#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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What do you mean by this? Is it that we don't know what things we need to get better at, so we don't know where to focus the development of practice?
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Here's a pretty mainstream take, from Ericsson's Peak:
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Can see why knowledge workers aren't begging for practice space when it's described as uncomfortable and requiring full conscious attention!
reminds me of DeMarco's Slack and the typical org drive to fill schedules with 'productive' work...