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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 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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ianbicking ◴[20 Jun 16 19:19 UTC] No.11940568[source]▶
1. After Engelbart's group disbanded it seemed like he ended up in the wilderness for a long time, and focused his attention on management. I'll project onto him and would guess that he felt more constrained by his social or economic context than he was by technology, that he envisioned possibilities that were unattainable for reasons that weren't technical. I'm curious if you do or have felt the same way, and if have any intuitions about how to approach those problems.

2. What are your opinions on Worse Is Better (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html)? It seems to me like you pursue the diamond-like jewel, but maybe that's not how you see it. (Just noticed you answered this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940276)

3. I've found the Situated Learning perspective interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning). At least I think about it when I feel grumpy about all the young kids and Node.js, and I genuinely like that they are excited about what they are doing, but it seems like they are on a mission to rediscover EVERYTHING, one technology and one long discussion at a time. But they are a community of learning, and maybe everyone (or every community) does have to do that if they are to apply creativity and take ownership over the next step. Is there a better way?

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alankay ◴[20 Jun 16 20:20 UTC] No.11941199[source]▶
It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!"

The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...

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9erdelta ◴[21 Jun 16 06:55 UTC] No.11943951[source]▶
This is incredibly hard hitting and I'm glad I read it, but I'm also afraid it would "trigger" quite a few people today.

What steps can a person take to get out of pop culture and try to get into the same league as the inventors? Incredibly stupid question to have to ask but I feel really lost sometimes.

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1. alankay ◴[21 Jun 16 12:07 UTC] No.11945066[source]▶
I think it is first a recognition problem -- in the US we are now embedded in a pop culture that has progressed far enough to seriously hurt places that hold "developed cultures". This pervasiveness makes it hard to see anything else, and certainly makes it difficult for those who care what others think to put much value on anything but pop culture norms.

The second, is to realize that the biggest problems are imbalance. Developed arts have always needed pop arts for raw "id" and blind pushes of rebellion. This is a good ingredient -- like salt -- but you can't make a cake just from salt.

I got a lot of insight about this from reading McLuhan for very different reasons -- those of media and how they form an environment -- and from delving into Anthropology in the 60s (before it got really politicized). Nowadays, books by "Behavioral Economists" like Kahneman, Thaler, Ariely, etc. can be very helpful, because they are studying what people actually do in their environments.

Another way to look at it is that finding ways to get "authentically educated" will turn local into global, tribal into species, dogma into multiple perspectives, and improvisation into crafting, etc. Each of the starting places stays useful, but they are no longer dominant.