A list of my favorite quotes.
Only rarely does some exceptional event lead people to reorganize their intellectual self-image in such a way as to open up new perspectives on what is learnable
- Seymour Papert, Mindstorms
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
– Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters (1657)
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
– Leslie Lamport
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
— Edsger Dijkstra
Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve.
When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.
– Edsger W.Dijkstra, On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. This would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt.
– Edsger W.Dijkstra, On the foolishness of "natural language programming", h/t cratermoon
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
– Bertrand Russel
The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."
– Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture, from Succinctness is Power by Paul Graham
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
From Plato's Phaedrus, by way of fs:
Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories. My discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom. But the king answered and said ‘O man full of arts, the god-man Toth, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them.’
And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
From Bret Victor & Alan Kay in Re: using AI to augment human intelligence:
I would argue that a tool that augments one's intelligence must leave that person with a better understanding of whatever domain they're working in. If the tool develops an "understanding", but does not induce that understanding into the user, I don't think it can be called an IA tool.
One of Alan's favorites analogies is the prosthesis on a healthy limb. Here's one phrasing of it (from here):
Put a prosthetic on a healthy limb and it withers. Using the logic of current day education, we could say that since students are going to be drivers as adults, at age two we should put them in a little motorized vehicle and they will just stay there and learn how to be much better drivers. Now, we would think that was pretty horrible. But what if we gave the same person a bike? We're not going to feel so badly [because] the bike allows that person to go flat out with his body and it amplifies that. [The bike is] one of the great force amplifiers of all time because it doesn't detract from us--it takes everything we've got and amplifies it. Most computers today are sold like cars, where as many things as possible are done for you. You don't have to understand how it works and, in fact, you don't have to understand how to think because the most popular stuff is prepackaged solutions for this and that. When you put a person into a car, their muscles wither. You put a person into an information car, and their thinking ability withers. I wouldn't put a person within 15 yards of a computer unless I was absolutely sure that it was a kind of a bike for them.
The most important question for an IA tool is: does it grow the person? Or does it create a dependency which ultimately weakens them?
Turkle's "Simulation and its Discontents" has some powerful observations about students and practitioners who were weakened in this way by computational tools. They could produce work faster (for some definition of "work"), but knew less and understood less.
(And, among other things, would make egregious "what were you even thinking" mistakes. Because the tool had prevented them from learning to think.)
Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating
– Bret Victor
malloc for the internet
– Jeff Bezos's original spec for s3
A meeting is a refuge from ‘the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought.’”
— Bernard Baruch, “A Theory on Meetings” (1970), quoted in The Design of Design by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.