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ENGLEBART_HIERARCHY

                                             July 13, 2021

Englebart's 1962 proposal is unfortunately full
of a lot of made up jargon for concepts that
don't seem all that heavy or interesting:

    process hierarchy                              It seems that he likes to
    repertoire hierarchy                           say "hierarchy" instead of
                                                   referring to, say, sets of
                                                   capabilites, because he
                                                   thinks of them as having
                                                   components, and you might
Discussing what we now call "word                  go after improving a
processing" or "text editing" software:            sub-process to improve a
                                                   process.
    "Even so apparently minor an
    advance could yield total changes              The trouble with this, I
    in an individual's repertoire                  think, is that hierarchies
    hierarchy that would represent a               are "directed acyclic
    great increase in over-all                     graphs" with single nodes
    effectiveness."                                at the top (is there one
                                                   life process, one god
For "individual's repertoire hierarchy"            repertoire?) and child
you could easily swap in the phrase                nodes are owned by one
"individual's capabilities" without losing         parent node-- aren't
anything.                                          there low-level capabilities
                                                   like "pattern recognition"
                                                   that are useful for many
                            "deep augmentation?"   different higher-level
                                                   ones?

                                                     Englebart may have found
                                                     it useful to think
                                                     about things this way,
                                                     breaking down human
                                                     cognition into multiple
      It could be that Englebart is                  trees of components,
      simply thinking about "layers",                but trotting out something
      without really worrying about                  like this in public
      the structure of the connections               without anything like
      between the layers.                            scientific support
                                                     seems dubious.



                   It's easy to attack this material,
                   to make fun this wonky late-50s/early-60s
                   attempt at understanding humanity,
                   but maybe it's worth remembering that
                   Englebart actually *got somewhere* with
                   this sort of reasoning.

                   If you've got some sort of taxonomy of
                   human intellectual tools in your head,
                   even if it's a slightly nutty taxonomy,
                   you still might be able to use it to
                   generate interesting ideas for new tools.


                       "Let's build a system that let's
                        Nunzio Nusono send emergency
                        requests to Dominic Darrio."








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