Extreme thinking, by Michael A. Nielsen

This is a great essay. The core tensions that he outlines for developing a sense of purpose really resonated for me:<p><pre><code> "I believe that the key to developing a strong sense of purpose and meaning is to balance three activities. o The first is development of a common understanding with a large group of people with whom one is later able to feel a common sense of community. o The second is development of abilities which are not common to your community, and which eventually give you the ability to make a unique contribution to your community. o The third is making a creative contribution to your community, to something larger than yourself."</code></pre>

At the end of the first and second principles, I was reminded of thoughts by two other writers... who were mentioned in the immediately next passage (Kay and Covey, respectively). It seems like a clear nod to the audience.<p>But I'll mention my first thought anyway: abstract ideas that are difficult to reason about can be made easier to work with by finding a better representation. Hopefully one exists. Alan Kay compared multiplication with Roman numerals (in Roman times, only geniuses could do it) with today's positional numerals (in modern times, children can do it). <i>We haven't got any smarter</i>, he said, <i>we've just changed our representation system. Inventing better representation systems is something important that we do as programmers.</i> This was Kay's explanation of "point of view is worth 80 IQ points" that Nielsen mentioned.<p>Perhaps, in the context of teaching, this itself was an example of the communication technique where you set up a trigger for the audience - a striking image to evoke their own memory, or a puzzle to provoke their own reasoning - so that they take ownership of the message, and it makes more connections to their own network of pre-existing ideas. The "nod", or implicit punchline, is confirming for those who caught the reference; is completing for those who half caught it (filling a gap is another way for increasing memorableness); and just plain informing for those new to the topic. Or am I reading too much into this physicist's writing, and he has quantumed me out?

It seems that a more appropriate title might have been "Effective Learning". It's an excellent essay.

How is the card game and the bar game the same? If a man is obviously old, he can drink alcohol or other kind of drink. In the case of cards, there is only an answer.