Alan-
Thomas Watson of IBM said:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/think_trans.html
"And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and
thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The
trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking
-- because it's hard work for people to think, And, as Dr. Nicholas
Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be
settled easily if men were only willing to think.' "
Whether that last statement is true, the idea of better tools to think
with has been a dream of many since Memex and Augment. I've long wanted
some sort of tool that would run on top of Google search results to try
to tease out, say, some sort of concept map to understand the landscape
of ideas related to a search, and then further, to integrate and score
and organize search results as I work my way through them. You could
perhaps do something like that by hand with something like Evernote and
a web clipping utility, but that would just be a shadow of what I'm
imagining as full support for "sensemaking" about web content. I agree
such tools for improving human reasoning are important -- especially for
my general goal of helping people to see how it would be better to use
technologies of abundance like computers from an abundance-oriented
mindset rather than a scarcity-based mindset. Below are some general
thoughts on that, including links about stuff I've worked towards for
that end.
--Paul Fernhout
==== Rambling thoughts on sensemaking and augmenting human thinking
If you look around, you will find versions of such tools have already
been developed as proprietary works at the costs of billions of dollars
of tax-payer dollars over the past decade or two. That work was done
mostly by the Defense/Intelligence community and the industries that
surround it, but also some by other groups who have specific needs in
business, education, and so on.
My wife and I have worked towards such thinking tools, mostly from a
narrative perspective intended so get decision makers to look at issues
from multiple points of view, although I would like to expand that out
to include some other things like structured arguments. Some previous
systems we contributed core parts to an the Cognitive Edge Sensemaker
Suite and Singapore's RAHS (Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning system):
http://www.sensemaker-suite.com/smsite/index.gsp
http://app.rahs.gov.sg/public/www/home.aspx
We tried to get Cognitive Edge to open source those tools, but not much
luck. However, they are pretty much all based on ideas my wife found
looking through the literature in areas like decision support.
Whatever one might think of Singapore (it's been called "Disneyland with
the death penalty") and potential use of RAHS, here are some discussion
of the general issue including some pitfalls (we worked with David
Snowden on this, and my wife was director of research of Cognitive Edge
for a time, and this is his statement on the project, which was funded
by defense/intelligence funds):
http://web.archive.org/web/20071010013005/http://www.cognitive-edge.com/2007/03/unwired.php
"However Wired manages to wander off the rails to fantasy land with its
reporting of the RAHS project. I realised when they contacted me that
there was a danger of them choosing to sensationalize the project by
linking it to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project in DARPA and
the name of John Poindexter. So right up front I explained the
difference. There had been two DARPA projects, working off two very
different philosophies. One (TIA) sought to obtain and search all
possible data to detect the possibility of terrorist events. That raised
civil liberties concerns and much controversy in the USA leading to
resignations and programme closure. A parallel program Genoa II took a
very different philosophy, based on understanding nuanced narrative
supporting the cognitive processes of decision makers and increasing the
number of cultural and political perspectives available to policy
makers. I was a part of that program, and proud to be so. It also forms
the basis of our work for RAHS and contains neither the approach, not
the philosophy of TIA."
Here is an example of my wanting to apply such tools to democratic
decision making, which links to tools at SRI and elsewhere:
http://barcamp.org/w/page/47222818/Tools%20for%20Collective%20Sensemaking%20and%20Civic%20Engagement
Key links from there from SRI as systems which help promote coming up
with "counter-examples":
SEAS - Structured Evidential Argumentation System (Proprietary, used for
structured arguments by intelligence analysts)
http://www.ai.sri.com/~seas/
Angler (Proprietary, used to overcome bias by intelligence analysts)
http://www.ai.sri.com/~angler/
"Angler is a tool that helps intelligence/policy professionals Explore,
understand, and overcome cognitive biases, and collaboratively expand
their joint cognitive vision through use of divergent & convergent
thinking techniques (such as brainstorming and clustering). "
Here is an example of my wanting to apply them to health sensemaking
(I'm planning on submitting something similar to the current Knight News
Challenge on health data):
https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
Here is my thinking about how they should relate to the intelligence
community as open source tools usable by the public (with a nod towards
David Brin's Transparent Society):
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists)
who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important
issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence
community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race
going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet
can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based
economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something
like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the
status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger
social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a
gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local
subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like
with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for
all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue
because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said,
whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race
to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of
using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do
nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters
(or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM
[tabulating devices with punch cards] in WWII Germany) will probably
prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts
of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is
not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the
system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the
old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that
makes the old paradigm obsolete."
