[alankay1]

Closer to home -- for example in the US public educational system -- we have prime examples of your (and Easterly's) point about "band-aids" vs. "health". After acknowledging how politics works, I think we can see other factors at work in those more genuinely interested in dealing with problems. Some of these are almost certainly (a) the idea that "doing something" is better than doing nothing (b) that "large things are harder than small things" (c) the lack of "systems consciousness" amongst most adults (d) pick a few more.

The "it's a start" reply, which is often heard when criticizing actions in education which will get nowhere (or worse, dig the hole deeper) is part of several fallacies about "making progress": the idea that "if we just iterate enough" we will get to the levels of improvement needed. Any biologist will point out that "Darwinian processes" don't optimize, they just find fits to the environment. So if the environment is weak you will get good fits that are weak.

A "being more tough" way to think about this is what I've called in talks "the MacCready Sweet Spot" -- it's the threshold above the "merely better" where something important is different. For example, consider reading scores. They can go up or down, but unless a kid gets over the threshold of "reading for meaning" rather than deciphering codes, none of the ups and downs below count. For a whole population, the US is generally under the needed threshold for reading, and that is the systemic problem that needs to be worked on (not raising the scores a few points).

To stay on this example, we find studies that show it is very hard to learn to read fluently after we've learned oral language fluently. Montessori homed in on this earlier than most, and it has since been confirmed more rigorously. And this is the case for many new things that we need to get fluent at and above threshold.

So at the systems level of thinking we should be putting enormous resources into reforming the elementary grades rather than trying to "fix" high schools.

And so forth. This is the logic behind building dams and levees and installing pumps and runoff paths before flooding. One recent study indicated that the costs of prevention are 20% of the costs of disaster.

We could add to (d) above the real difficulties humans have of imagining certain kinds of things: we have no trouble with imagining gods, demons, witches, etc. but can't get ourselves beforehand into the "go all out" state of mind we have during an actual disaster (where heroes show up from everywhere). The very same people mostly can't take action when there isn't a disaster right in front of them.

This is very human. But, as I've pointed out elsewhere, part of "civilization" is to learn how to "do better than human" for hard to learn things.

[mmiller]

Hmm. So, it sounds like the same "keyhole" problem I've seen you talk about before (you used an AIDS epidemic as an example with this). What's seen is taken as "good enough," because the small perspective seems large enough. If there are any frustrations or tragedies, they're taken as, "It goes with the territory. Just keep plugging away."

There's a parable I used to hear that I think plays right into this:

Two people are walking along a beach, and they see an enormous field of starfish stranded ashore, and one of them starts throwing them, one by one, back into the sea. The other is watching, and says, "What's the point? You're not going to be able to save all of them." The person doing the throwing holds up a starfish, and says, "I can save this one."

It's a nice thought, talking about good will and perseverance, and certainly the message shouldn't be, "Give up," but I think it nicely illustrates the "keyhole" problem, because ideas like this lead people to believe that because they can see people who need help, even if the number is more than they can handle, and they're trying to help those people in the moment, that they're improving their lives in the long-term. That may not be true.

I've seen you talk about the "MacCready Sweet Spot" in relation to the Apollo program. BTW, I first heard you talk about that in a web video from some congressional testimony you gave back in 1982, when Al Gore was Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee. When you said that the Apollo rockets were below threshold, not nearly good enough to advance space travel, and that the rockets were a kind of kludge, the camera was panning around the room, showing large posters of different NASA missions that had been hung up around the chamber. Gore said in jest, "The walls in this room are shaking!" I can imagine! When I first heard you say that, it struck me as so contrary to the emotional impact I had from understanding what was accomplished (I do think that landing on the Moon and returning safely to Earth was a mean feat, particularly when the U.S. couldn't get a rocket into space to save our lives 12 years earlier (I don't mean that literally)), but as I listened to you explain how the rocket was designed (450 ft., mostly high explosives, with room for only 3 astronauts, not to mention that the missions were for something like 9 days at a time. Three days to get there. Two, sometimes more days, on the surface, and then three days to get home), it occurred to me for the first time, "My gosh! He's right!" It really helped explain my disappointment at seeing us not get beyond low-Earth orbit for decades. For years, I thought it was just a lack of will.

