27 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2019
    1. In six and a half pages crammed full of well-based speculations, Bush proceeds to outline enough plausible artifact and methodology developments to make a very convincing case for the augmentation of the individual intellectual worker.

      It's only been three-quarters of a century since the Bush paper. So many of the things he postulated have already come true, and many more probably will before a century is up. And yet, we still have global disasters like climate change.

      Doug always emphasized the importance of coevolution. Re-reading this paper is a celebration of his technological foresight and the concepts underlying that, but it's also a sobering reminder of how much we've failed on the human side of coevolution. There's still time — not much, it feels like — but we need to start emphasizing this side of things more.

    2. Clinical psychology seems to provide clear evidence that a large proportion of a human's everyday activity is significantly mediated or basically prompted by unconscious mental processes that, although "natural" in a functional sense, are not rational. The observable mechanisms of these processes (observable by another, trained person) includes masking of the irrationality of the human's actions which are so affected, so that few of us will admit that our actions might be irrational, and most of us can construct satisfying rationales for any action that may be challenged.

      Nice acknowledgement of human irrationality here, well before the rise of behavioral economics.

    3. Compound Effects

      The essence of Doug's bootstrapping approach.

    4. A complex process is often executed by the H-LAM/T system in a multi-pass fashion (i.e., cut and try). In really complex situations, comprehension and problem solutions do not stand waiting at the end of a straightforward path; instead, possibilities open up and plans shift as comprehension grows. In the model using a network of contractors, this type of procedure would entail a great deal of extra work within the superstructure—each contractor involved in the process would have the specifications upon which he bid continually changed, and would continually have to respond to the changes by restudying the situation, changing his plans, changing the specifications to his subcontractors, and changing his records. This is a terrific additional burden, but it allows a freedom of action that has tremendous importance to the effectiveness the system exhibits to the outside world.

      This, in contrast to my previous comment, is a great example of Doug acknowledging the non-linearity of complex problem-solving. He's also foreshadowing Agile and Lean processes and highlighting the importance of continuous, fast learning.

    5. d. Model of Executive Superstructure

      The other thing that makes me cringe a bit when re-reading this paper is how hierarchically he frames everything, which of course is indicative of how he thought. He does make several references to how interwoven and connected and emergent everything actually is, but it's not the predominant frame.

    6. 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 might the sophistication of practical organization mature (if each person can so quickly and easily look up applicable rules), how would our education system change to take advantage of this new external symbol-manipulation capability of students and teachers (and administrators)?

      How have they? This is a hard passage to read 60 years later, because it is so very easy to look things up, but that hasn't made us collectively smarter, and it hasn't changed the educational system at all. That's not to say that it hasn't impacted individuals or that there aren't amazing educational impacts to highlight, but systems are complicated, and as Howard Rheingold has noted in other annotations, culture is a powerful beast, sometimes in good ways, other times not.

    7. We fastened a pencil to a brick

      One of Doug's classic metaphors, one that he still used often when I worked with him in 2000. He had a brick pencil on his desk in his office.

      However, this metaphor feels like it has taken on new significance in today's world of social media, where speed has clearly discouraged thinking rather than emphasized it. So much of Howard Rheingold's work around crap-detection literacy and Mike Caulfield's work around fact checking simply starts by slowing down. It feels like we would be better served with the equivalent of brick pencils on the Internet!

    8. Whorf

      The first time I read this paper, I remember being surprised by this reference to Whorf. Language was such a thing for Doug at so many levels.

    9. The set of sub-process capabilities discussed so far, if called upon in proper occasion and sequence, would indeed enable the execution of the memo-writing process. However, the very process of organizing and supervising the utilization of these sub-process capabilities is itself a most important sub-process of the memo-writing process. Hence, the sub-process capabilities as listed would not be complete without the addition of a seventh capability—what we call the executive capability.

      This excerpt is so indicative of how Doug thought and his systemic / root-cause approach. Keep going deeper, keep looking for the sub-process underlying all other sub-processes, until you find the most impactful leverage point. This is, in essence, what his bootstrapping strategy was, and it's the heart of good systems thinking as well.

    10. Although the size of the step a human being can take in comprehension, innovation, or execution is small in comparison to the over-all size of the step needed to solve a complex problem, human beings nevertheless do solve complex problems. It is the augmentation means that serve to break down a large problem in such a way that the human being can walk through it with his little steps, and it is the structure or organization of these little steps or actions that we discuss as process hierarchies.