My wife and I talked a couple years ago about doing a Kickstarter
project about such tools as open source for community sensemaking and
decision making. However, Kickstarter seems to work best when you get
some premium (essentially, as advanced sales). That model does not work
so well with free and open source software. So, I've been working full
time doing unrelated software development in the broadcast industry for
almost two years, while hoping to be able to get back to these ideas
someday -- but at least that makes possible my wife working on a free
book related to some of these ideas:
http://www.workingwithstories.org/
The people who get this stuff still think of it is a proprietary edge.
There is commercial money for it, but not so much open source funding
we've found. I'm glad to see others waking up to the value of this
though. At the Bar Camp link above are some other systems. Compendium
and Cohere from the Open University are examples of open source system
that try to help with this, although they do not have all the aspects.
My wife's Rakontu project was steps towards this, although grant
proposals for that have not worked out so far, and we made the mistake
of putting the first version on a (then) unreliable shifting web
platform (Google App Engine):
http://www.rakontu.org/
On my main page at the link below (scroll down) is a screenshot from a
web-based version of "Twirlip" for doing concept maps using CouchDB. So,
we've played around with these ideas in a few ways on different
platforms. What I usually get bogged down in is wanting these tools (in
a way inspired both by Smalltalk and Engelbart's Augment work) to be
part of a distributed "social semantic desktop" that integrates an
extensible message-driven yet optimizable-at-the-low-level programming
environment, including something that can be understood from the
ground-up in FONC-ish ways, and yet can reflect on itself (like Squeak
generates its own VM but to arbitrary platforms). :-) So, trying to do
too much at once by myself, I end up spinning my wheels in the mud. :-(
A couple sketches of part of such ideas though, one for the web in
JavaScript with a PHP backend, and one for the desktop in Java:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20130202
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623
But probably that all might have gotten further if I had stuck with
Squeak with all its warts and built some very simple system on top of
it. Except subject to one caveat on "URLs" mentioned below.
So, anyway, such open source tools would be valuable in many ways --
including probably in reasoning about the best way to do complex
software projects. :-)
Nonetheless, as discussed on the Compendium list, it is also easy to get
lost in the notion that if you just had a better argument, things would
get done better, which seems to be rarely the case for all sorts of
political reasons. These include that people with power often like
things the way they are, and even the powerless can fear change and
their lack of resources to cope with change when living
pay-check-to-paycheck or worse.
As an example, given essentially zero net new jobs in the USA for a
decade, yet with GDP still rising 30% or so during the time in the face
of limited demand, the lack of a universal "basic income" in the USA for
all residents like John Holt suggested in the 1970s (in "Escape from
Childhood") might be a good example of how good arguments are not
enough. The basic income idea has lots of merits as a way to prop up
capitalism, with tons of good arguments for it in an advanced
technological society that still clings to capitalism (and so avoids
emphasizing alternatives like a gift economy, a 3D printing and
gardening robot and solar panel subsistence economy, and/or a
democratically planned economy). But culturally a basic income is not
yet a good fit in a place like a USA with an emphasis on work granting
the right to consume (even as Social Security is in practice exactly a
basic income, but even there, people can't admit that is what it is).