I've explained to people that when I was growing up in the '80s, I had this expectation drummed into me (willingly), as many people in my generation did, that we would see interplanetary travel, probably within our lifetimes, and in several generations, interstellar travel. It was very disappointing to see the Space Shuttle program cancelled with seemingly nothing beyond it on the horizon, and I think more importantly, no goals for anything beyond it that have been compelling. I heard you explain in a more recent presentation that this was a natural outcome of Apollo, that it set in motion something that had its own inertia to play out, but the end result is no one has any enthusiasm for space travel anymore, because the expectations have been set so low. The message being, "Beware of large efforts below threshold." Indeed!

[alankay]

We are "story creatures" and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from "fond stories and beliefs" to "actually think things through".

That the moon shot was just a political gesture -- and also relevant to ICBMs etc -- was known to every scientist and most engineers who were willing to think about the problem for more than a few seconds.

We hoped that the -romance- of the shot would lead to the very different kinds of technologies needed for real space travel (basically it's about MV = mv, and if you don't want to have to carry (and move) a lot of M, you have to have very high V (beyond what chemical reactions can produce). If you have to have a large M you use most of it to move just it! This has been known for more than 100 years.

But the real romance and its implications didn't happen in the general public and politicians.

[scroot]

And the story we tell ourselves today is, frankly, a dismal one. It's that all of computing should be invented and put into the service of "the economy" rather than people. Instead of a culture of "computational literacy" in which human thought is extended to another level to the same effect as written literacy hundreds of years ago, we have an environment of complex technologies that cater to our most base evolutionary addictions and surveil us for profit.

Our universities are no longer institutions where people learn how to think, but rather where they learn how to "do" -- usually "doing" involves vocational practices that already exist, especially those that some manager (ie provost or dean) deems economically important. This is why you have generations of programmers bitching about type systems instead of the very politics, history, and social consequences of their own wares.

We don't have funding like ARPA/IPTO anymore and the devices and software of our world show it. Everything is some iteration on ideas that came from that period, good or bad – iterations whose goal is always "efficiency" in some form. Our current political culture prevents big initiatives like this, because how on Earth would they benefit the economy in the short or medium term, the limits of our new horizon?

Because these technologies have been created in service of an economic system that has proliferated social problems, they can never be a meaningful solution to those problems. Sure, we might invent some new systems for dealing with environmental catastrophe, but they are always predicated on the assumption that people should consume more and more. We are at the behest of billionaires – smart ones, mostly – who understand complex systems but also have an interest in ensuring that they remain complex.

It is unlikely that we will achieve a new kind of transcendent way of computing until we change the way we think about politics and economics. That is our environment. That is the "fit" that our technical systems have, as you say.

[mmiller]

Great description of the problem (and great description of what we could have instead)! What came to mind as I read what you said here was a bit that I caught Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about from 8 years ago. As I heard him say this, I thought he was right on point, but I also felt sad that it's pretty obvious we're not thinking like this in computing. It turns out this is not just a problem in computing, but in science funding generally. That's what he was talking about, though he was quite polite about it:

https://youtu.be/UlHOAUIIuq0?t=22m30s

It strikes me that a very corrosive thought process in our society has been to politicize the notion of "how competitive we are" economically. Sure, that matters, but I see it more as a symptom than a cause of social problems. I hate seeing it brought up in discussions about education, because sure, competition is going to be a part of societal living, and in many educational environments, there's some aspect of competition to it (a story I heard from my grandfather from when he entered medical school was, "Look to your left. Look to your right. Only one of you will be graduating with a medical degree," because that was the intended ratio along the bell curve), but bringing economic competitiveness into education misses the point badly. I understand where the impulse to focus on that comes from, because globalization tends to produce a much more competitive economic landscape, where people feel much more uncertain about basic questions they have to answer. Part of which is creating the life they want, but often people end up missing a significant part of actually creating it (if it's even feasible. What I see more often is a compromise, because there are only so many hours in a day, and only so much effort can be put into it) in the process of trying to create it. They get caught up in "doing," as you said.

