Built Quantum Country.

Transcript context

…I have complicated feelings about this. I need different advice on different days. Of course, different people need different advice on different days. When I was getting into this kind of work, what that advice led me to do is to not think all that deeply about the ideas I was exploring. An idea would come up and I’d think, “Oh, I can try that.” I would try that, then I'd learn something, and then I'd repeat. There wasn't this sense of building a theory of what the problem is and what it would mean to solve it. Instead, it was just a theory of action. A theory of action as opposed to a theory of change is, imagine you're in your current position, and eventually want to get to some goal state, a theory of action is you look around you and you say, “Well, what can I do? What can I build? What do I see as possible?”. A theory of change is to look at the endpoint to try to work backwards. The metaphor is imperfect because in research, you don't exactly know what the endpoint is and you certainly don't know how to work backwards. I guess what I'm saying is that following that advice historically has led me to try things that were straightforward. The most powerful design work has ideas in it. What makes a nonlinear text editor, the text editors that we all know and love, so powerful is this observation that writing is a nonlinear process, but writing with a pen linearizes it. Many, many other observations like that and on the nature of what it means to have a thinking environment is how we got that particular interface. Likewise, the way that we got powerful programming environments is by people thinking very hard about what it means to specify a system and coming up with new primitives that express those ideas. The most powerful interfaces are often the expression of new ideas or new primitives that capture new ways of doing, new kinds of objects that can be manipulated. In Photoshop, for instance, you can manipulate a photo by means of a construct called a layer. This is a very strange idea. It has some precedent in dark rooms where you could potentially have sheets of film. I don't mean the negatives, I mean sheets of gels that you could potentially put over lights to affect the exposure - to make there be more exposure here and less there. But in Photoshop, they're non-destructive and they're continuously manipulatable. The layer is like a new primitive that is introduced into the activity of photo editing. It utterly changed what you could do in photo editing. What I'm saying in a very long-winded and confused way is that it's difficult to have ideas by means of building an MVP very rapidly. Now, if you have an idea that you think is interesting, it is good to test it rapidly. Part of why I'm confused in my response here is that it's good advice once you have something worth testing. dly. Now, if you have an idea that you think is interesting, it is good to test it rapidly. Part of why I'm confused in my response here is that it's good advice once you have something worth testing. For me, adopting that mindset, and I've lived in it for so long that it's very ingrained in me, it makes me not sit in stillness and in confusion and in contemplation with the ideas long enough for them to be good. Michael Nielsen and I made Quantum Country and when I was trying to think about what to do next, the most obvious or natural idea was “What if we just tried that with lots of other things? ”. That idea occurred to me and the pandemic had just struck, so I was feeling a little timid, creatively or emotionally. I wanted something that felt safe and I knew I could do that. I can build a platform that generalizes this thing that we did for this textbook. So I did. And I did it relatively quickly. I did it in a few months. And that wasn't the right thing to do. It wasn't really the right question to be asking. The idea wasn't that strong. Building this highly general version of it wasn't the right way to test it. I would have been better building more one-offs rather than a self-serve thing that anyone could use. And this comes down to the difference in aim. I'm not trying to build some kind of scalable thing for the world at this moment. I'm trying to build the idea. The prototype is an expression of the idea. Once it arrives at a good place, then maybe there can be some scalable solution. But it's not necessarily at that place. Until it's at that place, there's a lot of thinking and sketching that goes along with the building and prototyping. Part of my confusion here is that often I still need to hear this advice. Often I will just tie myself in knots in theory land. What I really need to do is to have a friend sit me down and say, “Is there a piece of this that you can carve off and build next week?” So you're hearing a lot of tension. Interesting. What was the consequence of shipping Orbit out before it felt ready to scale?…

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