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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

#51

Post by pvg »

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…

The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain.

Is it? (to either of those things). In current English usage, 'unorthodox' doesn't mean 'incorrect' and doesn't connote 'incorrect'.

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

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology

No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means (either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.

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

#53

Post by Cybiote »

jacobolus wrote: post #49
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…

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 w…

I was directly replying to the asked question. But, it is not just the developmental timeline that was off. There's also its hypothesis of what children learn and how they reason or what they are capable of that is inaccurate.

Child centered, problem centered is vague. More practically, the big things are: you want material that's novel to the learner but also somewhat familiar (this is true, regardless of age). Children's attention is more distributed and worse at blocking out irrelevancies. Therefore, more complex tasks (such as math) should be presented in a way such that the signal meant to be learned can be extracted with minimal ambiguity (less extraneous information in presentation). Few other things have replicated.

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

#54

Post by sgentle »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #50

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 V…

It's important not to let pragmatism wander into anti-intellectualism.

"pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics" are all well-defined terms with non-bullshit meanings. Montessori, Papert and Bruner are well-known names whose theories would be familiar to anyone with a background in learning theory. McLuhan (the "medium is the message" guy) is similarly well-known in media circles, and if you want to understand why Alan Kay thinks he's important, he wrote about it: https://kokonautlabs.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/alan-kay-on-ma...

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike the article or Kay, but the way that you got there seems to be by saying "they rely on a bunch of bullshit that nobody understands". How are you, presumably lacking a background in the ideas they are talking about, able to determine the difference between good theory and bullshit?

If you want to reason about something, like how people learn, or how technology shapes thought, how would you do that without building a theory about it? How would you build that theory without ideas? How would you refer to those ideas without names? Is your criticism anything more than just that you don't know the names in a field you aren't familiar with?

God bless the real engineers who make things work; programming and the personal computer were revolutionized with the availability of hardware like TTL ICs, not pseudo-engineers bloviating about "structured programming".

But I've seen the code written by real engineers, and they could perhaps use a little less pragmatism and a little more theory. Thinking in abstractions can certainly lead to bullshit, but I'd rather that than no thinking at all.

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

#55

Post by walterbell »

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…

Thanks for the Peirce reference. Would you recommend any books/papers/videos as introduction to his work?

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

#56

Post by QuadrupleA »

sgentle wrote: post #54
QuadrupleA wrote: post #50

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 V…

It's important not to let pragmatism wander into anti-intellectualism. "pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics" are all well-defined terms with non-bullshit meanings. Montessori, Papert and Bruner are well-known names whose theories would be familiar to anyone with a background in learning theory. McLuhan (the "medium is the message" guy) is similarly well-known in media circles, and if you want to understand why Alan…

Agreed, with regard to the quote about Montessori, Papert and Bruner, I don't have the necessary background knowledge to truly evaluate the statement. The terms "pedagogy", "psychology" and "mathematics" are very broad though - not meaningless, but nearly so in this context. If you say somebody combined teaching in general, theories of human thinking in general, and mathematical reasoning in general, that's too broad to really get any sense of what's being talked about, and whether the ideas are valuable or just hot air.

I guess I've come to be suspicious of pure philosophy, or theory divorced from practice. A broad idea can be wonderful when it's used alongside actual practice (like Bret Victor's explorations of immediate visual feedback and interactivity in creative tools and programming tools). But when it stays in the theoretical realm it can get insidious: perhaps designed to impress rather than inform. I haven't deeply dived into Alan Kay's work except for learning a bit of smalltalk (and enjoying it), but everything I've come across since leaves me scratching my head wondering if there's much substance under all the semi-profound and abstract talk.

So I guess I'm expressing my growing antipathy towards pure theorizing divorced from practical implementation. Together they can be wonderful, but if grand ideas are floated around in a vaccum too long they start to stink.

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

#57

Post by wslh »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #50

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 V…

I never saw the source code of Photoshop but propably uses OOP...

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

#58

Post by dang »

dragonwriter wrote: post #52
dang wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means (either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.

I couldn't disagree more.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

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/

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by saywatnow »

Cybiote wrote: post #48
Pulcinella wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

by serendipity I clicked through on this link and sgentle's link to Kay on McLuhan and the following sentence comes remarkably close to my experience of the two presentations of the Selection task:

> .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind.

(a tangent, but perhaps interesting)

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