(2024-07-10) Matuschak Exorcising Us Of The Primer
Andy Matuschak: Exorcising us of the Primer. If you want to make an educational technologist’s eyes sparkle, just mention “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”.
If you ask a technologist interested in learning what they dream of achieving, most will answer: “building the Primer.”
Fifteen years ago, I’d have given the same answer (see prev (2020-02-20) Matuschak On Primer)
As my practice grew, and as I earnestly considered what it would mean to build the Primer, I started to notice the vision’s serious flaws. Gradually, I came to see it as fundamentally unworkable
Now I feel haunted by the Primer. I know it’s not what I want to build, but some part of my mind won’t let go of that vision until it has something else it can grab onto.
In fact, I think my whole field is haunted by the Primer
I want to clearly delineate what makes its vision so compelling—what I want to carry in my heart as a creative fuel. But I also want to sharply clarify the lessons we shouldn’t take from the Primer, and what it simply ignores. Then I want to reconstitute all that into something new, a vision I can use to drive my work forward.
What I want to take from the Primer
In Nell’s adventures with the Primer, I recognize something precious and scarce from my own life. Her interactions with the book remind me of my most rewarding, highest-growth learning experiences—except that the Primer produces those rare experiences basically all the time, for every topic.
I’m thinking about what I want, as a capable, curious adult. I want to use its ideas to invent enabling environments for myself—to help me better think, learn, and create.
Immersion
My most cherished learning experiences have involved diving into a topic, trying things, getting my hands dirty, living and breathing it. In the real world, this kind of learning is somewhat rare.
The main way the Primer makes this possible is through dynamic media. (interactive)
That’s not how learning usually works in these domains. Abstract topics often demand that we start with some necessary theoretical background; only then can we deeply engage with examples and applications.
The Primer’s nanomolecular microscope helps Nell dip her toes into cellular biology, but it’s also a tool which makes expert biologists much more capable
It’s a tool which can grow with her into legitimate practice, a tool which in fact expands the frontiers of practice for the entire field. My collaborator Michael Nielsen has long argued that this is true of all our most powerful representations. If you make experts more capable, similar ideas will often also help novices; but if you focus on educational use, you’re unlikely to transform real work in the field
Responsiveness
Have you ever stumbled on a stairwell or lobby which felt acoustically spring-loaded—where when you hum or clap, you feel like you’re plucking an instrument, and the whole room vibrates back at you? That’s what my favorite intellectual and creative experiences have felt like. My every move is absorbed, reflected, amplified back at me through the work or the people around me.
When she expresses interest in anything, the book finds tractable ways for her to start meaningfully engaging. Then it helps her go deeper over time
Responsiveness also manifests through rich feedback, which the Primer provides continuously and often immediately. When learning somersaults, for instance, the Primer shows Nell a recording of her movements and points out where her form could be improved. But it does the same trick with abstract topics, too: Nell learns Boolean logic by manipulating waterways, and punchcard programming by manipulating an organ
Assurance
My highest-growth experiences weren’t easy or stress-free.
I had confidence that if I kept pushing, I could reach whatever I was chasing.
Likewise, part of what makes memory systems so rewarding is a sense of total assurance: if I want to remember a fact, I can add it to my memory system and be quite sure that I’ll retain it indefinitely
The Primer creates this kind of assurance for Nell. It lets her struggle—she’s often depicted attempting a puzzle many times—but it never lets her fail.
One way the Primer achieves this feeling is through dynamic scaffolding. In my highest-growth experiences, I’ve managed to find a perfect route through the difficult terrain I’m traversing
These routes are rare. Much of the time, when I “just dive in”, I end up diving into a wall, or stuck in trivialities.
But the Primer provides and adjusts this kind of scaffolding for everything Nell learns. Sometimes it does that over a span of years.
Emphasis on the emotional
My highest-growth experiences are all driven by obsession: I’ll find an idea utterly beautiful, or I’ll fall in love with a community, or I’ll feel an almost righteous need to realize some captivating vision. It’s not a cold utilitarian calculus; it’s a hot emotional fuel.
One reason the Primer’s vision sticks with me is that it emphasizes the emotional.
The Primer isn’t an encyclopedia; instead, it uses mythic stories, vivid characters, and immersive environments to create and maintain emotional connection. And the dialogue is performed by a professional who devotes her life to expressing care for Nell through her voice.
Another important emotional move: the Primer places Nell in a fundamentally active stance, framed as the author of her experiences
The Primer also recognizes that learning is an act of identity construction
I’m changing the way I view myself and the world.