As I've thought back on the '60s, it seems like while there was still competition going on, the emphasis was on a political competition, internationally, not economic. There was a significant technological component to that, because of the Cold War/nuclear weapons. The creation of ARPA and NASA was an effect of that. My understanding is we underwent a reorientation in the 1980s, because it was realized that there was too little attention paid to the benefits that a relatively autonomous economy can produce, killing off bad ideas, where what's being offered doesn't match with what people need or want, and allowing better ones to replace them. That's definitely needed, but I'm in agreement with Kay that what education should be about is helping people understand what they need. Perhaps we could start by telling today's students that if and when they have children, what their children need is to understand the basic thought-inventions of our society in an environment where they're more likely to get that. Instead, what we've been doing is treating schools like glorified daycare centers. Undergraduate education has been turned into much the same thing.

[scroot]

> My understanding is we underwent a reorientation in the 1980s, because it was realized that there was too little attention paid to the benefits that a relatively autonomous economy can produce, killing off bad ideas, where what's being offered doesn't match with what people need or want, and allowing better ones to replace them.

There was a rightward swing in the late 1970s that took root in our political system, then commentariat, and then culture. It has never reverted. The term "neoliberalism" gets thrown around (usually by dweebs like me) but it's the precise term to use. Wendy Brown's recent book is probably the best overview of the topic in recent years.

The cultural shift that was unleashed in that period is so insidious that you don't even notice it half the time. Think about dating apps/sites where users talk about their romantic lives using terms like "R.O.I." Or people discussing ways to "optimize" their lives by making them more efficient. It's nuts.

Steve Jobs' old "bicycle of the mind" chestnut is, in a way, emblematic of this way of thinking. He was talking about how the most "efficient" animal was a human with a bicycle. He wanted human thinking to be "more efficient." If you listen to Kay, on the other hand, he's talking about something entirely different. The transcendent effect of literacy on mankind created the very possibility of civilization, for good or ill. Computing as an aid to thinking in the way the written word was previously could take this to the next, higher stage – one we cannot really describe or talk about because we don't even have the language to do so.

But short term thinking, shareholder value, and the need for economic growth – these are and have been the pillars of our politics and culture for several decades now. No one says who that growth benefits, of course, which is why it's no coincidence that the maw of inequality has opened ever wider during the same period. If you're wondering where all the "good ideas" are, well, we don't have time for good ideas. We only have time for profitable ones, or at least ones that can be sold after a high valuation.

The culture also trickled into the university, and then to funding (not just science funding, but funding for most fields. We need more than science to do new science). I have been on the bitch end of writing NSF grants for pretty ambitious projects, and the requirements are straight out of Kafka. They want you to demonstrate that you'll be able to do the things you're saying you'll hope to be able to do. That's not how it used to work. But the angle is always the same: they want something "innovative" that can be useful as immediately as possible. Useful for the economy, that is. They don't understand this undeniable fact: if you want amazing developments, you have to let passionate and smart people screw around and you have to pay them for it. The university used to be the place to screw around with ideas and methods. Now it's career prep.

> I understand where the impulse to focus on that comes from, because globalization tends to produce a much more competitive economic landscape, where people feel much more uncertain about basic questions they have to answer

This kind of globalization is a choice, one made by powerful people with explicit interests. It was not inevitable. Right now I live in the wealthiest country that has ever existed on the planet. And right now many of its citizens are calling their elected leaders to beg them not to take away the sliver of health care that they have left. We serve the economy and not each other. When there's a big decision to make, our leaders wonder "how the market will react," rather than how people will be affected.

Last point: the idea of this thing called "the economy" as an object of policy is relatively new. Timothy Mitchell has an amazing chapter on it in his book Carbon Democracy. The 20th century was one where we allowed the field of economics to cannibalize all others. The 21st has not taken the chance to escape this.

[alankay1]

We should get "Fast Company" to interview you -- you'd do a better job! (Actually I think I did do a better job than their editing wound up with.)

Your comments and criticism of the NSF are dead-on (and is the reason I gave up on NSF a few years ago -- and I was on several of the Advisory Committees and could not convince the Foundation to be tougher about its funding autonomy -- very trick for them admittedly because of the way it is organized and threaded through both Congress and OMB).

One way to look at it is there is a sense of desperation that has grown larger and larger, and which manifests both in the powerless and the powered.

