes the effect of a scenius:
Looking back on these experiences, I’m struck that my lifelong processes of loving ideas and reacting to them didn’t bear really interesting fruit until I encountered “The ARPA Dream” in grad school at the University of Utah. A fish on land still waves its fins, but the results are qualitatively different when the fish is put in its most suitable watery environment.
This is what I call “The power of the context” or “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points”.
One of the greatest works of art...was the almost invisible context and community that catalysed so many researchers to be incredibly better dreamers and thinkers. That it was a great work of art is confirmed by the world-changing results that appeared so swiftly, and almost easily.
This rhymes with what I said I believe is needed for a good education in last week’s post: A social environment & positive cultural context that prizes educational values such as growth, curiosity, learning, wonder.
We’re talking about adults instead of children now, but it’s clear that the context/culture is still very important.
It’s funny that the “fish out of water” idiom Kay mentions is also used to get children to try new things when they complain they’re not good at something. But I don’t really hear it suggested for adults. How many of us truly experiment with different contexts? What if changing your environment might result in an additional “80 IQ points”? Especially because great ideas are often remixes of other ideas in your environment, or as Kay puts it:
My best results have come from odd takes on ideas around me— more like rotations of point of view than incremental progress.
Accomplishing such rotations is a joint effort between the individual and the context. Cultivating the ability to appreciate great ideas from diverse fields is important, but not enough unless you also have interesting ideas in your environment you can rotate. The individual and the context are almost never separable when it comes to great inventions.
What made ARPA/PARC work?
when I think of ARPA/PARC, I think first of goodwill, even before brilliant people
Trust and goodwill are the foundation upon which other principles are laid.
What made all this work were a few simple principles articulated and administered with considerable purity. For example, it is no exaggeration to say that ARPA/PARC had “visions rather than goals” and “funded people, not projects”.
The vision was “interactive computing as a complementary intellectual partner for people pervasively networked world-wide”. By not trying to derive specific goals from this at the funding side, ARPA/PARC was able to fund rather different and sometimes opposing points of view.
ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who “had to do, paid or not” and “whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important”. Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible.
“Funding people not projects” is a classic Silicon Valley phrase you’ll hear from every VC fund. Not an expert, but my sense is that “visions rather than goals” may be less common at VC funds – I don’t know if I’ve seen too many that have a vision like that at ARPA/PARC. And strikingly, even the ARPA/PARC vision described above is nowhere close to being achieved and still quite generative. I saw a tweet a while back that “the personal computer hasn’t been invented yet,” which I completely agree with.
This passage also got me thinking about seeing your own career/life along the same lens. What would it mean to have “visions rather than goals” for how to steer your life? I think this is perhaps where I was headed when writing out my concrete utopia in this previous post. What would it mean to fund “people, not projects” in your career? Perhaps it means ‘funding’ different versions of yourself as you change throughout time, and trusting each of them to build their own path towards the vision? It’s been a useful framing to see the money I earned through my past years in big tech as ‘funding’ for a new iteration of myself. At the end of the day, I don’t know if I have the ability described in the quote, but I do have the self-motivation. I know that I have to do, paid or not. We’ll see where that ends up.
Children & computing
Kay created Smalltalk as an early scripting language for children, the direct predecessor to Scratch. He speaks about children & computing a few times during his remarks:
The real printing revolution was a qualitative change in thought and argument that lagged the hardware inventions by almost two centuries. The special quality of computers is their ability to rapidly simulate arbitrary descriptions, and the real computer revolution won’t happen until children can learn to read, write, argue and think in this powerful new way. We should all try to make this happen much sooner than 200 or even 20 more years! This got me started designing computer languages and authoring environments for children, and I’ve been at it ever since.
Most things done by most people today are still “automating paper, records and film” rather than “simulating the future”. More discouraging is that most computing is still aimed at adults in business, and that aimed at nonbusiness and children is mainly for entertainment and apes the worst of television. We see almost no use in education of what is great and unique about computer modeling and computer thinking.
It’s interesting that one of children’s main skills is also the “ability to simulate arbitrary descriptions.” The technical term for this is “having an imagination.” So what would it mean for kids to read, write, argue, and think in the way that Kay describes? I find myself unsure where to begin answering that question. The obvious approach is using computers to bring kids’ imaginations to life in a highly interactive & ideally social way. This reeks a bit too much of VR to me, which at least in its existing form I instinctively shun as it seems to pull users too much out of the real human world.
