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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 5 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
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anildigital ◴[20 Jun 16 18:20 UTC] No.11940006[source]▶
Do you think Java is an Object Oriented programming language?
replies(1): >>11940050 #
alankay ◴[20 Jun 16 18:25 UTC] No.11940050[source]▶
Object oriented to me has always been about encapsulation, sending messages, and late-binding. You tell me ...
replies(2): >>11940493 #>>11940694 #
yazaddaruvala ◴[20 Jun 16 19:32 UTC] No.11940694[source]▶
Semi-offtopic: I've always been fascinated by the origins of religions, their evolution, potential re-definitions and conflicts with other ideas. Specifically, I like thinking about how the founding members of a set of ideas, might retrospectively analyze the entire history of their ideas, and the "idea set"'s metamorphosis into a religion whose followers now treat it as dogma.

I have this, entirely unprovable, theory that most founders of these types of "idea sets" are actually poly-ideological, i.e. giving weight to all possible ideas, and just happened to be exploring ideas which made the most sense at the time.

While I enjoy your thoughts on "object oriented", "functional", etc, I'd love to hear your thoughts about philosophy of religion and its origins (i.e. a slightly meta version of the conversation around "object oriented", "functional", etc). You may be one of a handful of humans able to provide me more data. Is this a topic that interests you, and is it something you think about? If it is something you think about, regarding the dogma you potentially accidentally helped instigate,

Did you and your peers intend for it to become dogma? The rest of my questions sorta assume you did not.

Retroactively, do you feel it was inevitable that these ideas, i.e. popular / powerful / effective ideas, which were espeically extremely effective at the time, became dogma for certain people, and potentially the community as a whole?

Either retroactively or at the time, did you ever identify moments when the dogma/re-definitions were forming/sticking? If so, did you ever want to intervene? Did you feel you were unable to?

Do you have any lessons learned about idea creation/popularization without allowing for re-definitions / accidentally causing their eventual turn into dogma?

Again, if this type of conversation doesn't interest you, or because it cloud potentially be delicate, you'd rather not have it in public, I'd understand.

Thanks regardless

replies(1): >>11941298 #
alankay ◴[20 Jun 16 20:31 UTC] No.11941298[source]▶
Bob Barton once called systems programmers "High priests of a low cult" and pointed out that "computing should be in the School of Religion" (ca 1966).

Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds of caching Kahneman's "System 1" does for us for real-time performance and in lieu of actual thinking.

replies(1): >>11941674 #
1. poppingtonic ◴[20 Jun 16 21:20 UTC] No.11941674[source]▶
1. Spaced repetition can make the recalling - and thus the thinking and pondering - easier. It can certainly make one more consilient, given the right choice of "other things to study" e.g. biology or social psychology, as you've mentioned in an earlier comment. 2. It takes quite a bit of training for a reader to detect bias in their own cognition, particularly the "cognition" that happens when they're reading someone else's thoughts.

What to do about System 1, though? Truly interactive research/communication documents, as described by Bret Victor, should be a great help, to my mind, but what do you think could be beyond that?

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2. alankay ◴[20 Jun 16 21:34 UTC] No.11941764[source]▶
I think that the "training" of "System 1" is a key factor in allowing "System 2" to be powerful. This is beyond the scope of this AMA (or at least beyond my scope to try to put together a decent comment on this today).
replies(1): >>11941879 #
3. poppingtonic ◴[20 Jun 16 21:51 UTC] No.11941879[source]▶
There's a recursive sense in which "training" "System 1" involves assimilating more abstractions, through practice and spaced repetition, such as deferring to the equations of motion when thinking about what happens when one throws a ball in the air. Going as far as providing useful interfaces to otherwise difficult cognitive terrain (a la Mathematica) is still part of this subproject. The process of assimilating new abstractions well enough that they become part of one's intuition (even noisily) is a function of time and intense focus. What do you see as a way to aggregate the knowledge complex and teach further generations of humans what the EEA couldn't, fast enough that they can solve the environmental challenges ahead? What's HARC's goal for going about this?
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4. alankay ◴[20 Jun 16 23:39 UTC] No.11942478{3}[source]▶
Yes, this is precisely what I meant here, and it's a very interesting set of ideas for education. I can't articulate a great goal yet.
5. michaelscott ◴[21 Jun 16 14:16 UTC] No.11945735{3}[source]▶
Personally, I've found that discovering "hazy" intuitive connections between otherwise dissonant subjects/ideas (such as the mentioned physics example) cements new concepts at a System 1 level quickly if done early in the learning process. It's also surprising how far one can go on such noisy assimilations alone as well, before needing to dig deeper.