this might be important for Understanding Through Building - when prototyping things to learn, it's important to focus on the actual problem, instead of trying to "stroke the aesthetic ego" by polishing rounded corners, playing with type systems, etc.
some examples:
If the plans for villagization were so rational and scientific, why did they bring about such general ruin? The answer, I believe, is that such plans were not scientific or rational in any meaningful sense of those terms. What these planners carried in their mind's eye was a certain aesthetic, what one might call a visual codification of modern rural production and community life. Like a religious faith, this visual codification was almost impervious to criticism or disconfirming evidence. The belief in large farms, monocropping, "proper" villages, tractor-plowed fields, and collective or communal farming was an aesthetic conviction undergirded by a conviction that this was the way in which the world was headed-a teleology.
— Seeing Like a State - James Scott
Arbitrary prose paragraphs aren't effectively usable in multiple places: good prose depends on arc, narrative, context. Text transclusion is almost always disjointed. I fear that most of the system designers who have been excited about this approach are in love with an idea about technology, rather than an idea about writing or communication.
— Transclusion is limited by the data model’s composability ↗ - Andy Matuschak
In Mindstorms I made the claim that children can learn to program and that learning to program can affect the way they learn everything else. I had in mind something like the process of re-empowerment of probability: the ability to program would allow a student to learn and use powerful forms of probabilistic ideas. It did not occur to me that anyone could possibly take my statement to mean that learning to program would in itself have consequences for how children learn and think
— What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power - Seymour Papert
counterargument from Mindstorms on Henri Poincaré:
The question at issue here is whether even in the course of working on the most purely logical problem the mathematician evokes processes and sets problems which are not themselves purely logical. (...) according to Poincare, the mathematician is guided by an aesthetic sense: In doing a job, the mathematician frequently has to work with propositions which are false to various degrees but does not have to consider any that offend a personal sense of mathematical beauty.
there are a lot of counterexamples to this in The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler, where he argues that invention is driven by play, intuition, and following a "sense of beauty":
In the popular imagination (...) men of science appear as sober ice-cold logicians, electronic brains mounted on dry sticks. But if one were shown an anthology of typical extracts from their letters and autobiographies with no names mentioned, and then asked to guess their profession, the likeliest answer would be: a bunch of poets or musicians of a rather romantically naive kind. The themes that reverberate through their intimate writings are: the belittling of logic and deductive reasoning (except for verification after the act); horror of the one-track mind; distrust of too much consistency (...); scepticism regarding all-too-conscious thinking (...). This sceptical reserve is compensated by trust in intuition and in unconscious guidance by quasi-religious or by aesthetic sensibilities.
670 words last tended to on 2022-04-26 — let me know what you think