My highlights:
Designing for comprehension, understanding what’s going on in one’s surroundings, how things in the world work, and effective ways of thinking and talking about it.
The World Wide Web has too much content for not enough information, and its capabilities are underutilized.
Alan Kay: three modalities of thinking:
- stories
- arguments
- system dynamics
Everybody understands stories, because we’re hardwired for stories. A small fraction of the population are fluent in logical argumentation, and an immeasurably narrow subgroup pilot their daily lives in terms of models and data. It is an issue of training. People learn hard things all the time.
The cultural value of gaining comprehension is situated in time and space, relative to the person, and highly dynamic. People are sensitive not just to cost of learning something new, but to the potential social downside of possessing the resulting knowledge. Learning is always unproductive in the short term, so you may be accused of wasting time, especially if you don’t have a likely shot at being the best. If it’s important to you to always appear competent and in control of the situation, you could easily find yourself publicly humiliated. In the process of gaining comprehension, the ability to both conceal the effort and fail discreetly are dimensions worth considering.
Stories have characters, the characters do things, their actions have consequences, the consequences are either good or bad (or some mixture), the characters either deserve the outcome or they don’t. The median story presents almost nothing to learn, besides who the players are and which ones of them to root for. Stories inform our own conduct within a model, worldview, system, or paradigm; very rarely do they challenge it. The capacity for stories to communicate new models is sharply limited, that’s the real of argumentation which in the middle of a story is dull as all hell.
Logical argumentation as rigorously stepping stepping through a path within a given model. If the world is like that, then we can conclude this. Science and philosophy routinely suggest that maybe the world isn’t like that. It’s immensely taxing on your attention, you have to understand the whole, and the benefit doesn’t come until you’ve assimilated the entire thing.
System dynamics are actually what give us agency, whether we’re aware of them or not. Inferring the unseen model from the seen data. Models are about predicting the future from the past and present, within some tolerance that the model remains useful. The model doesn’t have to be precise, but it does have to be accurate.
Model is a kind of formal structure of entities connected by relationships, that represents some part of reality and is useful for reasoning about it. All models are systems, with dynamics that approximate the systems they represent, and the point of a model is to better understand – through data – what its assigned bit of reality is capable of. It helps us understand in advance what reality can do, what you should do in response if it ever happens for real.
Using stories to inform one’s own conduct is reasonably okay at yielding reasonably okay results, enough of the time. Stories only hint at system dynamics. Cargo culting is copying behaviour without understanding the underlying mechanism.
When it actually matters that your decisions and actions reliably perform, stories just won’t cut it: you need models to be effective. Under the model-driven regime, stories indicate when your model has stopped working, if you’re wise enough to pay attention to them.
Reason is actually the weakest form of rhetoric, because it requires the audience to follow you all the way, paying intense attention the entire time. It’s only useful for convincing those who are already somewhat sympathetic. It takes no effort to just ignore your arguments, which is why people who have already made up their mind don’t listen to reason.
Models connect to other models inside your mind to make bigger models to make sense of more things about the world. Once you’re model-literate, you look for ways to fill out and extend it. Models are not exactly self-assembling, since we’re the ones assembling them, but there is a strong drive to do so because models go stale and need to be kept up to date so they match reality. Data is what plugs into models, and that’s what gives models dynamics. Models are much denser than stories.
It is my concern that stories, the one modality of communication everybody understands, are too sparse to carry the quantity of information needed to make sense of the world. Sequential argumentation and exposition–the one you’re reading, for example, likewise. Figure out a way to bulk-load models into people’s heads, make it fun or at least interesting, make it so you can leave and come back, create space to learn discreetly, with no stigma, share and get other people involved.
Enacting models is literally what computers do all day. Random access gives computers their power, because it enables them to construct large, complex systems out of many simple parts, and then run the whole thing in real time.
Syntagm, one specific through the paradigm. Computers foreground the paradigm, making syntagm something that is generated out of it.
The native form of the computer is the database. The way you navigate a database is hypertext, or hypermedia. Rather than start at the beginning of a work and read all the way to the end, you can skip over parts, drill into details. Computers are specially good at it.
The Web has a lot of extremely desirable characteristics–instantaneous global publication, unlimited scale, unprecedented ease and low cost of deployment–but as hypermedia, it actually kind of sucks. Links only go in one direction, so you can see the links going but, but not the links coming in. There’s no convention for the type of link, so you can’t tell in advance if a link is a bibliographic citation, a definition, or something else. Even the fact that the basic unit of the Web is the page biases it toward big, chunky, analog-style documents–that is to say, stories, rather than the sleek, pulverized information of models. The reason is mainly inertia.
The benefit of URLs is that they extend the idea of random-access addressing to a global scope. Because it’s very cheap to rename files–and thus their URLs–and very expensive, if not impossible, to update all the places a given URL is referenced, they tend to be extremely brittle, awkward and cumbersome. Why bother linking so something at all if it’s just going to break in a month?
Retrofit the Web with a sort of adapter, which repairs the brittleness of URLs. Dense hypermedia. By fixing URLs–specially, by enabling you to defer, perhaps indefinitely, the task of deciding what to call them, and then remembering what the old names were when you do–they become a lot more reliable.
You use it to make websites. No desire for it to become a platform, rather a set of demonstrations. To be intertwingler is to be inextricably, densely, deeply interlinked, where nothing is truly separate from anything else.