      This reminds me so much of my favorite Doug story, which I wrote about here after he passed away. Doug loved bicycles, and so many of his great metaphors involved them, including this one:

      As a kid, he and his brother used to challenge neighborhood kids to see who could perform the most difficult tricks. Doug had a trick that always worked. He would challenge the other kids to ride their bikes with their arms crossed.

      What was so hard about this? Riding straight with your arms crossed was easy. The only tough part was turning. If you wanted to turn right, you’d have to move your left arm. If you wanted to turn left, you’d have to move your right arm. In other words, you simply had to do the opposite of what you normally had to do.

      Two rules easily grasped, yet none of the kids could ever do it without falling off their bikes. Why? Because learning, in order to be applied, needs to be embodied. We need to build that habit and, sometimes, that means changing old habits.

      This is hard, but it’s not impossible. That was the other key lesson of this story. Doug could do the trick, not because he was smarter or more physically gifted than the other kids, but because he had trained his body to do it through lots and lots of practice.

    11. goal-centered

      I appreciated that he emphasized "goal-centered" here! Very design-y!

    12. For instance, an aborigine who possesses all of our basic sensory-mental-motor capabilities, but does not possess our background of indirect knowledge and procedure, cannot organize the proper direct actions necessary to drive a car through traffic, request a book from the library, call a committee meeting to discuss a tentative plan, call someone on the telephone, or compose a letter on the typewriter.

      As noted here, there's not a strong race or gender lens in this paper, as you might expect from a white male scientist writing in the early 1960s. Some of the examples (like this one) might feel a little cringe-worthy.

      In fairness to Doug, I think he was very conscious of how privilege impacted worldview. Rather than use this as a metaphor, he could very easily have shared the story he told me and others repeatedly about hiking in the thick, Oregon woods with his brother when he was younger. His brother suddenly told him to stop and to stay still. Doug stopped, and peered carefully at his surroundings, trying to understand what made his brother want to stop. Finally, a deer emerged from the complex patterns that were in front of him. Doug was only able to see the deer when it moved, and he always marveled at how his brother was immediately able to recognize the deer out of all that noise.

    13. pursue the quickest gains first

      Interesting to note in retrospect what felt "quickest" back then.

    14. first phase

      This jumped out at me when I re-read this paper — a reminder of how far ahead Doug was thinking and how open he was to what he might learn along the way. I was reminded of that evolution throughout the whole paper. For example, while he talks extensively about H-LAM/T in this paper (see http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/#2a14 for the first mention), I'm not sure he ever referred to it in the time that I worked with him (starting in 2000). I can guess as to why, but I wished I had asked him. :-(

  2. Feb 2019
    1. You nod cautiously, in hopes that he will proceed in some way that will tie this kind of talk to something from which you can get the "feel" of what it is all about.

      I'm struck by how much Doug is empathizing with "you" here. I feel like it speaks to how self-aware Doug was of the other person's experience as he spoke to them and the delicate balancing act he was doing as he tried to explain concepts. I'm not sure I felt that self-awareness (at least at this level) when we worked together.

    2. "It turns out that this simple capability makes it feasible to do some pretty rough tasks in the upper levels of the capability hierarchy—where precise use of special terms really pays off, where the human just couldn't be that precise by depending upon his unaided memory for definitions and 'standards,' and where using dictionary and reference-book lookup in the normal fashion would be so distracting and time-consuming that the task execution would break down. We've tried taking this feature away in some of these processes up there, and believe me, the result was a mess.

      Doug really understood how huge of a barrier a lack of shared language was. It was a huge challenge for him personally. I think him highlighting this example speaks to how important he thought it was to have shared language, although I don't know if experience has shown that this feature addresses the problem to the extent he speculates that it does here.

    3. This didn't impress you very much, since an automatic carriage-return feature was sort of a trivial return on the investment behind all of this equipment—but then you reflected that, as long as the computer was there anyway, to help do all the flashy things you had witnessed earlier, one might as well use it in all of the little helpful ways he could.

      This helps reinforce what he writes in his introduction about going after the "quickest gains first." It seems like a little thing, but all of these little things together add up to something much bigger. These details matter when it comes to the overall experience.

    4. You ask yourself why you weren't prepared for this, and you are forced to admit that the generalizations you had heard hadn't really sunk in—"new methods for manipulating symbols" had been an oft-repeated term, but it just hadn't included for you the images of the free and rapid way in which Joe could make changes in the display, and of meaningful and flexible "shaping" of ideas and work status which could take place so rapidly.