It’s also unclear to me if a phone or a laptop are even the right form factor for how kids should be interacting with computers. Especially with the near moral panic nowadays around children and screen time (which is definitely partly justified – just look at YT Kids), it feels like the time is ripe for tech that provides more positive screen time use for kids.
To start thinking through this more concretely, I was riffing on a classic interest that kids have – dinosaurs. How do kids source info about dinosaurs today? A few I could think of:
Bug their parents to go to the natural history museum (again?)
Read books, watch TV/movies/content, play games about dinosaurs
Ask their parents to look stuff up about them, or some form of supervised internet time to do so
And a couple random ideas based on this:
A simulated dinosaur world where kids can say things (”I want the t-rex to always beat this other dinosaur”) and the world updates to be consistent with that claim (”t-rex makes this other dino extinct which has this other effect on the overall ecosystem”)
Using AI to guide kids through cheaply 3D printing an entire biome complete with dinos that they can then play with; the details of the biome could be a collaboration between the kid and their friends
I still found it hard to think of ways that computing could help kids go deeper into this interest without it looking like a simulation that kids might end up preferring over the real world. It’s difficult when the subject is extinct, and tbh I’m probably being overly boomer-like by trying to focus on ‘the real world’ rather than just tech that can help kids learn & grow. I suppose even going to a natural history museum is a way to simulate details of an imaginary world in your head – it’s not actually about the real world. I’ll keep thinking, and suspect I’ll have more ideas as my son gets older.
Top links
Hidden Door
The previous section, combined with the fact that I’m currently reading The Diamond Age, got me looking for games where you can say something to change the plot & the story changes accordingly in a consistent way. Turns out this genre is called retcon & there’s a company using LLMs to help implement this in a DnD kind of way. Pretty sick.
Bearblog discover
A minimalist blogging platform. The coolest part is the linked discovery feed. I have been thinking about making a little app which scrapes Substack & finds users that have high overlap in the blogs you read (niche readerships weighted higher), so you can chat with & meet more cool Internet people. This gave me similar vibes.
School is not enough
Much to say about this. I feel like I finally “finished school” when I quit my job a year ago. At every point in my life before that, there were clearly defined rails I could allow myself to follow without having to think too hard. Now the reality of the situation is clear – I am “condemned to freedom” like everyone else. I can no longer outsource any of my emotional resilience to a larger organization. There are tradeoffs involved, but I would like my kids to be able to experience this earlier in life than I did. It’s a very instructive experience.
IRL (In Rami’s Life)
Yet another busy week in this 5 month old baby’s life, with a few private investigators resigning, citing “fatigue” and complaining “they don’t get paid enough for this.” Luckily Rami has been to so many places that witnesses abound.
The week started off with Rami’s parents confirming he hasn’t yet developed full object permanence, which they had already suspected as he doesn’t react to peekaboo (though he does have it partially – he has exquisite FOMO at social events). Rami was playing with a toy and his parents placed a blanket over it to test if he would try to move the blanket to get it, which would confirm he knew the toy still existed. He did not. Full object permanence is developed between 4 and 12 months, and usually around 9 months, so this wasn’t too surprising. Now Rami’s parents have a whole battery of experiments they plan to subject him to, to learn more about how he’s developing. Witnesses are concerned about the lack of IRB review.
Early in the week, Rami and his parents drove to Massanutten, a mountain resort in the Shenandoah mountains. The mountain was ablaze with fiery fall colors (though it was a little cloudy and cold).
Trees are Rami’s favorite thing, so he was completely enthralled for the four days he was there. The second day, sources were surprised to see Rami attending a free breakfast & presentation where employees were trying to sell his family a timeshare. For once, Rami was not the sole income earner in the family (shoutout California Paid Family Leave) – his parents got a $150 gift card for surviving the sales tactics. Later that day, Rami was spotted having an unblinking stone cold reaction going down a slide. Witnesses believe he’s been desensitized to rapid motion because he gets flown around by his dad all the time. He did have an incredible time in the swing, though.
After a few tree-filled days, Rami had his first Halloween experience. He started the day off dressed in a skeleton sleeper, ironic given he’s 90% fat. Witnesses report looking away for a few minutes and Rami doing a full costume change into Buzz Lightyear, complete with a purple bald cap for the helmet. After getting tossed around as the famous Space Ranger, he met his Vidhi बुआ who flew in from Chicago. She was shocked at his cuteness and loved his costume’s wings. Just an hour or two later, Rami changed into his final outfit of the day – a classic chicken. Despite being unable to cross any roads, Rami made witnesses laugh and giggle. He finished the day off with a short drive through the neighborhood to look at people’s elaborate Halloween decorations.
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