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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#391

Post by alankay1 »

dang wrote: post #356
alankay1 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What Fools these Mortals be!" Puck meant that we are easy to fool. In fact we like to be fooled -- we pay lots of money to be fooled! One way to look at this is that the most important learning anyone can do is to understand "Human beings as if from Mars" -- meaning to get beyond our fooling ourselves and to start trying to deal with what is dangerous and counterproductive in our genetic (and hence cultural) makeups…

> the great Jerome Bruner in the 60s came up with a terrific curriculum for 5th graders that was an excellent start for "real anthroplogy" Was that the MACOS program? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man:_A_Course_of_Study I was casting around recently looking for something to post to HN about it, but there's surprisingly little on the web. (I haven't yet watched the National Film Board documentary on it, which was the…

Yes, it was MACOS. A very good book about this is "Politics in the Classroom".

There is actually quite a lot of stuff on MACOS on the web, most of the materials, etc.

Bruner wrote a number of outstanding essays as part of the MACOS design project ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#392

Post by alankay1 »

jensv wrote: post #364
_ayv0 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a reddit AMA would be better? They have much more flexible/powerful comment system. Edit: Not sure why I am getting down voted for making a suggestion. Oh well.

Or maybe a Quora session.

A lot more good activity here than on Quora ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#393

Post by alankay »

_ayv0 wrote: post #354
alankay1 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me both acknowledge your questions, and also acknowledge that this forum (the media authoring tools) are not in scale with the needed answers ...

Perhaps a reddit AMA would be better? They have much more flexible/powerful comment system. Edit: Not sure why I am getting down voted for making a suggestion. Oh well.

I like the vibes here

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#394

Post by gnaritas »

alankay1 wrote: post #387
gnaritas wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I understand what you're implying, I'm not blind, and only recently realized other people actually see pictures in their mind while awake. But dreaming while awake would be awesome if achievable.

I'm saying that you don't see what is on your retina, but something that is manifested by your brain (and this is why you can see images when you dream). So I'm guessing that there is a path for you to imagine images. It could be very similar to how most people who think they are tone deaf can be helped to hear pitches quite accurately.

Ah, yes, I'm hoping this is true as well hence my interest in what you said about learning to dream while awake. If you don't have any specific recommendations I'll continue researching on my own.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#396

Post by bbcbasic »

alankay1 wrote: post #162
psibi wrote: post #40

What do you think about functional languages like Haskell, OCaml etc ?

They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents). And then there is the issue that we need to make "systems" ... I like what a function is, and this idea should be used, but I think it is better used rather differently ...

> They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents).

I am not sure what the time problem is for functional programming, but I reckon the Elm language/framework solves problems with time in a very elegant way with it's flavour of FRP and Signals.

In Elm, you can play back your UI interactions in a debugger as they happened and watch the variables as they would have been!

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#397

Post by derflatulator »

Joeri wrote: post #315
CharlesMerriam2 wrote: post #18

Many mainstream programming tools feel to be moving backwards. For example, Saber-C of the 1980s allowed hot-editing without restarting processes and graphical data structures. Similarly, the ability to experiment with collections of code before assembling them into a function was advance. Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?

Hot-editing updates behavior while keeping state, causing wildly unpredictable behavior given the way objects are constructed from classes in today's languages. The current approach to OO is to bootstrap fresh state from an external source every time the behavior changes so guarantees can be made about the interaction between behavior and state. It seems to me the equivalent of using a wheelchair because you might st…

Redux does this at a library level - http://redux.js.org/docs/introduction/

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#398

Post by alankay1 »

Natanael_L wrote: post #330
alankay1 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully ... I think you missed the point of my answer.

Did you intend to compare the progress and formalization of the fields? Didn't pick up on that

Yes, that was what I was driving at. Anyone could do physics in the Middle Ages -- they just had to get a pointy hat. A few centuries later after Newton, one suddenly had to learn a lot of tough stuff, but it was worth it because the results more than paid for the new levels of effort.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#399

Post by alankay1 »

gnaritas wrote: post #321
alankay1 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dreaming can work without images. What are your sleeping dreams like?

Apparently aphantasia doesn't appear to affect dreams (from research I've read), when sleeping I do have visual dreams, but awake, nothing but black even with eyes closed no matter how hard I try to imagine a picture.

Try doing some after images and see what happens ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#400

Post by alankay »

poppingtonic wrote: post #325
alankay wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the "training" of "System 1" is a key factor in allowing "System 2" to be powerful. This is beyond the scope of this AMA (or at least beyond my scope to try to put together a decent comment on this today).

There's a recursive sense in which "training" "System 1" involves assimilating more abstractions, through practice and spaced repetition, such as deferring to the equations of motion when thinking about what happens when one throws a ball in the air. Going as far as providing useful interfaces to otherwise difficult cognitive terrain (a la Mathematica) is still part of this subproject. The process of assimilating new…

Yes, this is precisely what I meant here, and it's a very interesting set of ideas for education. I can't articulate a great goal yet.
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