So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".

Did the campfire smoke spell out their exact location to nicely make up for the distorted distance perspective for lights at night?

Yeah, it's called Neurolinguistic Programming, and it's not quite a science yet. (E.g. the Wikipedia entry just straight-up calls it pseudo-science.)

In brief, it started with linguistic analysis of transcripts of videos of therapy session with some very talented and successful therapists. (The analysis was informed by the same Transformational Grammar of Chomsky that also informs formal language design.) It was noticed that some people tend to favor "preferred" sensory systems, and a model of subjective experience was developed that allowed for eliciting and encoding subjective processing "strategies". (E.g. most good spellers use visual memory to recall a picture of a word, and then check it kinesthetically for correctness ("it feels right"), and read it off from their minds' eye. Bad spellers typically do something else. Teach a bad speller the good "strategy" and they can suddenly spell well.)

That was nearly half a century ago.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." ~William Gibson

> Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.

~Robert Anton Wilson

So, yeah, don't pop off on the bus or anything and you're doing alright.

> "Oh, yeah, if I didn't have inner peace, I'd completely go psycho on all you guys all the time." ~Lenny, from "The Simpsons"

In re: #2 Of course your mind has layers. Who does your breathing when you're not watching it? Also, the nervous system in your gut is as large as your brain (just distributed, spread around, yeah?)

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Second, I'm an internal-dialog person (FWIW), when I picked up one of the Star Trek (original series-based) novels and read it my mind spontaneously (as in it surprised me) used the actors' voices for the characters dialog. E.g. when I read Kirk's dialog I heard it in Shatner's voice automatically! Same for the other characters. It was pretty startling.

Are you kidding? It's like drilling up geysers of money.

The ten most profitable companies in the world are nine oil companies and Apple.

Count the cars and trucks and planes and generators and leaf-blowers and chainsaws and every piece of plastic ever and thousands of chemical byproducts... oil is everywhere.

Oil is black gold.

FWIW, oil is massively subsidized: war isn't cheap, eh?

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I doubt it requires big research to make good tools. Inventing "zero" wasn't done by committee. In any event, the research has been done. It is steadfastly ignored. E.g. something as simple and straightforward as Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" applied uncreatively would measurably improve the majority of user interfaces out there. There's a near total disconnect between good UI design and what gets inflicted on IRL users. Evidence: every change ever made to every app or web app that made the users scream. Heck, "Google backtracks on search results design (techcrunch.com)" is on HN front page as I type this. At best people are fucking UI/UX to make a buck, but most of them do it because they suck at their jobs.

This isn't limited to UI design. E.g. MLs have had type algebra for decades and yet it's only just barely gaining traction among "professional" programmers today in A.D. 2020. Instead of flying cars we have Rube Goldberg machines made out of other Rube Goldberg machines.

That's why "When small groups of motivated people [try] they make rapid progress." Because what we're using now is refried merde.

It doesn't scale either because people are stubborn about giving up crap[1] -or- it just hasn't been let.

Canon killed the Cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

Dynamicland may be fantastic but you can't buy it for money.

([1] This might be the real problem: People just don't give a fuck. Thinking takes energy- calories -and so, as an evolved animal, if you can get by w/o it, you will. "The Internet is for porn.")

I've known what I wanted to make ever since reading Ted Nelson's "Dream Machines" and that was twenty-odd years ago (it was published way earlier, that's just when I got ahold of it.) Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" was even earlier.

(I've been playing with a very simple UI demo that incorporates elements from Raskin and from Wirth's Oberon OS. Its backing store is a git repo and all changes are autosaved. It's dreamy. Raskin warns that excellent UIs are addictive in the sense that once you get used to them it's like withdrawal if you have to go back, and he's right. Mac, Windows, X et. al., it's all so painful and clunky now.)

So yeah, with a little work, and standing on the shoulders of giants and not on their toes, you can make something fantastically better than current tools/OSs. It's not hard.

It might even make money in the marketplace, eh?

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> What's needed is the development of a powerful praxis, a set of core ideas which are explicit and powerful enough that new people can rapidly assimilate them, and begin to develop their own practice. We're not yet at that stage with tools for thought.

Speak for yourselves, eh?

Here's where I think they fall into the same trap as so many people do (philosophers, psychologists, designers-of-tools-for-thought, etc.) when talking about thought: They do not define the term.

What is thought?

(As an aside the only place I've seen that can begin to claim to have a concrete mathematical theory of intelligence amplification is "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby.)

Anyhow, the folks who have the goods on the structure of subjective experience work under the rubric of "Neurolinguistic Programming" (the other NLP). Unfortunately the school of thought is still seen as pseudoscience! Oh well, what a world...

Anyway, the "machine code" of thought is called "submodalities" in NLP jargon, an (outmoded) model of "microcode" is called "strategies" but that's deprecated (I don't know how to succinctly describe the replacement models, and many of them don't have names), etc. Using the patterns and algorithms discovered or reified by the NLP folks you can rapidly and easily reprogram your mind. [2] At that point you don't really need external "tools of thought" but if that's your thing you're in a much better place to make them. (I.e. if you want to make mind-machine interfaces and such like, or design audio/visual/kinesthetic UIs and UX flows.) Here you're going to want to pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" to get a handle on the finer points of cognition and storytelling. See also Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre".

[2] For example there's a spelling "strategy" that involve using visual memory to recall the word (as a picture) and a kinethestic check for correctness. In other words, remember the word, feel that it's right, then read it off from the picture in your mind. Most good spellers use that strategy, most bad spellers do something else. You can take someone who is bad at spelling, teach them to use the proper "strategy", and suddenly they are good spellers. It's analogous to replacing a buggy spellcheck subroutine with a correct one. Spelling isn't hard, we have just been teaching badly. We are in a transition time in psychology similar to when alchemy became chemistry.

Imagine getting your Forth firmware loaded with this in it, you can already do e.g. OMeta-style grammars because it's still Forth, so you can send your device a language description preamble and then just talk to it in whatever language you like, all in one stream.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta )

After my experiences with postscript (and being a web user like everyone else) allowing for recursion when you don’t really need it freaks me out a little.