One might make an event better set of arguments for a basic income
(whole books have been written on it), but that might not really lead to
change. It might help a bit to rebut status quo arguments
systematically, but who will really pay attention to that or translate
that to political change? Acceptance of that basic income idea might
improve as AI, robotics, and other automation put more and more people
out of paying work and as various demonstrations of it succeed in
various places. But that has little to do directly with better thinking
tools. Alaska is a poster child for the idea with the Alaska Permanent
Fund, but other places are heading towards such experiments too (and it
was tried for a time decades ago in a small town in Canada). But until
there are more positive examples of success in a different way, the
mythology of wealth constrains what is done whatever arguments one makes
about current suffering or future projected suffering. So, "myth" can
trump "formal thinking" in that sense. And even formal thinking can be
confused when there are powerful interests with lots of resources to
expend creating and popularizing counter-arguments.
Ultimately, it seems deep change comes from some complex social process
where reasoning is only part of it. That make senses looking at a book
like "Descartes' Error" about how emotion is what underlies all
reasoning. Or it makes sense given what Einstein said about "Science and
Religion" in how knowing what is or was via science does not tell you
what should be via morality. So, better thinking tools might help
construct a better future, but they are not, by themselves, enough. To
some extent, we know a lot of the things we need to do to make a happier
planet for most people (or we could know, if we looked). One use of such
tools might then be in thinking about deeper issues like how to shift
the mythology of a society to avoid unneeded suffering. So we should not
expect such tools will create the one great effective argument which
will be persuasive towards some end -- even if they may be generally
helpful.
Also, one can hope, the same way as with Smalltalk and now Scratch built
on Squeak, that if people can play with ideas more quickly (or fail more
quickly), people will learn more quickly -- and then one can just hope
the better parts of human nature prevail informed by that learning as
such learning flows throughout society. Such tools might support a good
simulation aspect, especially for social issues, and then one can have
reasoning support while discussing the simulations. Certainly cultural
change can happen, as we saw with environmentalism and related ethics
and laws and innovations (like ever cheaper solar panels as the result
of much dedicated effort) spreading over the past few decades. This is
perhaps my greatest long-term hope for such tools.
I guess there are many ways to learn "truths" about life -- where
thinking about stories and engaging in discussions about arguments are
two key processes of learning. And as suggested by Hugo Mercier and
others, the human reasoning process of argumentation did not evolve for
individuals to find the truth so much as for small groups to develop
useful ideas together, so networking this thinking seems important. See:
"Researcher Responds to Arguments Over His Theory of Arguing"
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing/
"The main idea of the “argumentative theory of reasoning,” put forward
by Dan Sperber and myself is that the function of human reasoning — why
it evolved — is to improve communication by allowing people to debate
with each other: to produce and evaluate arguments during a discussion.
This contrasts with the standard view of reasoning — apparently shared
by quite a few of the readers — that reasoning evolved in order to
further individual reasoning: to make better decisions, to plan ahead,
to get better beliefs, etc. We have gathered a lot of evidence in
support of our theory. The interested reader may enjoy a short summary,
and the bravest may read the main academic article (use the “One-Click
Download” link on the summary Web page). For those who don’t have the
time or the inclination, let me simply try to correct an important but
common misconception.
We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We
claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find
the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about
trying to convince other people; it’s also about listening to their
arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to
produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it
displays a strong confirmation bias — what people see as the “rhetoric”
side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate
arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so
as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better
beliefs and make better decisions in the end."
Jack Park talks about "Knowledge Gardening" and has some efforts
(including commercial) towards that end:
http://www.slideshare.net/jackpark/knowledge-gardening
Still, it's easy to get close to some success, but not get all the way
at the right time. I've been musing recently over the broad success of
Minecraft as a constructivist platform (including simulated electronics
and computers). Squeak and Kansas/Nebraska had almost all the needed
support components including a shared 3D world a decade earlier, but
they somehow did not have quite the right application for easily
accessible 3D construction motivated by some emotions (surviving the
scary night in the case of Minecraft). So, Squeak missed a great chance
in that sense -- yet it was so, so close. And yes, people were willing
to download and install Minecraft, as well as lots of add-on packs, and
jump through all kinds of crazy hoops to gain access to a compelling
creativity-supporting application.
