Interconnected

I had a look to see when I first mentioned Samuel Arbesman here. It was 2011: the average size of scientific discoveries is getting smaller.

Anyway I’ve been reading his new book, The Magic of Code (official site).

There’s computing history, magic, the simulation hypothesis, and a friendly unpacking of everything from procedural generation to Unix.

And through it all, an enthusiastic appeal to look again at computation, as if to say, look, isn’t it WEIRD! Isn’t it COOL! Because we’ve forgotten that code and computation deserves our wonder. And although this book isn’t an apology for technology (computing is meant to be for the humans, says Arbesman), it is a reminder - demonstrated chapter by chapter - that wonder, delight and curiosity are there to be found.

(And if we look at computation afresh then we’ll have new ideas about what to do with it.)

Now I’m decently well-read in this kind of stuff.

Yet The Magic of Code is bringing me new-to-me computing lore, which I’m loving.

So, in the spirit of a virtual book tour - an old idea from the internet where book authors would tour blogs instead of book stores, as previously mentioned - I asked Samuel Arbesman for a reading list: 3 books from the Magic of Code bibliography.

(I’ve collected a couple dozen 3 Books reading lists over the years.)

I’ll ask him to introduce himself first…

Samuel! Tell us about yourself?

I’m a scientist and writer playing in the world of venture capital as Lux Capital‘s Scientist in Residence, where I help Lux explore the ever-changing landscape of science and technology, and also host a podcast called The Orthogonal Bet where I get to speak with some of the most interesting thinkers and authors I can find. I also write books about science and tech, most recently The Magic of Code, as well as The Half-Life of Facts and Overcomplicated. The themes in my work are often related to radical interdisciplinarity, intellectual humility in the face of complex technologies and our changing knowledge, and how to use tech to allow us to be the best version of ourselves.

The best way to follow me and what I’m thinking about is my newsletter: Cabinet of Wonders.

I asked for three fave books the bibliography…

#1. Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science, edited by Harry R. Lewis

I love the history of computing. It’s weird and full of strange turns and dead ends, things worth rediscovering and understanding. But it’s far too easy to forget the historically contingent reasons why we have the technologies that we have (or simply know the paths not taken), and understanding this history-including the history of the ideas that undergird this world-is vital. More broadly, I want everyone in tech to have a “historical sense” and this book is a good place to start: it’s a handbook to seminal ideas and developments in computing, from the ELIZA chatbot and Licklider’s vision of “man-computer symbiosis” to Dijkstra’s hatred of the “go to” command. Because the ideas we are currently grappling with are not necessarily new and they have a deep intellectual pedigree. Want to know the grand mages of computing history and what they thought about? Read this book.

Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science: Amazon

#2. In the Beginning… Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson

I’m pretty sure that I first read this entire book–it’s short–in a single sitting at the library after stumbling upon it. It’s ornery and opinionated about so many computing ideas, from Linux and GUIs to open source and even the Be operating system (it was written in the 1990’s and is very much of its time). Want to think about these ideas in the context of bizarre metaphors or a comparison to the Epic of Gilgamesh? Stephenson is your guy. This expanded my mind as to what computing is and what it can mean (the image of a demiurge using a command line to generate our universe has long stuck with me).

In the Beginning… Was the Command Line: Amazon / Wikipedia

#3. Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, Chaim Gingold

Chaim Gingold worked with Will Wright while at Maxis and has thought a lot about the history of SimCity. And when I mean history, I don’t just mean the way that Maxis came about and how SimCity was created and published, though there’s that too; I mean the winding intellectual origins of SimCity: cellular automata, system dynamics, and more. SimCity and its foundation is a window into the smashing-together of so many ideas–analog computers, toys, the nature of simulation–that is indicative of the proper way to view computing: computers are weirder and far more interdisciplinary than we give them credit for and we all need to know that. Computing is a liberal art and this book takes this idea seriously.

Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine: Amazon

Amazing.

Hey here’s a deep cut ref for you: in 2010 Arbesman coined the term mesofact, facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime, or too slowly for us to notice. I think we all carry around a bunch of outdated priors and that means we often don’t see what’s right in-front of us. I use this term a whole bunch in trying to think about and identity what I’m not seeing but should be.

Thank you Sam!