Andy Matuschak

Design friends: I highly recommend @edelwax's new talk! [link] Years ago, Joe wrote a wonderful talk on the challenges of metrics called "Is anything worth maximizing?" This is the followup, presenting a design approach intended to escape HCD's goal orientation.

Was reminded recently of one of my favorite papers on social learning. It centers on a clever lie! Subjects study some material, then quiz either a peer or a bot about it. They learn much better when they think they're quizzing a peer. Secretly, in both cases, it's a bot!

Some tantalizing discussion of the instigation of Illustrator on p. 84, but I wish it were more than a few short sentences. Still, lots of interesting details here—thank you!

In case you haven't seen, there is this great 2018 talk from Chan and a couple excellent colleagues (miss you guys!):

[link] I found the Four Star books helpful for learning techniques (things to note when scanning a piece before beginning to play) but they must be supplemented with tons more at-level music—not enough in each book to pass each level IME.

Really enjoyed this thread, Connie—thank you! Sharing some notes in a similar vein in case they're of interest:

I've not found the "how to be more creative" genre terribly fruitful myself, but some of the "creativity research" work has been pretty interesting. Klein's "Seeing What Others Don't" might be a nice starting point there if you haven't seen.

I don't think any really have its mystique, though of course there are many other great books. It's pretty interesting, actually, that no others seem to have the same cultural vibe. SICP is just so singular.

Read through the CHI '21 proceedings last week. My favorite paper was this very interesting AR tutor, which features in-context guides and multiple levels of scaffolding, adapted in realtime to user behavior. PDF: [link] Abstract/videos:

Quite breathtaking paper: [link] Computationally identifying transcriptional phenotypes by using CRISPR interference to knockdown genes, then sequencing millions of cells (!) to correlate the varying perturbations with transcription effects.

I spent much of yesterday reading this book and have really been enjoying it. Thank you for a phenomenal resource. And thank you for licensing it so liberally—I may use it as part of a research program on augmented learning media…

Holden K's been writing a great series exploring why depictions of non-ironic utopias are so rare / unappealing. I really love this suggestion in his latest post—that you can get a feel for a "moderate" utopia thru media centered on sports or performing arts.