53 lines
2.2 KiB
Org Mode
53 lines
2.2 KiB
Org Mode
---
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title: Retrospect on Foresight
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author: Chris Hodapp
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date: January 8, 2018
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tags: technobabble, rambling
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---
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/(Spawned from some idle thoughts around the summer of 2015.)/
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Why are old technological ideas that were "ahead of their time", but
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which lost out to other ideas, worth studying?
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We can see them as raw ideas that "modern" understanding never
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refined - misguided fantasies or even just mistakes. The flip side of
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this is that we can see them as ideas that are free of a nearly
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inescapable modern context and all of the preconceptions and blinders
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it carries.
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In some of these visionaries is a valuable combination:
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- they're detached from this modern context (by mere virtue of it not
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existing yet),
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- they have considerable experience, imagination, and foresight,
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- they devoted time and effort to work extensively on something and to
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communicate their thoughts, feelings, and analysis in a durable way.
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To put it in another way: They give us analysis done from a context
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that is long gone. They help us think beyond our current context.
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They help us answer a question, "What if we took a different path
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then?"
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[[http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html][Epigram #53]] from Alan Perlis offers some relevant skepticism here: "So
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many good ideas are never heard from again once they embark in a
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voyage on the semantic gulf." My interpretation of it is that we tend
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to idolize ideas, old and new, because they sound somehow different,
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innovative, and groundbreaking, but attempts at analysis or practical
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realization of the ideas leads to a bleaker reality, perhaps that the
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idea is completely meaningless (the equivalent of a [[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deepity][deepity]], perhaps),
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wildly impractical, or a mere facade over what is already established.
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* Examples
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* Scratch
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- Douglas Engelbart is perhaps one of the canonical examples of a person
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who was an endless source of these ideas. Ted Nelson arguably is
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another. Alan Turing is an early example widely regarded for his
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foresight.
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- [[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/][As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)]]
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- "Do you remember a time when..." only goes so far.
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# Tools For Thought
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