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Andy Matuschak Profile picture
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22 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Sutherland’s ’63 Sketchpad thesis is a great counterpoint to my whining about troubles of doing both research & implementation. His final iteration (incl far-reaching abstraction insights) took ~1 year, including custom hardware! cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UC…
Blackwell and Rodden, who wrote the new preface for the thesis’s ’03 publication, note: "The struggles of developing custom hardware while also exploring far-reaching abstractions are also far removed from current research experiences.” Maybe that should be less frequently true!
(though as I’ve mentioned before the struggles of developing custom software while also exploring far-reaching abstractions are more than I can confidently handle!)
I think about this picture all the time. What a handicap—and yet!

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More from @andy_matuschak

Andy Matuschak Profile picture
22 Jan
Quite touching reading about all the emails @slatestarcodex got during his hiatus. astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive

I forget this too often, so a catechism: praise is positive sum, and most people are not nearly as close to the point of diminishing returns as I might imagine!
When I email someone who’s written a popular book/essay/paper, I always subconsciously imagine that email’s going into a black hole, a drop in a bucket full of fan mail. But most of the time I get a reply which makes it obvious that’s not the case!
It’s a weird asymmetry in my theory of mind. For whatever reason, the amount of happiness I imagine a nice note would bring to someone else is less than what I usually feel myself in the same situation!
Read 4 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
18 Jan
🎉 New essay reflecting on my experiences so far as an "independent researcher"—ill-defined though that term is.

andymatuschak.org/2020
I view "independent researcher" as a probably transitional-title. If the work is good, it'll probably be better to institutionalize.

Why not start a startup? Doesn't make sense to optimize for growth.

Why not be an academic? Some big misalignments with my adjacent field (HCI).
Crowdfunding has been a surprisingly successful route for sustainable independent research. It's pretty clear that my experiences depend on lots of accumulated career capital, but I suspect other experienced tech people could crowdfund weird work like mine.
Read 6 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
11 Jan
Omar's thinking about interfaces is consistently striking and unusual, in the best possible way. I'm delighted to have a chance to support a kindred weirdo independent researcher!
Interesting to see the tensions implied by a funder drive like this one. It's centered around a specific project, and focus/utility surely brings in extra donors… but that emphasizes maintenance and roadmaps ("funding a project") over open-ended research ("funding a person").
FWIW, Omar, if you had a research-centric funding thing up ("fund me to keep working on and writing about my weird ideas"), I'd be a happy sponsor! I'm not a heavy tab user, so TabFS isn't the draw for me—just the ideas. 🔮❤️
Read 4 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
1 Jan
🎉 New essay: andymatuschak.org/prompts

This essay catalogues techniques and mental models for writing good spaced repetition prompts—not just to remember stuff but as a method for creating understanding.
I've been working with authors to extend the mnemonic medium beyond Quantum Country, and prompt-writing has been a consistent challenge—even for experienced authors. So I wrote this guide to distill what I've learned through my own practice and my work with @michael_nielsen.
It's a mnemonic essay, exemplifying its own advice by weaving prompts about the content into the text.

But it's very different from Quantum Country. These are fuzzy heuristics, not laws of nature. How does the medium support reading non-technical material? This is an experiment.
Read 5 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
24 Nov 20
I’ve really enjoyed 2020’s flowering of Substack writers, but I also enjoyed this criticism of the medium’s impact on thought: nintil.com/substack-milqu…

One reframing: is there an adjacent model which can support book-depth thought? Or even three-month-essay-depth thought?
I’ve heard the argument that maybe one can support book-writing by writing a weekly newsletter *while* writing a book. Ideally the newsletter might be exhaust from research or book-drafting sessions. I think @antonhowes is trying this! I’d love to see success stories here.
Note that this approach is the opposite of a common practice: write a blog for a few years; get popular; staple posts together into a book. I like some of those books, but they usually seemed just as good as blog posts: they don’t seem to be accessing new depths as books.
Read 6 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
31 Oct 20
When teaching, it feels natural to center on powerful ideas or techniques. But it’s usually better to center on *questions*—ideas and techniques can follow. Ideally, they’re deep, meaningful questions with no “right” answer, an active object for experts in the discipline.
e.g. If you're studying history, details are important, but usually in service of broad, enduring questions like "when and how do individuals make a difference?"

Wiggins & McTighe call these "essential questions" in Understanding by Design, a great text on instructional design.
I love this idea but often forget it when I'm writing or giving a talk. Institutionalized education sets a bad cultural norm: a teacher's supposed to know the answers and tell them to you… not ask impossible questions! Obviously, I don't *believe* this, but it sneakily seeps in.
Read 7 tweets

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