Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:27:04 -0800
From: Chaim Gingold
Subject: Re: [journal] organizing state
Not off the top of my head from the text itself, and I don’t have time right now to dig through Augmenting Human Intellect, but I’m almost certain it’s in there.

Talking with his daughter brings this point home: she points out that Doug’s tools offered more powerful ways of working, but people had to work hard to learn how. The chording keyboard is a great example. She and her siblings were drilled by their dad on the chording keyboard. And in AHI he talks about about the tools as well as craft knowledge (but I don’t remember the term he uses).

c

On Jan 27, 2016, at 2:13 PM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:

Do you have an example of Engelbart being attuned to that, Chaim?

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 1:25 PM, Chaim Gingold wrote:

On Jan 27, 2016, at 12:57 PM, Robert Ochshorn wrote:

I’m not specifically anti-acronym, but I don’t recall Engelbart acknowledging any cognitive burden to the recursive layering of acronyms, which strikes me as absurd.

This is a minor point in your overall email, but I want to point out that Engelbart is deeply attuned to the labor of mastering a new craft. I think his orientation that people need to master new tools is powerful, but it did hamper the accessibility of his systems (and writing and acronyms). I don’t think it’s an easy knot to untie; mastery and accessibility are in a dynamic tension with one another.