In the area of knowledge tools, I have little doubt someone will have a
big success either commercial or open source. It's just a matter of time
because the need is there, and the computers and networks are there, and
the general ideas are there. But there is so often a "failure of the
imagination" to see what is possible. If you look at the ideas in SEAS,
Angler, RAHS, Compendium, Cohere, Global Agora's Structured Dialogic
Design, procon.org, and similar tools and systems, you will see there
are the intellectual underpinning of such a system. But no one has yet
really put them all together in a coherent compelling and
easy-enough-to-use way. My wife and I have been somewhat constrained in
funding by wanting to open source such tools; otherwise there is money
floating around to do them as more proprietary things. I'm a bit
surprised Google has not made a major effort into this area though,
since it seems a natural to build on search success.
To try to tie this back to "The Fundamentals of New Computing" (even as
that has ended in some sense), to create such a tool that works well
requires looking at a bunch of fundamental things about how people think
about, discuss, and use information for decision making. And that may
lead to some deep new conceptual ideas about practical ways to manage
information (as hard as it may be to improve on, say, William Kent's
Data and Reality or grapple with the issues it outlines). But it still
remains a natural thing for a recursive-oriented programming mindset to
then ask, how can such tools be applied to make computing
better-in-some-sense-like-easier-to-understand at all levels?
One thing I've realized in the internet age is: "If it does not have a
URL, it is broken." :-) I don't think we've scratched the surface of
what that adage means for our IDEs or our textual software, especially
in a distributed system with version control and local repositories
(again, a "social semantic desktop" aspect). Or how to do that all with
open standards (although we can probably create de-facto standard by
success inventing the future, as a implication in your oft-quoted
point). I talked about the URL aspect of that here in passing:
http://barcamp.org/w/page/61193582/CapCamp2012_Open_Data_Standards
Along those lines, we have still not seen the full implications of the
web browser. It provides to the average user the ability to bookmark
interesting bits of information, and the ability to run arbitrary
applications from others somewhat safely sandboxed (granted, still
issues), and the ability to reference others content systematically.
Those are amazing capabilities compared to thirty years ago. And so that
is perhaps one of the big draws to working on such stuff. Yet, there is
still value to local, so how to get the best of both worlds, remote and
local, is a challenge. The web browser is so dumbed-down to what it
could be, with JavaScript as a computationally-inefficient standard for
expressing algorithms (although people are working on that in various ways).
Work on the Lively Kernel by Dan Ingalls and others was very
inspirational to me in seeing some of that -- even though the Kernel
itself faces the challenges of trying to do a lot on shifting standards,
and still does not address these higher level issues of information
representation and augmentation. So, even though it seemed like the
Lively kernel solved the "install" issue, in practice by being at a URL,
for a long time browser incompatibilities and speed issues have held it
back. But with better standards, and faster computers, and perhaps
somewhat smaller ambitions technically than Lively, even if greater in
an application space, very interesting stuff may be possible in that
space. I've been more and more tempted to think of a tool as a browser
plugin though, perhaps for Chrome as easiest to write for at first,
because that might better support keeping local copies of data and doing
a variety of things with URLs from multiple domains.
With such tools, maybe this will then become much easier:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
Anyway, enough "blue plane" stuff for now.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
On 9/8/13 10:45 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Paul
When I said "even scientists go against their training" I was also pointing out
really deep problems in humanity's attempts at thinking (we are quite terrible thinkers!).
If we still make most decisions without realizing why, and use conventional
"thinking tools" as ways to rationalize them, then technologists providing
vastly more efficient, wide and deep, sources for rationalizing is the opposite of a
great gift.
Imagine a Google that also retrieves counter-examples. Or one that actively
tries to help find chains of reasoning that are based on principles one -- or
others -- claim to hold. Or one that looks at the system implications of local
human desires and actions.
Etc.
I'm guessing that without a lot of training, most humans would not choose to use a real
"thinking augmenter".
