Quite the opposite, so long as we grasp the fresh routes to knowledge, and connection, that technological change brings, says Nick Harkaway.

These are old, old fears in a new form. In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down. To an extent, he was right. We do indeed take on and regurgitate information, sometimes without sufficient analysis, and we do use notes as an aide memoire - though even now, when our brains have begun to assume the ability to Google information, studies show we can still memorise facts perfectly well if we know we will need to. But Socrates was also wrong: literacy isn't a catastrophe for knowledge, but a huge boon. It allows us to gain an understanding of the work of lifetimes in short order, preparing the way for research into topics we might

Deep domain understanding helps you create analyses. Your ability to understand how a particular system (no matter how small) works allows you apply a confident analysis to new systems you encounter. Once you know everything there is to know about nuclear physics, soccer or the praying mantis, it makes it easier to understand new systems.

At the same time, it's impossible to be smart without also being aware of the wider world. That's because it's the random interactions and the surprising coincidences that help us navigate our daily lives.

design principles dieter rams product vitsoe speech
The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They
synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its
design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions

The best way to manage complication is to avoid creating it in the first place. If you find yourself in a mindless change → pray → run loop, you don’t understand your code well enough to be editing it. Stop what you’re doing, actually get up and walk away from the keyboard, think about what you’re trying to do, and don’t come back to the keyboard until you understand exactly what you’re doing and how to do it. Obviously there’s some slack here for debugging, but it’s not controversial to say that you shouldn’t change code you don’t understand, even — especially? — when it’s your own.

Rod Cambridge, the author of How NOT To Use Your Smartphone, has released a paperback version of the eBook. Increasingly, smartphone users are being hacked because they don't understand how to configure or use their devices safely. And identity thieves can do an awful lot of bad once they have someone's personal information. The bad guys can trick smartphone owners into connecting to insecure Wi-Fi networks where their credentials and other private information becomes exposed.

["Art is Boring"]

"Maybe art has to be boring, now… We should not expect art to entertain or divert anymore. At least, not high art. Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye — but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring ... e.g. listening for sense rather than sound…

If we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention."

["On Intelligence"]

"I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.”"

["Why I Write"]

"There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.

I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.

But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when- talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently."

The most recent pronouncement from the UK government – reinstating in an updated and worsened way the idea of near-universal surveillance of emails, texts, phone calls and web-browsing – is horrific in many ways (which I will blog about separately) but it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise. This government, and the last government, and the one before that, have an abysmal record in their dealings with the digital world. They get it wrong in almost every way, almost every time.

Brett Victor's interactive essay on combining various levels of abstraction with each other -- and the concrete.

I'm interested to hear what very talented mathematicians and physicists have to say about "what it's like" to have an internalized sense of very advanced mathematical concepts... As someone who only completed college calculus and physics, and has some basic CS background, but who is very intrigued by mathematics, I've always been curious about this. Does it feel analogous to having mastery of another language like in programming or linguistics? Any honest, candid insights appreciated!
Edit

"…all the way through the talk I was trying to say: this bit is about writing, and this bit is about reading.

And it didn’t make sense, at least to me, it didn’t make sense, because reading and writing, for me, are not separate activities. It’s all way-finding, orienteering through literature, and sometimes someone else has beaten down the path and sometimes you have to make it for yourself…

I started trying to write a book last year, for various reasons, and I kept getting derailed by the sheer pointlessness of the format for what I was trying to do. The only point I could identify in writing it as-a-book was to make a saleable thing, which is fine but the whole point of this not-book was/is to talk about what is not that.

Network Realism is about yoinking as much of the network as you need into the text. Something something the whole network i.e. reading and writing, flow, process."

"In talking to audiences outside universities (some of whom may be graduates), I am struck by the level of curiosity about, and enthusiasm for, ideas and the quest for greater understanding, whether in history and literature, or physics and biology, or any number of other fields…

Such audiences do not want to be told that we judge the success of a university education by how much more graduates can earn than non-graduates, any more than they want to hear how much scholarship and science may indirectly contribute to GDP. They are, rather, susceptible to the romance of ideas and the power of beauty; they want to learn about far-off times and faraway worlds; they expect to hear language used more inventively, more exactly, more evocatively than it normally is in their workaday world; they want to know that, somewhere, human understanding is being pressed to its limits, unconstrained by immediate practical outcomes."

"I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories “misconceptions” from the outset, instead of only after we have discovered their successors. Thus we could say that Einstein’s Misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton’s Misconception, which was an improvement on Kepler’s. The neo-Darwinian Misconception of Evolution is an improvement on Darwin’s Misconception, and his on Lamarck’s… Science claims neither infallibility nor finality."

David Deutsch…in The Beginning of Infinity…demonstrates that although we will, barring extinction, continue to refine & improve our knowledge infinitely, we will also never stop being able to improve it. Thus we will always live w/ fallible scientific understanding (& fallible moral theories, fallible aesthetic ideas, fallible philosophical notions, etc.); it is the nature of the relationship between knowledge, mind, & universe.

But it remains odd to say: everything I know is a misconception."

"As an alternative to the idea that we teach “subjects,” I’ve been playing with the idea that what we really teach are “subjectivities”: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be “taught” – only practiced. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one’s self-esteem.” You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self…

So here’s my question to everybody: Within your own particular field, is there a particular “subjectivity,” perspective, or way of seeing and interacting with the world that you are trying to inspire in your students? In your mind, is this perspective more important than the “content” or “subject-matter” of the course?"

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