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Alan Kay's reading list

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Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#81

Post by alankay »

a_imho wrote: post #74
alankay wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat by accident I wound up a fluent reader before going to school, and read voraciously from then on. I'm not sure how many books I've read, but probably no more than 20,000 (I have some friends -- and have knowledge of some -- who have read quite a bit more). Fluency really helps because there are fewer really worthwhile books than other kinds (this is similar to "most ideas are mediocre down to bad", in no sma…

>probably no more than 20,000 (I have some friends -- and have knowledge of some -- who have read quite a bit more). can you please verify that number? Assuming reading for that past 50 years, that is over a book/day (or 3 books / 4 days reading for 75 years). I'm a slow reader and generally enjoy taking my time reading, but that would be quite the volume.

I don't have any strong way to estimate -- I didn't bother counting them as I read (it wasn't a contest). There were many years where I read around 10 books a week (the library limit). They don't take long to read. I'm 76 and have been reading heavily for 73 years. My library at home has about 13,000 books and for the most part does not have books I read as a child. I still read roughly 4 books a week, etc.

So, as I estimated, probably not more than 20,000.

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#82

Post by alankay »

christudor wrote: post #79
a_imho wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>probably no more than 20,000 (I have some friends -- and have knowledge of some -- who have read quite a bit more). can you please verify that number? Assuming reading for that past 50 years, that is over a book/day (or 3 books / 4 days reading for 75 years). I'm a slow reader and generally enjoy taking my time reading, but that would be quite the volume.

Note: I have friends who claim to have read an similarly extraordinary number of books, although in their case it turns out they had actually been 'speed reading' them, which I wouldn't count as reading at all.[1] Some people would disagree with me, however... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

As I mentioned in another place, the key is remembering what's important.

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#83

Post by alankay1 »

igravious wrote: post #71
paulojreis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wanted to ask you this: what's your opinion on Gregory Bateson's work on the intersection of anthropology, psychiatry, cybernetics and communication in general? Since this discussion is focusing on books, have you read "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"? I hope it goes without saying: thank you very much for your contribution to the world, generally.

Would you also consider then: _The Laws of Form_ by George Spencer Brown, Anything about logic by Gotthard Günther :) (He's a rare bird.) _Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living_ by Maturana and Varela Anything by Niklass Luhmann about social systems: the economy, mass media, art, functional differentiation, … He was a student of Talcott Parsons Norbert Wiener, _Cybernetics: Or Control And Communica…

Sure. Just to remind that the list was for people in business -- they were quite intelligent, had college degrees, but were not well read or "broad". They were very goal-oriented, and I think they did not use school or college for "general education". I tried to pick books that would be assessable and useful for them.

A lot of the books you mention were listed in the Whole Earth Catalog, and were favorites at PARC.

Especially "Laws of Form".

And some of the other "Cybernetics" circle books (Bateson et al was part of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, etc.) Both Maturana and Varela were around in those times as well.

Minsky was a huge fan of Warren McCullogh and Walter Pitts.

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#84

Post by alankay1 »

paulojreis wrote: post #73
alankay1 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Gregory missed some important ideas in that book (partly from his background I think, and partly from his personality). You might get some perspective from looking at his last book "Mind and Nature". And, in many ways, much more powerful looks at "mind" are Minsky's "Society of Mind" and "The Emotion Machine". There is also Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow" more recently ...

Would you have a place in your list for António Damásio's work on consciousness and, generally, the embodied mind?

I don't know whether I would include this book on the list for the Anderson Consulting people. It's worth reading for the context, perhaps not so much for the specific content.

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#85

Post by alankay1 »

internaut wrote: post #75
alankay wrote: post #42

This wasn't actually for my students, and dates back to the early 90s. A number of people at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) asked for my "top ten" books. This is not possible for anyone who reads extensively, so I came out with that list as a bare start. I should mention that reading lots of "poor books" is also part of literacy: they help the understanding and appreciation of "good books" considerably.

Thanks Alan, that looks like a pretty fantastic list of books to get engaged with. Definitely agree with this sentiment: > I should mention that reading lots of "poor books" is also part of literacy: they help the understanding and appreciation of "good books" considerably. I see parents bemoaning their children reading sort of simple formulaic series like The Hardy Boys but frankly that's how I started out and now t…

I quite agree with this. I don't think of "junk novels" as "poor" in that sense. A lot of getting fluent is just doing, so reading lots of junk fiction that is fun is generally good (I certainly did). To me a "poor" book is one that is not up to its subject and/or its intent. There are lots of great junk novels.

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#87

Post by alankay1 »

igravious wrote: post #70
alankay wrote: post #42

This wasn't actually for my students, and dates back to the early 90s. A number of people at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) asked for my "top ten" books. This is not possible for anyone who reads extensively, so I came out with that list as a bare start. I should mention that reading lots of "poor books" is also part of literacy: they help the understanding and appreciation of "good books" considerably.

Life is too short for poor books :) I couldn't vouch for the other topics but I can say that the section on Philosophy made me raise an eyebrow! Well, that and the section on Politics & Economy is obviously US/capitalist -centric but you know that. No Communist Manifesto? Really? :) In case anyone happens to read the list you gave and also reads here, the following are not considered primary philosophical works: The…

Life is too short period!

Just to remind again that the list was for people in business -- they were quite intelligent, had college degrees, but were not well read or "broad". They were very goal-oriented, and I think they did not use school or college for "general education". I tried to pick books that would be assessable and useful for them.

So no "Das Kapital" or other political tracts. I would have put in Madison's Notes on the Constitutional Convention, and many other political writings for a different audience.

I didn't really include much if anything primary about Philosophy (again, that wasn't the point for this group).

And, now that we are discussing this, I now recall that the original list (it was an email) was not just expanded by I know not whom into the pictorial form on the web, but has also been edited a bit. The most important changes are from sentences like "Anything by Bertrand Russell" and "Anything by Jerome Bruner" etc. to the individual books (as subsets). However, I don't recall what I did say about Plato ...

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#88

Post by tamana »

andrewbinstock wrote: post #30
awt wrote: post #6

I'm disappointed not to see Aristotle. On the other hand not totally surprised, either.

Kay is a huge admirer of Socrates. When I interviewed Kay in 2012, he even managed to bring Socrates into the conversation and then discourse on his worthiness in the context of various religions[1]: "You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a huge problem." While the link below goes to the page mentioning Socrates, I highly recommend the entire inte…

Mormonism solves this problem by baptizing dead people.

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#89

Post by alankay1 »

embarcadero wrote: post #86

Do you read on paper, tablet, phone, or all of the above? What do you think about the respective merits of these?

I did a lot of work at PARC on the design of readable fonts, and a few years later on reading from a display (CRT) using a super-good eye tracker we had. This was prompted by "bad feelings" when trying to read from displays. The displays are better today, but I still have "bad feelings" (somewhat different) from reading from various kinds of displays, even including eInk ones. It's partly "movement" and partly memory, so I always print out to read when I can. (This is a disappointment to say the least.)

Re: Alan Kay's reading list

#90

Post by tamana »

zcmncbv wrote: post #33

Great list but I'm surprized about the De Bono books. Edward De Bono is a great story-teller, but there's little science in his work and while he describes many instances of creative thought, he never shows the underlying mechanisms with any rigor.

That's lines up with Kay perfectly.
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