Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

I'm always torn whenever I see a Bret Victor talk.

On one hand, I agree with almost everything he says in the talk, amazed by the prototype tools he presents, the concepts he discovered to make those tools usable. And I can see that in each talk he has some new insights to present, deeper connections, better and more general creations - and thats really exciting.

On the other hand, his attitude that he doesn't plan to turn the tools into products, that they're just prototypes, that he expects someone else to come and create actual products - that rubs me the wrong way.

The thing is, we've found excellent collaboration platforms exactly for these kind of prototypish things that we don't plan to make a product of yet we would like other people to toy around with the general idea. The most recent incarnation is GitHub.

So why not publish some of these prototypes? Its not about the code, its about forming a community that will build upon those ideas. Its about kick-starting the construction, setting it in motion. As far as I can see, that is what Victor is hoping for - people taking these ideas close to their hearts and building them in reality.

Is the idea not ready yet? Not exactly polished enough or general enough to be published? The visualization drawing / exploration tool looks like an awesome start to me...

I don't understand.

Edit: Oh wait. https://github.com/damelang/nile contains the presented Nile viewer. Nevermind.

My gut reaction is to say that all three of these ways of thinking (interactive, visual, and symbolic) are all useful and should be used where their advantages can be best applied. As a shallow example, I think that the basic visual/interactive representations can be fantastic teaching tools, and once you get an intuitive feel for how the system behaves, you can then switch to symbolic representation and move on to the more higher-order systems which those building blocks are composed of.

I thought it was interesting that when he compressed the paragraph describing an equation to is algebraic representation (x2 + 2x = 10), we immediately grokked the algebraic version better, because we have loads of experience reading and manipulating the algebraic expression. If I think back to my own learning career, however, I learned the basic tenets of algebra using -- you guessed it -- interactive and visual representation through Hands-On Equations [1]

[1] http://www.borenson.com/

(now that I think about it, Hands-On Equations serves as a very nice "tldr" for this speech and the related concepts)

One particular tweet from Victor explains his point of view quite poignantly, in what he calls the dichotomy between industry and research:

"An 'Industry vs Research' dichotomy that I sketched at a conference. I probably should elaborate on it sometime. https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/pho...

One can understand why, given the options as viewed by Victor, one would choose "research" if given the choice.

Thanks for posting both of these! I'm very interested in tools that allow you to switch between the linearity of narrative (e.g., a film) but then break out into the non-linearity of systems.

I think these tools could be especially useful for helping people understand systems like climate change.

I would think the number of people who are free to do this is significantly higher than the number of people who actually do it.