Why work on Improving our Tools for Thought?
Loránd Kedves • a month ago
Dear Frode,
we had our short journey together but to me it seemed you focus on text and existing toolchain, while my obsession is what I call today (thanks to Gyuri!) idea projection: the process of direct interaction with the network of knowledge, and the requirements of an infrastructure that allows the continuous morphing of that network (that is merely impossible with what we have today).
Now the development is on hold due to personal financial and health issues, but I still write texts :-) sometimes. I guess you may like it... https://medium.com/@lkedves...
Frode Hegland Mod Loránd Kedves • a month ago
Hi Lorand. Yes you are right, I am focused on text, I feel that external symbols are a powerful way to manipulate our thoughts and communications. If you can find a way to directly interact with knowledge, that would indeed be amazing but I am a text guy and that is outside of my area.
Loránd Kedves Frode Hegland • 25 days ago
OK, but then please explain me why you put a graph to the top of the article as an illustration of Tools for Thought? That is not text, you can't use a text editor to author it (yet another markup or source language IDE is not a "text editor", but manages hidden properties assigned to text fragments).
My problem with your approach is that as long as you put an equal sign between thoughts, symbols and text, you can't even see the point: the also morphing language and syntax required to transfer (serialize! so no graph here) your knowledge to text. A real Tool for Thought (which I have already created and used to improve itself before learning about Doug, but was too deeply locked to one platform) should include changing ALL, even the rules it uses to fully describe itself. That is missing since Bush described and Doug partially implemented Memex.
Focusing on text (writing yet another editor) is a dead end street, as example see Ted Nelson's Xanadu progress in the past 50 years. By the way, I don't see the fundamental improvement in Liquid over Xanadu. What is it?
Frode Hegland Mod Loránd Kedves • 25 days ago
I don't think text needs to be in a column, I guess that is where we have different perspectives. I'm sorry you feel my work is a dead end street and no, I am not trying to go down my good friend Ted's route, it's a different direction.
Loránd Kedves Frode Hegland • 19 days ago
> I don't think text needs to be in a column, I guess that is where we have different perspectives. I'm sorry you feel my work is a dead end street…
On your level of extreme oversimplification
Not exactly.
On my level of TL;DR
I have been writing source code for living for 20+ years. I always hated to bury my understanding of a task into serial text of the chosen programming language and libraries. To me the real work is building the structure and interaction of components. That can be wrong for the first time, this is where design patterns, refactoring, Agile methodologies come in. They are as natural to me as breathing, in fact I used before learning about them. I created always better tools to support design and automatize coding until Dust Construct that I used to think about and build itself. At this point I first met Engelbart's ideas and realized that this is Augmenting Human Intellect.
I was already at the border of "machine text" and plans of "human text" and asked if thinking in general can have the same problem as source code. I have found Tim van Gelder, a philosopher who refers to Engelbart, derives argument maps from text to represent the real content. He says that a communication error is the difference between the knowledge graph that the reader decodes from the text and the one the sender wanted to transfer. We need tools making these graphs transparent to decrease errors caused by the weakness of text. I found Neil Postman, who explained the dangers of using modern information systems without understanding how much they change our thinking. And many, many others.
I say text is outdated because of the
- need of serialization,
- lack of exact definitions and structures,
- missing ability to follow morphing background.
I knew that you did not listen when I tried to explain this. Your not-even-wrong summary adds those months to the long list of bitter mistakes of mine. Thank you for making it clear.
> … and no, I am not trying to go down my good friend Ted's route, it's a different direction.
Sure. Xanadu is not only ahead of Liquid by 50 years, but almost solved the problem. Yet, Ted made some fundamental mistakes in the Why? (Vision) to What? (Architecture) translation. These are:
- The “atom” of text is NOT the character, but the statement. References exist among statements, not character ranges. This allows changing other statements or translating the text without breaking existing references.
- Store statements by using combined IDs: internal primary key + commit ID. You can change statements later and save them by the same internal but different commit ID. You keep the original references and can follow updates on Xanadu level.
- Trash EDL, understand that any given text is a hierarchy of statements, either local or remote. You need to store the links in their natural bidirectional form, and build the text from a root node to display. The statements are not locked into their owning text, but a flexible cloud open for reuse. By the way, this is the essence of ZigZag database.
This Xanadu prototype is a 6 months spare time project for a developer with my skills. I started it using Hungarian laws as data source for my research, but trashed due to the lack of support and feedback. I also close my PhD because I “lost” the time needed to get the required publication credits.
"Your good friend Ted" was quite close to see his 50-year-old dream working TODAY, beyond a quite weak 3D framework demo of squares with custom texture and colored rectangles. But, he does not talk with strangers on his YouTube channel and has you protecting him from the chance.
If anything, you’d better be sorry for this instead of my guessed feelings.
To quote the Oracle from Matrix:
"I'm sorry, kiddo. I really am. You have a good soul. And I hate giving good people bad news. Don't worry about it. As soon as you step outside that door, you'll start feeling better. You'll remember you don't believe in any of this [Lorand] crap."
Over and out.
Frode Hegland Mod Loránd Kedves • 18 days ago
Lorand, I have replied to you here: http://wordpress.liquid.inf...
