IMO bret is a truly revolutionary thinker in the field of CS, really a genius of our time. understudy of the similarly gifted Alan Kay. Inventing on Principle (https://vimeo.com/36579366) profoundly changed my perspective on life and software when I first saw it years ago, much like the Hubble photos. I wish our culture and society cherished and gave more credit to these individuals.
I don't know, seems like a lot of bloviating and hand waving to me.
>>Media are our thinking tools. Our representations of a system are how we understand it.
I got this quote from the site, seems to be the central premise for this endeavor. Is this even valid? Are media our 'thinking tools' or something else, like our 'communicate to others what I'm thinking tool'? There's a big difference imo. This person appears to be going for a Sapir Whorf Hypothesis applied to media. Seems to be similarly fraught with peril ie open to debate as SWH is.
This reminds me of the opening to David Foster Wallace's "This is Water."
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes,
“What the hell is water?”
Of course the invention of representations like written language, equations, and graphs changed the way people think. It's just hard to see at first because you've grown up immersed in them.
>> Are media our 'thinking tools' or something else, like our 'communicate to others what I'm thinking tool'?
Interesting. Media are definitely enablers of better understanding, in my experience. There are often occasions where writing it down, or drawing a picture/graph have aided my thinking drastically. It's a method for channelling and organising thoughts so that my brain suggests the right next step, rather than getting hung up on peripheral matters, dinner, etc.
Having said that I can get similar epiphanies by also explaining the problem to someone else. That might suggest the benefit is less media, more a form of communication, as you suggest.
Personally though, I think the message is that structuring thought can yield great benefits and that's what these guys are aiming for as far as I can figure out. Great stuff.
> Are media our 'thinking tools' or something else, like our 'communicate to others what I'm thinking tool'?
What you're saying essentially is that the only times digestion of input would benefit from the things Bret Victor talks about is when those inputs are others' output. It seems that this suggestion would have only come from someone who finds themselves dealing almost entirely with the output of others and trying to make sense of it, rather than any original research or thought. What's more, is that I feel like I'm in some sort of Escherian loop here, because to anyone for whom is the case, they'd never have been interested in trying to make the suggestion that these tools wouldn't necessarily help elsewhere (having no "elsewhere" to contrast it to.)
The types of tools Bret focuses on are as important if not moreso for solo endeavors of research/discovery/understanding as they are for trying to achieve person-to-person communication with the smallest possible time-to-understanding penalty.
>> What's more, is that I feel like I'm in some sort of Escherian loop here
Indeed. More to the point, what I'm implying is similar to the Allegory of the Cave. Thoughts are not constrained by time, space, or physics. I can build whatever structures in my mind, create, theorize, hypothesize, but if I can't communicate that to others, what have I done? Navel gazing I wager. Example, Einstein was really good at communicating his ideas thru writing and mathematics. But whatever one communicates is a projection, a shadow on the wall of the real content of the thoughts within. The point being physical media of any sort is a poor substitute for the canvas of the mind.
> I can build whatever structures in my mind, create, theorize, hypothesize, but if I can't communicate that to others, what have I done?
Most of the types of tools being discussed here are ones to help with the first part. Not being able to communicate something after having figured it out is an appreciable problem, but not being able to satisfy the preconditions—of having figured it out for oneself to begin with—has necessarily at least as many negative consequences.
As for the question, there exist plenty of contexts where a realistic answer would be "quite a lot". There are lots of engineering problems that fit in here. It doesn't matter that you're able to communicate to someone the novel discovery you made that went into the implementation of the software they're using. That the software/bridge/ag technique/etc simply exists comes packed with benefits all on its own.
This isn't even to mention that, in regards to communicating to others something that you've worked out for yourself, the tools that you would have used to do that work initially (e.g., visualizations) are apt not to be described for that purpose as "completely useless".
