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Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

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Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#41

Post by justin66 »

dang wrote: post #40
justin66 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you can offer a pair of online dictionary definitions that illustrates what you see as the difference in meaning between the two words. (I bet you can't)

Look closely enough and you'll see that they all do. One meaning for 'heterodox' is 'holding unorthodox opinions'. That's an attribute of the person, not the opinion. The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain. Hetero = different, dox = opinion, ortho = correct. So the distinction here is something like "diverse opinion" vs. "incorrect opinion…

Cool.

Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#42

Post by Cybiote »

jarmitage wrote: post #25
amasad wrote: post #24

I support this and find it really cool. However, I'd love to see less hero worship and more evidence. On its face there is nothing wrong with all those Alan Kay photos, but my feeling is that it's symptomatic of how much of what's being pursued rests on appeal to authority and/or nostalgia. To make this more concrete. Consider one of their projects ( http://harc.ycr.org/project/ ), the Block-based programming: what's…

Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/

The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.

A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to ~9 years olds but couched in the language of permission, the children are able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing) significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of reasoning aren't ever reached.

amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning. The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability to ask better questions.

Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#43

Post by Pulcinella »

Cybiote wrote: post #42
jarmitage wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/

The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in…

I would need to know what the actual task is, but isn't that obvious? If I ask adults "What's 2+2" in a language they don't understand and I ask the same question to children in their native language, the children will look smarter than the adults.

Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#45

Post by kennethfriedman »

skadamat wrote: post #14
Pulcinella wrote: post #4

Bret Victor also gave a presentation at the Santa Fe Institute but I haven't seen a recording or transcript of it. https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining...

Yeah wasn't able to find a recording either :(

While I don't think there's a public recording of this version, BVic's talk with the same title "Words are Obsolete" was recorded in 2015[0]. I'm not sure if the demos were the same, but it's something.

[0]: https://vimeo.com/114252897

Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#46

Post by skadamat »

kennethfriedman wrote: post #45
skadamat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah wasn't able to find a recording either :(

While I don't think there's a public recording of this version, BVic's talk with the same title "Words are Obsolete" was recorded in 2015[0]. I'm not sure if the demos were the same, but it's something. [0]: https://vimeo.com/114252897

You're probably right actually.

Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#48

Post by Cybiote »

Pulcinella wrote: post #43
Cybiote wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in…

I would need to know what the actual task is, but isn't that obvious? If I ask adults "What's 2+2" in a language they don't understand and I ask the same question to children in their native language, the children will look smarter than the adults.

It's nothing at all like that. I already mentioned the Selection task above, it's a very googleable term. It's old and there is yet no theory fully explaining why people fail at it as they do. Pragmatic reasoning schemas are the nearest attempt at an explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#49

Post by jacobolus »

Cybiote wrote: post #42
jarmitage wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/

The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in…

Even if we assume that all of Piaget’s theories about developmental timelines are bunk, how does that invalidate the concept of teaching constructively in a child-centered, problem-centered way? Those seem like mostly orthogonal concerns.

As for block-based programming: that seems like something we can test empirically, and indeed there’s quite a bit of literature about it (which I have not read and am not familiar with, sorry).

Re: Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

#50

Post by QuadrupleA »

What a bunch of of vague, hand-wavey nonsense (the article, not necessarily the HARC lab, I couldn't make heads or tails of what they actually do). Covers up its lack of clear thinking with an attempt to sound profound and obfuscatory in every sentence, like many academic articles. Also full of weird typos and misspellings (e.g. "mid 1970ties", "most currently available imaginaries about technologies").

I love Bret Victor's talks, in them he shows real engineering work and highly original ideas demonstrated with beautiful working prototypes. So don't want to sound like I'm knocking him. But reading this article makes it sound like some fool is footing the bill for endless navel-gazing and philosophizing. Some kind of strange architecture astronaut convention (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...)

It's continuing the ongoing lowering of my opinion of Alan Kay too; the more I hear about him the more he seems like a good bullshitter who happened to write a programming language back in the day. "Kay combined them with ideas about pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical speculations of Marshall McLuhan." Wow, world changing stuff; if anyone knew what the hell it meant it'd probably have a big influence on the course of civilization.

"So Kay took all of these ideas, desires, technologies, and opportunities, and recombined them. The results were crucial contributions to a new and emerging sociotechnical imaginary, in many ways representing the computer as a digital medium, which we now have today." Again, sounds really revolutionary, and wonderfully vauge enough that you could say he predicted pretty much everything that happened in the last 30 years. I say: ideas are cheap, especially vague ones.

God bless the real engineers who make things work; photography and digital art were revolutionized with the availablility of programs like photoshop, not pseudo-philosphers bloviating about "representing the computer as a digital medium".

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