The premise of the article doesn't make sense. Tools can only train thinking ability, they cannot extend it. Thinking and reasoning must be fixed at the root.
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#52This was a fascinating and wonderful read. As someone who also works on tools for thought, here's my review and criticisms. The material is long so this will be longish too. Review The bulk of the essay is on what the authors refer to as "the mnemonic medium". A mnemonic medium, of which they use their work, Quantum Country, as a motivating case-study is an essay format which embeds flash cards containing carefully c…
That was wonderful, thank you.
> someone either with exceptional empathy or who has just mastered the material, recording notes for themselves and then sharing.
Great stuff. Mr Nielsen lands firmly in the first category.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#53If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible. Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human…
There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there. Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred k…
I second this. I believe apps like Coda/Notion will make a big difference in how people work, think and interact with their computer and mind.
Not everyone would invest the time and effort to build what is basically an extension of the mind with these tools, but the ones who do will have an edge in thinking/planning/coordinating/executing I believe.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#54If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible. Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human…
There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there. Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred k…
I still think excel is the leader in this category. Was looking at a roadmap produced in excel the other day, somewhat amazed of what the persons working on it had been able to produce with various workarounds to get it to their liking. It still a rather blunt tool though. But is has the right elements in place, data grids, a workable visualization canvas, some limited automation capacity to tie them together.
I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work. A kind of whiteboard metaphor where objects are independently scriptable, ad some data flow modeling and data source capacity to that and there could be something a bit less blunt
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#55This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes. 2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the…
We know that our minds can do so much more.
I don't agree with this. One-off savants who can do some random task like remember the order of a deck of cards after seeing it once are just optimising all their energy towards something arbitrary but not actually that useful.
i.e. Feats of memory are a waste of effort when you can just write things down.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#56If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible. Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human…
There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there. Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred k…
Is this what Apple Shortcuts is trying to achieve?
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#57The premise of the article doesn't make sense. Tools can only train thinking ability, they cannot extend it. Thinking and reasoning must be fixed at the root.
A quick read to see how mediums and tech fundamentally affect "thought" is Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death".
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#58Honestly this is the area I'm most excited about. SRS is just one facet---correct choice of input media, datatypes, and mental models are a big deal here. I'm a math undergrad. And one thing that drives me crazy is how mich rewriting I do. What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree man…
Being a math undergrad puts you in the top 1% of the population in terms of the ability to manipulate symbols.
So your semi-tangible expression tree will only be comprehensible to maybe ten thousand users worldwide, at most.
This is why "worse is better" is a thing. Most of the population is at the middle of the bell curve, and they struggle with things developers find easy. Most of the developer population is to the right using tools and languages that are sort-of-workable but not particularly sophisticated.
The people who find symbolic thinking easy and natural are on the extreme right.
I think assistive AI has limited prospects for fixing this, because the XY problem and Dunning Kruger mean that people don't know what questions they need to ask. And to some extent symbolic perception relies on experiential qualia which most people don't have access to.
AI is going to be go big or go home. It will either be a physical prosthetic, giving users direct mental experience of patterns and data through brain stimulation, or it will be external and set up to anticipate and solve problems with only the vaguest strategic directions from a user.
Current technologies can't do much because UIs are low-bandwidth and can only do a limited amount to help people with average memories and average abstractive thinking. Which is why most apps and web pages are brochures/forms/shop fronts - familiar and uncomplicated models that don't require abstract thinking.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#59As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it’s just a way to avoid the mental effort…
Glad you like my work. To quote the essay: "these kinds of results should be taken with a grain of salt. The mnemonic medium is in its early days, has many deficiencies, and needs improvement in many ways... is this medium really working? What effect is it actually having on people? ... are there blockers that make this an irredeemably bad or at best mediocre idea? How important a role does memory play in cognition,…
I've googled generally and verbatim with various quotes from above and your name, and cannot find the essay. It sounds interesting. Can you post a link please.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there. Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred k…
I still think excel is the leader in this category. Was looking at a roadmap produced in excel the other day, somewhat amazed of what the persons working on it had been able to produce with various workarounds to get it to their liking. It still a rather blunt tool though. But is has the right elements in place, data grids, a workable visualization canvas, some limited automation capacity to tie them together. I’m th…
> I still think excel is the leader in this category.
Yes, definitely. The "reactive functional" programming paradigm of the spreadsheet is radically more understandable for end users than the imperative, as it doesn't require keeping a mental model of state changes in memory.
Fortunately, React has popularized this reactive functional paradigm and it is no longer confined to spreadsheets.
> I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work
An approach of visual building blocks could help for learning, though Scratch is imperative so it has all the trappings that make a language hard to learn for non-programmers, plus all the inconveniences of editing a visual language (much more cumbersome than editing text).
I'd rather have a "structure editor"[1] for editing a textual language (like the spreadsheet, but with a tree representation instead of a grid one), which added enhanced visual representations over the base tree. You know, like the IDEs developers use, but with a functional reactive language that mixed code and data, like the spreadsheet does.