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1401 points alankay | 2 comments | | 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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nnq ◴[] No.11943636[source]
Hi Alan, the question that troubles me now and I want to ask you is:

Why do you think there is always a difference between:

A. the people who know best how something should be done, and

B. the people who end up doing it in a practical and economically-successful or popular way?

And should we educate our children or develop our businesses in ways that could encourage both practicality and invention? (do you think it's possible?). Or would the two tendencies cancel each other out and you'll end up with mediocre children and underperforming businesses, so the right thing to do is to pick one side and develop it at the expense of the other?

(The "two camps" are clearly obvious in the space of programming language design and UI design (imho it's the same thing: programming languages are just "UIs between programmers and machines"), as you well know and said, with one group of people (you among them) having the right ideas of what OOP and UIs should be like, and one people inventing the technologies with success in industry like C++ and Java. But the pattern is happening at all levels, even business: the people with the best business ideas are almost never the ones who end up doing things and so things get done in a "partially wrong" way most of the time, although we have the information to "do it right".)

replies(1): >>11945591 #
1. alankay1 ◴[] No.11945591[source]
We were lucky in the ARPA/PARC communities to have both great funding, and the time to think things through (and even make mistakes that were kept from propagating to create bad defacto standards).

The question you are asking is really a societal one -- and about operations that are like strip mining and waste dumping. "Hunters and gatherers" (our genetic heritage) find fertile valleys, strip them dry and move on (this only works on a very small scale). "Civilization" is partly about learning how to overcome our dangerous atavistic tendencies through education and planning. It's what we should be about generally (and the CS part of it is just a symptom of a much larger much more dire situation we are in).

replies(1): >>11962959 #
2. nnq ◴[] No.11962959[source]
So you're rephrasing the question to mean that you see it as 'hunter gatherer mode' thinking (doing it in a practical and short term economically-successful way) vs. 'civilized builder mode' thinking (doing it the way we know it should be done) and that they are antagonistic, and that because of the way our society is structured 'hunter gatherer' mode thinking leads to better economical results?

This ends up as a pretty strong critique of capitalism's main idea that market forces drive the progress of science and technology.

Your thinking would lead to the conclusion that we'd have to find a way to totally reshape/re-engineer the current world economy to stop it from being hugely biased in favor of "hunter gatherers that strip the fertile valley dry" ..right?

I hope that people like you are working on this :)