[Back online] Early access essay: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Will. On the Elements of Style, I sympathize. I don't personally get much from the book. But it's by far the best-known example, so I decided to use it as a reference here. (Michael)

Andy Matuschak

Could’t help to think of HyperCard. I made some stacks with repetitions based on right / wrong answers for my kids 25 years ago :-) “Such a medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which it is possible for the user to have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.” They offer a form of chunking, helping to avoid working memory overload. “environments for thought. Past examples of such environments include the control room for Apollo 11, jazz improvisation in a superb ensemble, and a first-rate scientific laboratory.” This comes close to (Nonaka popularized it) “ba” (http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/thonglipfei/ba_concept.html), which would suggest “context” instead of “environment”. “They're imbibing an entire new language.” Link to Rorty’s “vocabulary”? From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/: In Rorty's view, both Dewey's pragmatism and Darwinism encourage us to see vocabularies as tools, to be assessed in terms of the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty suggests, "have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the bowerbird's skill at weaving." (TP 48) Pragmatic evaluation of various linguistically infused practices requires a degree of specificity. From Rorty's perspective, to suggest that we might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability to uncover the truth, would be like claiming to evaluate tools for their ability to help us get what we want—full stop. Is the hammer or the saw or the scissors better—in general? Questions about usefulness can only be answered, Rorty points out, once we give substance to our purposes. “Aspirationally, such a set of principles and idioms would work much like The Elements of Style (or some similar book of prose advice), and would help other people learn to write high-quality mnemonic essays.” I get the idea, but don’t think this is a very good example, certainly not after reading Pinker’s The sense of style. “Nonetheless, the benefits of such stories seem well worth violating atomicity, if they can be encoded in the cards effectively.” There could be categories of cards, as the ln ~s example showed already. “When people respond to the mnemonic medium with “why do you focus on all that boring memory stuff?”, they are missing the point. By largely automating away the problem of memory, the mnemonic medium makes it easier for people to spend more time focusing on other parts of learning, such as conceptual issues.” I wholeheartedly agree, and in the meantime I’m often thinking about the relation between memory and reasoning. Seeing (conscious) reasoning as a left-hemisphere task, this reasoning is very limited. Seeing it as a right-hemisphere task makes takes out the words, more or less. Complicated. I loved the Ian McGilChrist descriptions (The master and his emissary) but also Betty Edwards Drawing with the right side of your brain (= how to silence the left side). But attatching words to phenomena is not understanding, alas. So I’m still wondering (wandering).

liked the first and fast read very much. Will come back for lazy reading later, I hope.