Another draft post

drafts/2017-01-08-retrospect-foresight.org

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+title: Retrospect on Foresight
+author: Chris Hodapp
+date: January 8, 2018
+tags: technobabble, rambling
+---
+
+/(Spawned from some idle thoughts around the summer of 2015.)/
+
+Why are old technological ideas that were "ahead of their time", but
+which lost out to other ideas, worth studying?
+
+We can see them as raw ideas that "modern" understanding never
+refined - as misguided fantasies or just mistakes, even.  The flip
+side of this is that we can see them as ideas that are free of the
+modern preconceptions that are now nearly inescapable.
+
+In some of these visionaries is a valuable combination:
+
+- a detachment from this context (by mere virtue of it not existing
+  yet),
+- the ability to imagine and analyze far beyond the preconceptions
+  that in turn surrounded them,
+- the resources and freedom to actually apply this,
+- the foresight and sometimes blind luck to have communicated their
+  thoughts, feelings, and analysis in a durable way.
+
+To put it in another way: They gave us analysis in a context that no
+longer even exists. They help us think beyond our current context.
+They help us answer a question, "What if we took a different path
+then?"
+
+* Scratch
+
+- Douglas Engelbart is perhaps one of the canonical examples of a person
+  who was an endless source of these ideas.  Ted Nelson arguably is
+  another.  Alan Turing is an early example widely regarded for his
+  foresight.
+- [[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/][As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)]]
+- However, to quote [[http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html][epigram #53]] from Alan Perlis, "So many good ideas
+  are never heard from again once they embark in a voyage on the
+  semantic gulf."
+- "Do you remember a time when..." only goes so far.