Training is an essential part of Engelbart’s vision; it’s part of the H-LAM/T acronym:

I think he’s right that there are some things that take a good deal of time to learn but that pay off. I’m happy, for instance, that I can type very quickly on a QWERTY keyboard. And it’s a valid point of argument that I might have been better off if I had learned a chorded keyboard. I can see benefits, as well as drawbacks.

But there’s a big difference between training to learn a system, and training to understand each individual document in the system. I was referring to Engelbart’s fixation on acronyms (he calls them “abbreviations”):

 

This is coming from a reading of Whorf which I don’t believe has held up into the 21st century:

This very interface captures my suspicion of extending-language-and-thereby-extending-thought-through-abbreviation (ELATETTA): while nearly all of the words that Engelbart uses have a rich set of connotations that are captured by the scatterplot—even many of the proper nouns like Korzybski and Whorf—H/LAM-T is a string of characters without any semantic connotation. Something might, eventually, be gained by adding “H/LAM-T” into common usage, but my claim is that there is a severe cognitive cost associated with the use of characters outside of known semantic understanding. Engelbart thinks that “quick look-up” will overcome the strangeness of these characters. I disagree.

I’ll include a little more about this technique, below. I haven’t really gotten it to a satisfactory state yet, but it’s starting to point some directions forward.

More broadly, I’m interested in “seeing inside” of search. I’m blown away by the amount of complexity that Google is able to hide with their ten blue results. It’s an incredible achievement, but perhaps we’d expand from our own “personalized” perspective if we were able to better understand the “space” in which we are looking.

Your correspondent,

R.M.O.

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