Does anyone use advanced media projects?

post by ryan_b · 2018-06-20T23:33:45.405Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

Contents

  Historical
  Current
  In the Wild
None
5 comments

Epistemic status: exploratory.

I am using "advanced media projects" as sort of a catch-all umbrella for people working on better ways to present and explore information. I suppose the obvious hub for this kind of thing is places like the MIT Media Lab, but here are a few others I have been thinking about:

Historical

Alan Kay gave a couple of talks at Stanford about the time at PARC that I like. The title is How To Invent the Future, Part I and Part II. He talks a lot about the importance of tools and the under-utilization of computers for thinking purposes. I went to school for engineering, and I would particularly like to call out Ivan Sutherland's demonstration at ~26:30 in Part I because when people were still using punch-cards and tape readouts this guy threw together the first computer aided drafting program as a demo for a monitor and a light-pen and my life would have been much easier at several junctures if only we could have rolled back to the 60s. My mind remains blown.

Current

I just discovered Bret Victor, and his blog has a section in it called Kill Math. I am watching the presentation called Media for Thinking the Unthinkable, which seems directly relevant to the problems this community is largely concerned with. His central argument is that all of our progress hinges on people with a knack for manipulating abstract symbols with pencil and paper; this both loses value that might be added by people without such talents, and fails to leverage abstract symbol skills in more than two dimensions.

In the Wild

This is exactly the pitch of Distill, which I discovered from LessWrong. In fact, the demos for Distill look very similar to the first network theory paper example in the Media for Thinking the Unthinkable talk...and following the last link of their examples is that very talk.

But the question is, does anyone here actually use or produce such tools?

It seems like superintelligence is the kind of motivating example which requires the ability to think unthinkable thoughts, but I haven't seen very much discussion about how to do so. Secondarily, we have a strong interest in the pedagogical possibilities from a rationality perspective. What if we could flip the former around, and build a tool to render previously thinkable-but-wrong thoughts unthinkable, like a kind of rationality filter?

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