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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Shakespeare didn’t have a dictionary at all! Not in the modern sense.
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Half-serious: I wonder if that has anything to do with why he made up so many words?
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Maybe!
Take this example from the Merchant of Venice:
Theyle not shew theyr teeth in way of smile Though Nestor sweare the iest be laughable.
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The word “laughable” is newly minted, a combination of “laugh” (from old, Old English), and “-able” (a common Anglo-Norman suffix). Shakespeare put them together. No reference book told him he couldn’t or shouldn’t!
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