Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…What is the experience of watching George Hotz on the stream code up tiny grad? How does that compare to just being in an office with him? Because even if you're in an office with him, there would be constraints on his time and how much engagement there would be. Why isn’t video a scalable way to increase apprenticeship? I'm actually incredibly excited about streaming as a medium for this. We're gesturing at a particular kind of learning that needs to happen. It's often called tacit knowledge. One of the things that you have to learn to do as an engineer is to learn to deal with 100,000 different weird situations where something is not behaving the right way. Eventually you learn pattern recognition, you learn ways of dealing with this. Much of this is not described in any book. It's not explicitly taught. You just learn it by doing it over a long period of time. By watching George do it, I think that people do absorb stuff. They can absorb some of that knowledge. That's part of how apprentices absorb that knowledge. There's a few things that are missing. You're not getting feedback. There's a whole lot of chaff there. There's a whole lot of stuff that probably isn't all that meaningful. It's also true for apprentices. I'm pretty excited about streaming videos. I've complained loudly that there aren't more designer streamers. One of the things that I think is really interesting is that we have some disciplines like programming where there are a million books on courses about how to learn to program. They don't give you everything you need. There's this tacit knowledge stuff that you need to develop. If you work through these courses, if you go through the MIT OpenCourseWare for computer science, you'll be able to build some stuff and you'll be able to lift yourself up. This is not true in all domains. In particular, design, but lots of other domains that are like that, like musical composition, architecture, something like this. Nope. It's normally done in studio classes. Lots and lots of hands-on feedback. The feedback is highly contingent. It's highly contextual. We just haven't figured out how to communicate this. It's good to see lots of programmer streamers, but I really want to see the streamers in these other domains. On the point about more programming books. Ironically, the reason why there's some more resources on programming is that it's just so legible, but it already makes it easier to understand in the first place. You just have this reinforcement. Nand to Tetris is like a video game analog to learning, maybe not just programming, but how things in the internals of a computer work but programming has an element where it already feels like a video game. I have a friend who has a sort of intense sort of manic energy, and he used to be addicted to video games when he was a teenager, and now he just stays up all night in these coding binges. It's just the same part of the brain. Are you optimistic about things like video games and fiction being able to work and feel as though they're not already kind of like a video game, like programming?…

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