The ecological psychologist JJ Gibson proposed the concept of affordances. Affordances is information that reveals the possibilities of actions to a living thing. 1/n
Living things recognize affordances in an automatic manner (it is unconscious). That is because the prime directive of things with brains is to seek useful energy. Useful energy can only be attained by recognizing possibilities. 2/n
But what keeps me up a night is whether there is a higher human kind of thinking where one can see affordances that nobody else can see. That is, to see possibilities that nobody can think of. 3/n
You know this kind of thinking exists because you've seen it before. You've seen it in Design Patterns and you've seen it in Agile development methods. These are ideas promoted in the software space and you know why we have trillion dollar companies we inexhaustible agility. 4/n
When you see companies like @elonmusk Tesla and SpaceX and you know that they think very differently about how they build things. You know that they see possibilities that nobody else can seem to see. 5/n
Not all affordances are equal. Apparently, some of them can let you see things in a way someone without the same affordance cannot see. But these affordances, do not come innately. It comes from a way of modeling the world. 6/n
If you stumble on a model of the world that reveals the possibilities then you can find solutions that nobody has thought of. You see paths that nobody else sees. 7/n
The problem though with people who are experts who see things very differently is that they appear insane to non-experts because it appears that they violate too many rules. You know this when you watch a craftsman at work. 8/n
So it's like the Category Theorists are speaking in a plane above my plane. They surely see something that I cannot see. The only question is whether that plane of thought can translate to insight into the real world. 9/n
I come from a background of physics and computer science, that combination allows me recognize possibilities (and non-possibilities) differently from a majority of the population. However, I've been studying general intelligence and I must confess that 10/n
my former self a year or so ago could not see what I see now. That's because the strange thing about human thinking is that it is generative. 11/n
Richard Feynman was right when he said 'what I cannot create, I cannot understand'. Unfortunately, affordances need to be created by one's own minds before it can be understood. 12/n
n=12.
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