Notational Intelligence (2022)

by low_tech_punk • 2 years ago

40 1 2 years ago

Masterful article. I wanted a little more in terms of examples & referents, things to latch on to to imagine opening ups of notation, but it was so well written, so many good links, such an obviously good cause. To me, it's speaking to the heart of possibility, of what we could be doing, has found some true kernels to look at.

I think notation should be judged by its ability to contribute to and represent previously unthinkable, un-expressible thoughts.

Or,

There’s a subtle but important distinction between augmenting human productivity, which is every tech company’s aim, and augmenting human intellect.

I do wonder if this "as we may think" type discussion bridges somewhat away from notation of writing & starts blurring into systems more broadly. Tech hides under the facade of interface, trading off the rawness of direct representation for the comfort & steering of crafted experiences & human-centric form factors. But if we could create a better human computer symbiosis, better represent code & processing in a more direct way, that wasn't so intimidating & impenetrable, if systems operated more visible & directly, maybe that wonderful Engelbartian augment intellect cause would be better served.

I'd love to see a resurgence of these ideas. Model-View-Controller (MVC) or Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) or Model-View-Presenter (MVP) all purport to be ways for raw models/data to have exterior systems expose them (and offer manipulation toolkits in the case of Controllers). Our current programming tends to blend concerns together, be interior focused at devs, but this decomposition denotes separate logical pieces, which could be understandable pieces exteriorly, denote understandable patterns of data & rendering & control that- if we serve up to users- could ideally help breakdown the complexity of compute & untangle the ball of computing, create distinct pieces we humans might start grappling with, start thinking with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93vie...

This would require a much more amitious shift than what computing's been up to. As said:

There’s a subtle but important distinction between augmenting human productivity, which is every tech company’s aim, and augmenting human intellect.

Notational Intelligence (2022)

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