[mmiller]

What came to mind when I read your comments were some complaints I've had that relate to the "looking for the keys under the streetlight" fallacy. There are intuitions and anecdotes we can have about the unknowns, which is the best we can do about many things in the present, until they can be measured and tested. A problem I see often is there are people who believe that if it can't be measured, it's not part of reality. I find that the unknowns can be a very important part of working with reality successfully, and that what can be measured in the present can end up being not that significant. It depends on what you're looking for.

As Kay and I have discussed here, efficiency is not irrelevant, but we agree it's not the only significant factor in a system that we all hope will produce the wealth needed for societal progress. What seems to be needed is some knowledge and ethics re. the wealth of society, ideally enacted voluntarily, as in the philanthropic efforts of Carnegie, and similar efforts.

I happened to watch a bit of Ken Burns's doc. on the Vietnam War, and I was reminded that McNamara was a man of metrics. He wanted data on anything and everything that was happening to our forces, and that of the Viet Cong. He got reams of it, but there were people who asked, "Are we winning the hearts and minds?" There were no metrics on that. We didn't have a way to measure it, so the question was considered irrelevant. The best that could've been done was to get honest opinions from commanders in the field, who understood the war they were fighting, and were interacting with the civilian population, if people were willing to listen to that. In a guerrilla war, which is what that was, "hearts and minds" was one of the most important factors. Most of the rest could've been noise.

I dovetail with your complaint about focus on the economy in policy, but for me, it's philosophical: It's not the government's job to be worrying about that so much. If you look at the Constitution, it doesn't say a thing about "shall maintain a prosperous economy," or, "shall ensure an equitable economy," or any of that. Sure, people want enough wealth to go around, but it's up to us to negotiate how that happens, not the government. I think unfortunately, politicians and voters, no matter their political stripe, have lost track of what the government's job is. I think, broadly, we treat it like an insurer, or banker of last resort. If things don't seem to work out the way we'd like, we appeal to government to magically make us whole (including economically). That's really missing the point of it.

I could go into a whole thing about the medical system (I won't), but I'll say from the research I've done on it (which probably is not the best, but I made an effort of it), it is one of the most tragic things I've seen, because it is grossly distorted from what it could be, but this is because we're not respecting its function. As you've surmised with globalization, it's been set up this way by some interested people. It's a choice. I see a big knowledge problem with what's been done to it for decades. Doesn't it figure that people interested in healing people should be figuring out how to do it, to serve the most people who need their help, rather than people who have no idea how to do that thinking they should tell them how to do it? This relates back to your proposition about scientific research. Shouldn't research be left to people who know how to do that, rather than people who don't trying to micromanage how you do it? I think we'd be better off if people had a sense of understanding the limits of their own knowledge. I don't know what it is that has people thinking otherwise. The best term I can come up for it is "hubris." Perhaps the more accurate diagnosis, as Kay was saying, is fear. It makes sense that that can cause people to put their nose in deeper than where it should be, but it's like a horde panicking around someone who's collapsed from cardiac arrest, which doesn't have the good sense to give someone who knows CPR some room, and then to allow medical personnel in, once they show up.

It's looked to me like a feedback loop, and I shudder to think about where it will end up, but I feel pretty powerless to stop the process at the moment. I made some efforts in that direction, only to discover I have no idea what I'm really dealing with. So, with some regret, I've followed Sagan's advice ("Don't waste neurons on what doesn't work."), left it alone, and directed my energy into areas I love, where I hope to make a meaningful contribution someday. The experience of the former has given me an interest in listening to scientists who have studied people, what they're really like. It seems like something I need to get past is what Jon Haidt has called the "rationalist delusion," particularly the idea that rational thought alone can change minds. Not so.

[alankay1]

Clear thoughts and summary!

[mmiller]

"We are 'story creatures' and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from 'fond stories and beliefs' to 'actually think things through'."

What your analysis did for me was help put two and two together, but yes, it "collided" with my notions of what an accomplishment it was, and what I had been led to believe that would lead to. What you exposed was that the reality of "what that would lead to" was quite different, and it explained the reality that was unfolding.

