Augmenting Human Intellect is prescient in so many ways that it's helpful as an exercise to examine predictions which seem off. Collecting notes…
#1 (p13-17): DE paints a vision of word processing, describes how it'd help people develop ideas more rapidly and flexibly. (cont)
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He suggests that in competitive spaces, there'd be strong market pressure to adopt and improve augmentations like this (the implication is those who don't would get left behind).
It's striking, then, that some of the most successful writers draft by hand, or on typewriter!
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If Gaiman, Rowling, Stephenson, Sontag, King, etc can succeed without non-linear text editing, then it seems that either a) the augmentation must not be *that* transformatively powerful; or b) competition among top authors isn't that fierce, so "inefficiencies" can be tolerated.
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#2 (p28): Imagine you had a dictionary in your pocket. "If it were so very easy to look things up, how would our vocabulary develop, how would our habits of exploring the intellectual domains of others shift, …how would our education system change…?"
Not that much, it seems!
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I can't prove this, of course. It's just my impression: instant and universal access to dictionaries does not seem to have transformed thought or prose appreciably. If I'd been stuck with a paper dictionary rather than a digital one, I don't think this would change much.
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Why might this be?
I do look things up more than when I had to use a paper dictionary as a kid. But this doesn't seem to matter that much. Maybe it's because I would have looked up anything "important" in a paper dictionary anyway?
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Even Wikipedia, a vastly more astonishing reference, doesn't seem to have quite changed the development of vocabulary, though it's fair to say that it has shifted (and in many ways dramatically improved) our "habits of exploring the intellectual domains of others."
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One way to dream up post-book media to make reading more effective and meaningful is to systematize "expert" practices (e.g. How to Read a Book), so more people can do them, more reliably and more cheaply. But… the most erudite people I know don't actually do those things!
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p98 Automated monitoring & lightweight surveying sw can generate feedback on a user's working methods, and suggest practice techniques. "I spend ~5m/hr exercising with this package. This almost always reveals things to me that change…the slant of my approach for the next hour."
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I'm surprised how over-optimistic this turned out to be. Software like RescueTime or TagTime loosely follows this spirit, but that feedback is certainly not "almost always" changing users' approach hour-by-hour. The much less cybernetic Pomodoro technique seems more impactful.
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Twitch livestreaming of knowledge work and "game tape" framings seem aspirationally closer to the mark, but there's little automated monitoring or suggesting going on there.
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My instinct is that the root problem here is similar to why there's so little deliberate practice for knowledge work: we can't characterize, assess, and improve the core practices systematically enough.
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I don’t think Wiki impacted our vocabulary much but it’s crazy now that we used to sit in bars and argue about some simple statement of fact, only to shrug it off: “Oh well, who knows? Agree to disagree.” Wiki made it implausible to not settle such questions. To accept ignorance.
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among secondary educators (at least in Australian n = a couple, my high school kids) there's a strong resistance to using Wikipedia which I find infuriating.
More broadly, as online as school aged students are now, their instinct isn't typically to "google things up"
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maybe I should stop answering al their questions! (I do encourage them to look things up)
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Maybe the diversity and average grade level of language on the internet is lower than that of the written word leading to smaller impact. I love the dictionary (wiki) available in my kindle and use it regularly
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I think this one is anchored in a misunderstanding of language and vocabulary as something received forms books rather than an inherently social/interpersonal phenomenon. Consider what the internet has done for slang, memes, and so on, in this light…
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This is a great point.
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