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Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

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Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#31

Post by anfedorov »

swalsh wrote: post #15
anfedorov wrote: post #7

I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's thinking, but this part struck me as indicative of the criticisms he'll receive: "here, they are discussing some relationships: the regular latice, L grows linearly with n, we see L growing linearly with n, and we see C is staying constant. In the random network, L grows logarithmically, and we see L growing logarithmically, we see C going as a reciprocal relationship. When we read the…

The point is now someone who isn't the average reader of Nature can understand the concept... Sometimes I feel like nerds kind of enjoy the exclusivity provided by "cryptic" notation. What Bret is doing is not genius level stuff, he's just doing what a lot of people don't have the balls to do. Attempt to make "hard" things easy enough for "regular" people to understand by appealing to the right side of their brain.

Jargon and specialized notation is sometimes cryptic as an unintentional side effect of communicating efficiently between specialists. To suggest they should communicate findings in a less efficient way that's understandable by laymen who haven't put in the effort to learn the jargon / notation is silly.

But I think Bret's point isn't that every research paper should be as verbose as an introductory textbook, but rather that interactive widgets can express ideas which text and static images in published papers can't.

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#32

Post by felipeerias »

swalsh wrote: post #15
anfedorov wrote: post #7

I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's thinking, but this part struck me as indicative of the criticisms he'll receive: "here, they are discussing some relationships: the regular latice, L grows linearly with n, we see L growing linearly with n, and we see C is staying constant. In the random network, L grows logarithmically, and we see L growing logarithmically, we see C going as a reciprocal relationship. When we read the…

The point is now someone who isn't the average reader of Nature can understand the concept... Sometimes I feel like nerds kind of enjoy the exclusivity provided by "cryptic" notation. What Bret is doing is not genius level stuff, he's just doing what a lot of people don't have the balls to do. Attempt to make "hard" things easy enough for "regular" people to understand by appealing to the right side of their brain.

Sorry, but that is not the point.

This is not just about simplifying scientific notation so it is easier to digest for an untrained audience: it is about using tools to remove as much cognitive "shit work" as possible, so that our minds (including those of experts) are free to think the "unthinkable thoughts" of the title.

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#33

Post by MarcusBrutus »

saraid216 wrote: post #30
MarcusBrutus wrote: post #19

I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind willing to spend the effort to parse it has never failed to convey the unthinkable, the sublime or the transcendent.

So, it would suck to introduce you to this guy named Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Inability to hold educated conversation on Wittgenstein should not be taken to reflect badly on anyone's intellect.

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#35

Post by ameerkat »

anfedorov wrote: post #7

I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's thinking, but this part struck me as indicative of the criticisms he'll receive: "here, they are discussing some relationships: the regular latice, L grows linearly with n, we see L growing linearly with n, and we see C is staying constant. In the random network, L grows logarithmically, and we see L growing logarithmically, we see C going as a reciprocal relationship. When we read the…

The main take away I got here was that using a representation that decompresses the terse mathematical notation that you can interact with builds intuition about the system. If you already have the intuition then these interactions with the system add little value to your understanding of the system.

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#36

Post by logn »

MarcusBrutus wrote: post #19

I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind willing to spend the effort to parse it has never failed to convey the unthinkable, the sublime or the transcendent.

I see your point. However, these tools for thinking, they give you time to think more things and also allow you to think on new levels, which may let you attain the previously unthinkable. And you might be able to combine different ideas to understand new systems and conceive of new tools to discover more.

Further, on an individual level, each person might be able to think what maybe they personally couldn't think otherwise. And in that, communication might happen which gives rise to new thoughts.

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#37

Post by rhinoe »

The scientific paper isn't designed for people who need explanation/visualisation of a logarithmic curve. People who read that paper should be able to quickly decipher what the authors have written – their writing is consistent with normal mathematical instruction.

The electrical drawing would be obvious to anyone who is used to working with them.

There are obvious places where this would work– dissemination of material is always useful in many different forms. But this is NOT an answer to a question that is being asked. Rather, it is an alternative form of dissemination to an alternative audience.

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#38

Post by zhemao »

flyrain wrote: post #23
zhemao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine asked him this after we saw it in his "Inventing on Principle Talk". Here is his response: > Thanks! The tools I showed were just prototypes that I made for the talk. I don't have plans to make them into products myself. (But someone else might!)

Thanks, I can not wait for it. Anybody take this job?

Not that I'm aware of, which is rather unfortunate. One way to do this might be to take an existing open source SPICE implementation such as NGSPICE (http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/) and build a GUI around it that provides the real-time visualization of the signals.

In the meantime, if you're looking for a free, easy-to-use circuit simulation tool, I've used LTSpice (http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/) in the past for my EE classes. The Windows version runs pretty well under Wine and the UI isn't too shoddy. It's pretty far away from Bret Victor's vision though, as you need to rerun the simulation again in order to see a new plot of the node voltages and currents.

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#39

Post by blacksmith_tb »

MarcusBrutus wrote: post #19

I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind willing to spend the effort to parse it has never failed to convey the unthinkable, the sublime or the transcendent.

I tend to agree, though I suppose it's not entirely proven that it's never failed. But the "unthinakble thoughts" argument seems to be to go in two different directions - the analogy to sound is misleading; we have reason to believe in the existence of ultrasonic vibrations, and they don't require us to hear or not hear them. But thoughts don't exist separate from our minds. Truly unthinkable thoughts wouldn't be thoughts at all. What the concept seems to represent here is "novel ways of thinking" and those are in fact generally not impossible to share with other thinkers (luckily).

Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

#40

Post by lstamour »

rhinoe wrote: post #37

The scientific paper isn't designed for people who need explanation/visualisation of a logarithmic curve. People who read that paper should be able to quickly decipher what the authors have written – their writing is consistent with normal mathematical instruction. The electrical drawing would be obvious to anyone who is used to working with them. There are obvious places where this would work– dissemination of mater…

Fully admitting I've only read the website's summary bullets: I disagree. The point to me is not as much dissemination of material but thinking through materials in a language other than left to right words or symbols. It harkens back to renaissance books in which words and scribbles mixed together in what was, for the times, a coherent mixture. We're talking note-taking for instruction, tools to think about and optimize problem solving ... tools for thinking rather than sharing, even if the source appears to be sharing or instruction right now. That may not be true in the future... I, for one, am sick of OneNote being "the best thing since lined paper" and living otherwise with notepad.exe alternatives. What, precisely, will bring the tablet from its consumption roots into a true work/thinking device? There's a lot of room for more visual note-taking apps, and eventually that will be the new low-hanging fruit of computer vision and natural language input. Someday, for some tasks, at least.
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