      One reason I like this storytelling technique is that it helps pull out important qualities that may not be evident from a mere description of the system. In this case, it's how fast the system works, and the implications of that speed. One of my big takeaways from working with Doug was the importance of reducing latency. I remember Jeff Rulifson talking about how Doug would constantly harp on how the system was not fast enough, how technically challenging it was to meet his demands, and yet how critically important it was in the end to the overall experience.

    5. Joe understands this and explains that he will do his best to give you the valid conceptual feel that you want—trying to tread the narrow line between being too detailed and losing your over-all view and being too general and not providing you with a solid feel for what goes on.

      I love that Doug named this intention. He had to practice this his whole career, and I think it was challenging, although he does it nicely in this paper.

    6. It will just be a matter of "having the computer do some of his symbol-manipulating processes for him so that he can use more powerful concepts and concept-manipulation techniques," as you have so often been told.

      Couldn't help but chuckle at this. "So often been told"?! I don't think anyone has ever told me this, including Doug. I think it's okay that this hasn't manifested. :-)

    7. I once tried to use my cards, with their separate little "concept packets," in the process of developing a file memo outlining the status and plans of a research project.

      I love this little description of Doug prototyping Bush's ideas and sharing what he learned from actual experimentation.

    8. If my mental processes were more powerful, I could dispense with the cards, and hold all of the card-sized concept structures in my memory, where also would be held the categorization linkages that evolved as I worked (with my feet up on the artifacts and my eyes closed). As it is, and as it probably always will be no matter how we develop or train our mental capabilities, I want to work in problem areas where the number and interrelationship complexity of the individual factors involved are too much for me to hold and manipulate within my mind.

      More on the power of externalizing.

    9. Not only do my own thoughts produce results in this fashion, but when I digest the writings of another person, I find generally anyway that I have extracted from his structure and integrated into my own a specific selection of facts, considerations, ideas, etc. Often these different extracted items fit into different places in my structure, or become encased in special substructures as I modify or expand his concepts. Extracting such items or kernels and putting each on its own notecard helps this process considerably—the role or position of each such item in the growth of the note structure is independent, and yet if desired all can quickly be isolated and extracted by simple needle sorting on the reference-number notching field.

      More emphasis on externalizing what we're already doing when we're sensemaking. If the different connections and re-structuring we're making and doing in our heads is externalized, now we can easily build on them. Furthermore, others (including computers) can also look at them and do the same. If it's all versioned, we can easily re-trace our steps.

    10. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works.

      I am struck by how the Neo-Whorfian hypothesis described by Doug above starts to play out here. Bush is describing the memex in terms of concrete things he knows and understands — furniture, photos, newspapers, index cards, etc. It is tangible and inspiring, but as Doug starts to translate this into the language of digital computers below, it takes on new meaning.

      On the one hand, all of Bush's technology examples are so out-dated. On the other hand, Bush isn’t totally constrained by them. There's enough there for Doug to start taking them somewhere new.

      I'm also struck by how the descriptions in the "old language" remind me of how much has been lost in today's technology. We're going too fast, not taking the time to slow down, to zoom in and out, to make meaning of things together.

    11. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

      I don't remember Bush's metaphor of the "trail" jumping out so vividly the first time I read the paper. It's wonderful to see it today, as I think about how stigmergy (i.e. collaboration via leaving and following trails, e.g. ants) has become such a central concept in my work.

    12. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it.

      This is hard to read today, 74 years after Bush published this. We not only haven't addressed this today, we seem to have made it worse. Obviously, technology enables us to generate information even faster, as cogdog notes above. But the right technology could also encourage us to slow down, review, synthesize, and build on these ideas. As human beings, we already do this. Doug (and to some extent, Bush) was positing a system where we can externalize the meaning we make, which would allow us to do much more with it. I think a lot of folks have missed this.

    13. Indeed, it fits so well, and states its points so nicely, that it was deemed appropriate to our purpose here to summarize it in detail and to quote from it at considerable length.

      It's amazing to be reminded of how strongly Doug was influenced by Vannevar Bush's paper, so much so that he devoted this much time to it. It speaks to the critical importance of vision.

      I think Doug severely undervalued his own role as a visionary. He was a doer, as is so clear from this paper, where he moves so easily from big picture to the micro-weeds. But his vision was the guiding force that encouraged people to revisit and explore these weedy ideas over and over again.