From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Morally good hypertext
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 21:47:35 GMT


                                        Tuesday, the 22nd of December, 1992

Rob Jellinghaus had quoted in his .sig:
              "Next time you see a lie being spread or a bad 
               decision being made out of sheer ignorance,
               pause, and think of hypertext."
                             -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_

I used it as an occasion for complaining about Drexler's book, thusly:

  ...I wanted to comment that this one sentence epitomizes everything
  that irked me (and still irks me) about K. Eric Drexler's book.

And Marvin Minsky responds:

  Hmm.  I have a feeling that something's wrong here.  First, it is a
  seminal, important book.  But this particular sentence doesn't make
  sense out of context.  Drexler is expressing the hope that at some
  point in the future, when you quote someone about something you will
  automatically include a pointer to the portion of text that you're
  quoting from -- so that a reader can effortlessly refer back to the
  source!

  And so, Mike Morris, in case I've got this wrong -- which is possible
  because I don't have the book at hand -- would you mind repeating for
  me and for Steve Dyer, a bit of the context surrounding the cited
  sentence from Drexler's book.

First, let me say that I well understand _Engines of Creation_ is a
seminal, important book.

Second, let me say that while I do have the book at hand, I will start
without turning to it, and simply try to explain the context to which
I was referring.

My overriding complaint about the book has to do with Drexler's
can-do scientism. Now, whether that says anything or not about his
science (artificially intelligent assemblers, for example) being overly
optimistic, or over-sold, I don't know, but his discussion of the
brave, new world of hypertext and fact fora really put me off and, frankly,
made me suspicious of the rest. It would seem to me that hypertext, as
Drexler describes it in _EoC_, means the electronic linkage of text to
text, sort of a super footnoting system linking everything to everything
else. Imagine, say, the Library of Congress at your fingertip, where
you are reading, again say,
                        ``...of one whose hand,
        Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away
        Richer than all his tribe;...''
And you can immediately choose to connect to the folktale to which this
alludes, or to the Pearl of Great Price, or to the pearl fisheries
Columbus found at Margharita Island. Yeah, I think this might be kind of
a neat gizmo, a thinkably useful tool.

My complaint about Drexler, though, is only that I do not believe that the
ability to refer instantly back to the exact words that were said, or to
the exact figures that were calculated, does much for stopping lies being
spread, or stopping bad decisions being made out of ignorance. In other
words, I do not think Truth is to be found in such a system. I believe
that Drexler's encomium to hypertext presupposes a kind of reading that is
a simple sum of unit factoids, each factoid scientifically determinable
by trained experts. I.e., a kind of reading that is a little akin to
the interlineal reading and writing style that is natural to people here.
The trouble with this is that I think reading is *very* interpretive, and
that the forging of the interpretive links between book and book
is a highly *creative* process. I.e., I wouldn't necessarily trust
anyone else's hypertextual linkages, unless they were of the most
trivial, factual kind---the kind which are mostly uninteresting.
I also think that this interpretive process is very holistic, and that
we often simply misread when we read interlineally. Finally, I do not
believe that there is even one important political problem, say, which
would be analyzable into unit, scientifically decidable factoids.

One way I have of putting it is that I think the real problem is much
worse than the ``if we could only do a 10 times better job at science
education'' advocates would have us believe. I think the real problem
is more a failure of critical thinking, and a failure to hold critical
thought in high honour. A reading-and-writing system suited to
television-era attention spans---what I suspect hypertext might well
end up being---sounds to me like it might even be a step backwards.

                      Mike Morris
              (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)