I knew that Apollo was a big rocket (ironically, that was one thing that impressed me about it, but I thought how amazing it was that such a thing could be constructed in the first place, and work. Though, I thought many years later about just what you said, that the more fuel you add, the more the fuel is just expending energy moving itself!), and that there were only three people on it, though the "efficiency" perspective, relating that to how it did not contribute to further knowledge for space travel, didn't occur to me until you laid it out. I also knew from listening to Reagan's science advisor that NASA was heavily influenced by the goals of military contractors that had done R&D on various technologies in the '60s, and which exerted political pressure to put them to use, to get return on investment. He said something to the effect of, "People worry about the Military Industrial Complex. Well, NASA IS the Military Industrial Complex! People don't think of it that way, but it is."

Not too long after I heard you talk about this, I happened to hear about a simulator called the Kerbal Space Program (commonly referred to as KSP), and someone posted a video of a "ludicrous single-launch vehicle to Mars (and back)" in it. Even though I think I've heard that KSP does not completely use realistic physics, it drove your point home fairly well. Though, people would point out that none of the proposed missions to Mars have talked about a single-launch vehicle from surface to surface. All of the proposals I've heard about have talked about constructing the vehicle in orbit. KSP, though, assumes chemical propellant.

https://youtu.be/mrjpELy1xzc

"the real romance and its implications didn't happen in the general public and politicians."

In hindsight, I've been struck by that. When I took the time to learn about the history of the Apollo program, I learned that Apollo 11 made a big impression on people all over the world, but that was really it. I think as far as the U.S. was concerned, people were probably more impressed that it met a political goal, JFK's bold proclamation that we would get men to the Moon and back, and that it was a historic first, but there was no sense of, "Great! Now what?" It was just, "Yay, we did it! Now onto other things." There's even been some speculation I've heard from politicos, who were in politics at the time, that we wouldn't have done any of the moon shots if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, that it was sympathy for his legacy that drove the political will to follow through with it (if true, that's where the romance lay). Hardly anybody paid attention to it after 11, with the exception of Apollo 13, since there was the drama of a possible tragedy. Apollo 18 never got off the ground. The rocket was all set to go, but the program was scrubbed. People can look at the rocket, laid out in its segments sideways, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

[alankay]

James Fletcher -- twice the head of NASA -- had a very good speech that "the moon shot, and etc" were really about learning to coordinate 300,000 people and billions of dollars to accomplish something big in a relatively short time. (And that the US should use these kinds of experiences (wars included because the moon shot was part of the cold war), to pick "goals for good" and do these.

Most of the old hands and historians of the moon shot point to the public in the 70s no longer being afraid of the Russians in the way they had been in the 50s, and the successful moon landings helped assuage their fears. The public in general was not interested in space travel, science, etc. and did not understand it or choose to understand it. I think this is still the case today.

[mmiller]

"Most of the old hands and historians of the moon shot point to the public in the 70s no longer being afraid of the Russians in the way they had been in the 50s, and the successful moon landings helped assuage their fears."

That's what I realized about 10 years ago. The primary political motivation for the space missions was to establish higher ground in a military strategic sense, and once that was accomplished, most people didn't care about it anymore. There was also an element of prestige to it, at least from Americans' perspective, that because we had reached a "higher" point in space than the Russians did, that gave us a sense of dominance over their extension of power.

You know this already, but people should keep in mind that what got the ball rolling was the launch of Sputnik in 1957. The message that most people got from that was that the Russians controlled higher ground, militarily, and that we needed to capture that pronto, or else we were going to be at a disadvantage in the nuclear arms race.

It also created a major push, as I understand, by the federal government to put more of an emphasis on math and science education, to seed the population of people who would be needed to pull that off. I've heard thinking that this created a generation of scientists and engineers who eventually came into industry, which created the technological products we eventually came to use. There's been a positive sense of that legacy from people who have reviewed it, but I've since heard from people who went through the "new math" that was taught through that push. They hated it with a passion, and said it turned them off to math for many years to come.

The more positive aspect I like to reflect on is that Sputnik inspired young people to become interested in math, science, and engineering on their own, and they really experienced those disciplines. A nice portrayal of one such person is in the movie "October Sky," based on Homer Hickam's autobiographical book, "Rocket Boys."