Best wishes,
Alan
________________________________
From: Paul Homer <paul_ho...@yahoo.ca>
To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
Cc: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 8, 2013 7:34 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
Hi Alan,
I agree that there is, and probably will always be, a necessity to 'think
outside of the box', although if the box was larger, it would be less
necessary. But I wasn't really thinking about scientists and the pursuit of new
knowledge, but rather the trillions? of mundane decisions that people regularly
make on a daily basis.
A tool like Wikipedia really helps in being able to access a refined chunk of
knowledge, but the navigation and categorization are statically defined.
Sometimes what I am trying to find is spread horizontally across a large number
of pages. If, as a simple example, a person could have a dynamically generated
Wikipedia page created just for them that factored in their current knowledge
and the overall context of the situation then they'd be able to utilize that
knowledge more appropriately. They could still choose to skim or ignore it, but
if they wanted a deeper understanding, they could read the compiled research in
a few minutes.
The Web, particularly for programmers, has been a great tease for this. You can
look up any coding example instantly (although you do have to sort through the
bad examples and misinformation). The downside is that I find it far more
common for people to not really understanding what is actually happening
underneath, but I suspect that that is driven by increasing time pressures and
expectations rather than but a shift in the way we relate to knowledge.
What I think would really help is not just to allow access to the breadth of
knowledge, but to also enable individuals to get to the depth as well. Also the
ability to quickly recognize lies, myths, propaganda, etc.
Paul.
Sent from my iPad
On 2013-09-08, at 7:12 AM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Hi Paul
I'm sure you are aware that yours is a very "Engelbartian" point of view, and I
think there is still much value in trying to make things better in this direction.
However, it's also worth noting the studies over the last 40 years (and
especially recently) that show how often even scientists go against their
training and knowledge in their decisions, and are driven more by desire and
environment than they realize. More knowledge is not the answer here -- but
it's possible that very different kinds of training could help greatly.
Best wishes,
Alan
________________________________
From: Paul Homer <paul_ho...@yahoo.ca>
To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>;
Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 7, 2013 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
Hi Alan,
I can't predict what will come, but I definitely have a sense of where I think
we should go. Collectively as a species, we know a great deal, but individually
people still make important choices based on too little knowledge.
In a very abstract sense 'intelligence' is just a more dynamic offshoot of 'evolution'. A
sort of hyper-evolution. It allows a faster route towards reacting to changes in the
enviroment, but it is still very limited by individual perspectives of the world. I don't
think we need AI in the classic Hollywood sense, but we could enable a sort of
hyper-intelligence by giving people easily digestable access to our collective
understanding. Not a 'borg' style single intelligence, but rather just the tools that can
be used to make descisions that are more "accurate" than an individual would
have made normally.
To me the path to get there lies within our understanding of data. It needs to
be better organized, better understood and far more accessible. It can't keep
getting caught up in silos, and it really needs ways to share it appropriately.
The world changes dramatically when we've developed the ability to fuse all of
our digitized information into one great structural model that has the
capability to separate out fact from fiction. It's a long way off, but I've
always thought it was possible...
Paul.
________________________________
From: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 7:48:22 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
Hi Jonathan
We are not soliciting proposals, but we like to hear the opinions of others on "burning
issues" and "better directions" in computing.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________
From: Jonathan Edwards <edwa...@csail.mit.edu>
To: fonc@vpri.org
Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 4:44 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
That's great news! We desperately need fresh air. As you know, the way a
problem is framed bounds its solutions. Do you already know what problems to
work on or are you soliciting proposals?
Jonathan
From: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
Cc:
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 10:45:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
Hi Dan
It actually got written and given to NSF and approved, etc., a while ago, but
needs a little more work before posting on the VPRI site.
Meanwhile we've been consumed by setting up a number of additional, and wider
scale, research projects, and this has occupied pretty much all of my time for
the last 5-6 months.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________
From: Dan Melchione <dm.f...@melchione.com>
To: fonc@vpri.org
Sent: Monday, September 2, 2013 10:40 AM
Subject: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
Haven't seen much regarding this for a while. Has it been been abandoned or
put at such low priority that it is effectively abandoned?
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
