[airstrike]

From EWD387:

> The other two speakers that gave three one-hour lectures, Dr. McKay from IBM, Yorktown Heights and Professor Engelbart, SRI, Menlo Park, were both terrible. McKay spoke undiluted IBMerese for three full hours and I am not going to give any further comments; I only heard the first hour —like many participants— and that was enough (too much). Because I had an urgent letter to write I missed Engelbart's first lecture —it was not really a lecture, he showed a movie— but I attended his next two performances. He was not only terribly bad, he was dangerous as well, not so much on account of the product he was selling —a sophisticated on-line text-editor that could be quite useful— as on account of the way in which he appealed to mankind's lower instincts while selling it. The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous. (Sentences like "the half-life of a fresh university graduate is five years" are only correct if you have crammed the curriculum with volatile knowledge, erroneously presented as stuff worth knowing.) His anti-individualism surfaced when he recommended his gadget as a tool for easing the cooperation between persons and groups possibly miles apart, more or less suggesting that only then you are really "participating": no place for the solitary thinker. (Vide the sound track of the Monsanto movie showing some employees: "No geniuses here: just a bunch of average Americans, working together."!) The two talks I heard were absolutely insipid, he had handed out a paper "An augmented knowledge workshop.": the syntactical ambiguity in the title is characteristic for the level of the rest of the article. As a result of his presentations I have told a few of the participants that I had found, thanks to this seminar, a new software project. "Because in the years to come there will be a crippling shortage of competent programmers, I shall develop a software package, called "The Instruction Interpreter". From the moment of its completion, users do no longer need to program, they just give their instructions to the system." (This is only an edited version of one of the paragraphs of the Engelbart article!) I would have liked to start a discussion with him but I knew that my lack of mastery of the understatement would have made me too rude for English ears if I had spoken. Finally —after a more than two-hour effort in the middle of the night in sorting out his muddle— I decided that he was not worth the trouble. (One of the most offending conclusions I ever came to!)

[ontouchstart]

Wow