Much of what the Primer does emotionally is too patronizing and manipulative—more on that soon. But the main lesson I want to take here is that it’s right to care enormously about these issues. Anyone looking to extend human cognition must engage just as deeply with emotion
Wrong lessons to take from the Primer
The Diamond Age is a novel, not a research paper, so the Primer is presented as a single whole
It’s too easy, then, to treat that vision as a single whole when saying “I want to build the Primer”
This is a mistake. The concept has serious and foundational flaws
Authoritarianism
The Primer has an agenda. It is designed to instill a set of values and ideas, and while it’s supportive of Nell’s curiosities, those are “side quests” to its central structure. Each of the twelve “Lands Beyond” focuses on different topics, but they’re not specific to Nell, and Nell didn’t choose them. In fact, Nell doesn’t even know the Primer’s goals for her—she’s never told. Its goals are its own privileged secret. Nell is manipulated so completely by the Primer, for so much of her life, that it’s hard to determine whether she has meaningful goals or values, other than those the Primer’s creators have deemed “good for her”. (agency)
The Primer is built on a foundation of what Ivan Illich has called “our pedagogical hubris”: that is, “our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.” Its design is not only patronizing and infantilizing, but (I believe) immoral. I wouldn’t want to be manipulated in this way, so why would I want to do this to others?
Finkle-McGraw commissioned it to develop creative, independent thinkers. The problem here is that Nell spends her entire intellectual life thinking about what the Primer tells her to think about. We never see her embark on a substantial creative project with her own initiative or responsibility. I simply don’t believe this can work.
Isolation
When I ask people about their most rewarding high-growth experiences, they usually tell me about times when they were immersed in something that really mattered to them, like a startup, or an art project, or a competition. Lots of learning happened, but learning wasn’t the point: it was subsidiary to some other meaningful purpose, often pursued in community with others
By contrast, Nell is immersed in a fantasy world where the primary aim is learning. It’s isolated from any external meaningful purpose
Worse, the Primer is also isolated from other real people
The problems with both kinds of isolation become vivid when I think about the kind of enabling environment I want for myself, rather than what I think might be “good for” others.
Wonderful games like Portal and The Witness do reliably cause players to learn complex ideas without explicit instruction—so couldn’t we teach everything through games?
Advocates of this approach are satisfied with making mediocre games
Games are designed first and foremost to be fun—or beautiful, or engrossing, or exhilarating. Games are an aesthetic medium
It’s true that in some games, players end up developing certain skills or understandings along the way. But that doesn’t mean we can make a great game that teaches anything. You’re seeing the survivors
Even if you could make an effective educational game for any topic, you’d be competing along the wrong axis.
What if you don’t compete on pure fun, but on some other aesthetic value?
even in that framing, you’re still saddled with a demanding extra constraint, one that your competitors don’t have. You need to produce an irresistible aesthetic experience while also ensuring that the player thoroughly learns some disciplinary topic.
I’m absolutely not arguing that learning can’t be fun or profound.
I’m also not arguing that these experiences can’t be explicitly designed, or scaled to many people. Y Combinator, the startup accelerator program, uses a huge amount of authored structure to convey a set of ideas and values: talks, dinners, office hours, rituals, feedback, deadlines, and so on. This program isn’t a game; these people aren’t “playing founder”.
There are many important lessons to take from games as we try to transcend the Primer. It’s possible to design interactive environments which help people understand complex ideas through simulation and realtime feedback
In some of the Primer’s most vivid passages, Nell learns not by being instructed, but through inquiry and experimentation in a highly structured environment
Discovery learning is all you need
I understand the appeal. Inquiry learning implies hands-on immersion, rather than dull lectures.
we shouldn’t conclude that it’s all we need.
this issue has been debated at great length in the educational psychology literature
I’ll quickly summarize a few of the key issues.
Discovery learning methods often ignore learners’ extremely limited working memory capacity. In many experiments, we’ve found that when people solve a problem by straining their cognitive resources to their limits, they aren’t left with enough capacity to actually learn from the problem.
Likewise, these methods often fail to consider the realities of long-term memory.
Discovery learning emphasizes the concrete. That’s great for intuition-building and engagement. But much domain knowledge relies on abstraction
It’s worth noting that the Primer isn’t pure discovery learning! When Nell is young, the book and its characters provide guided instruction through storytelling
When Nell grows old enough to read on her own, she gains access to books within the Primer, which we’re told she studies avidly. There’s an important pattern to the books. Nell usually encounters a subject first through a discovery-oriented activity (like the chains in Turing’s castle), then once she’s built intuition and meaning through concrete interaction, she finds a book which details the topic more formally and in greater depth.
Constructing a new vision
Even as I leave the Primer behind, I still see dynamic media as central to each of those properties. Interactive representations and simulations make immersion possible for more topics.
But we do need to leave the Primer behind
I see no way to incrementally rescue its structure from these flaws.
Instead, I think we should invert the Primer’s structure. Our system should be designed to help us engage in the projects and interests we find meaningful, rather than to “achieve learning goals”. Our system should be woven into the world around us, where the things we care about are happening, instead of in a fantasy world confined to a screen. (Product Oriented Unschooling)
It would be more like a general-purpose enabling environment, a tool for thought which would increase the likelihood and speed of learning-dependent action. (tools for thought)
What form might this system take? If it’s woven into our involvement with the world, as I think it must be, it’s not quite a book anymore. It seems to be a medium in the sense that air is a medium for sound: it’s an ever-present conduit
This probably means a kind of ubiquitous computing.
you can see a first sketch of what a general enabling environment might look like in my recent presentation, “How might we learn?”.
See Adrian Hon
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