§Enabling environments, games, and the Primer

(This turned into a full essay here. These notes are now pretty outdated.)

Rather than focusing on the Primer, I’m finding a more powerful framing to be in centering the essay around scaling high-growth environments.

• You can read a book about starting a startup, or you can join Y Combinator. Which do you choose? This is the power of an Enabling environment.
  • The latter’s a much more effective growth environment, and it’s mostly not the funding.
  • When you read the book, you’re a founder wanna-be reading about the activities of founders, and you’re not “practicing founding”; when you do YC, you’re doing founding, in a community of founders. The book’s abstract, but YC’s not: every lesson is in the context of the idea you care deeply about:
  • Enabling environments’ activities directly serve an intrinsically meaningful purpose
  • Enabling environments focus on doing what’s enabled
  • Enabling environments focus on creating opportunities for growth and action, not on skill-building
  • The difference isn’t just emotional: you’re going to learn this material much more effectively in the context of YC because it’s a Participatory environment: Participatory environments support learning
  • The format also allows its designers to author founders’ experience over a multi-month period, while Mass mediums mostly lack an authored time dimension beyond a day
  • The authentic purpose doesn’t just improve the experience for participating founders: it also helps YC’s creators design much better systems.
  • Powerful enabling environments usually arise as a byproduct of projects pursuing their own intrinsically meaningful purposes
  • Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use
  • Of course, YC’s lessons aren’t “lessons” in a traditional sense—they’re experienced as the natural consequence of your actions in that environment: YC is an Enacted experience.
  • Even though you don’t know what you’re doing as a founder (Novices in enabling environments often can’t do what’s enabled), YC’s systems give you enough support to participate authentically and hone your skills in this intense context: Enacted experiences can bootstrap active participation in enabling environments
  • But those experiences aren’t an accident: YC’s enacted lessons are carefully authored, in the same sense that a book is. Enacted experiences can create intense personal connection to authored targets; Enacted experiences amplify the power of narrative.
• Unfortunately, Enacted experiences are hard to author and Enacted experiences are hard to distribute.
  • But there’s hope: Enacted experiences have incredible potential as a mass medium
• Video game design is the best prior art we have for this.
  • (some core notes on games and enacted experiences in Enacted experience; needs to be refactored)
  • emotional experiences and narrative unfold as a consequence of player action
  • and they’re good at building skills: Games effectively develop players’ skills
  • games demonstrate how dynamic media can do things that books can’t do: Games help players evaluate their developing skills and Games help players make and adapt plans
  • but games are an aesthetic medium; they’re about “Find the fun”; they’re not externally-oriented like non-fiction and YC: Skill development in games is subservient to other intrinsically meaningful purposes
• this is the core mistake that educational games make
  • Educational games try to teach through enacted experiences
  • Educational games are a doomed approach to creating enabling environments
  • (lots more notes here from that subtree and the anti-educationalism tag; Educational objectives often subvert themselves is a good root ==todo structure subtree in outline==)
• introducing The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer:
  • The Primer reminds people of their own experiences with profound enablement
  • The Primer seems like a much better example than educational games: The Primer’s goal is to produce creative, subversive youth; it’s not about checking a bunch of learning objective boxes
  • Like games, The Primer is an enormous enacted experience, and The Primer is scalable
  • Unfortunately, the specific mechanics described in The Diamond Age wouldn’t work: see The Primer isn’t a viable enabling environment and subtree ==todo structure subtree in outline==
  • it’s hard to imagine modifying educational games to become anything good, but the Primer is closer enough to the mark to be worth criticizing, and, possibly, to learn from
  • Nell does actually feel like she’s bringing each step about; that’s not true in edu games because Enacted experiences require participant-situated cause and effect
  • the Primer is about things that really matter (The Primer’s goal is to produce creative, subversive youth, even if Nell doesn’t know it (Nell doesn’t know or share the Primer’s goals)
  • activities in the Primer are much closer to an authentic enabling environment Enacted experiences can bootstrap active participation in enabling environments
  • it could be made continuous with expert environments, rather than something to leave behind (The Primer is one big “onboarding” experience for the rest of Nell’s life)
• So how do we make this new media form? ==TODO this section quite under-defined in general; some important ideas aren’t yet captured here, but we also have big holes in our theories here==
  • Framings
  • A helpful prior art: Guided meditation app
  • The Primer++ is embedded in a field, bootstrapping participation through enacted experience
    • Tools for thought should be evaluated in the context of intrinsically meaningful purposes
  • Designing new enabling environments can be framed as designing a University++
    • Lectures can offer a glimpse of what it’s like to think like an expert
    • Powerful innovations often focus on creating new paradigms, not solving problems of the current context
  • “Primer” is an unsituated framing
  • Better media forms
  • The mnemonic medium can be adapted to author an experience which unfolds over time
    • Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention
    • Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to develop or change habits
  • Executable books (==todo==)
    • TODO What might it mean to situate games like Shenzhen I/O inside pro environments like an IDE?
  • TODO connectivism, mass media embedded in authentic contexts/communities
  • criticism of existing non-fiction dynamic media
    • Dynamic mediums usually lack an authored time dimension
    • Most dynamic representations developed for communication aren’t very enabling
  • Doing thinking/doing better
  • Knowledge workers usually have no specific methods for developing ideas over time vs. Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work
  • People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice vs. Spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice
  • c.f. §Taking knowledge work seriously (Stripe convergence talk, 2019-12-12)
  • How to make better media forms
  • Insight through making and subtree
  • ==I have to know more than this to publish, I think==

TODO:

• denigrate MOOCs; compare YC, edu games and the Primer to a MOOC; integrate Minecraft vs. the Primer

References

Thread with Michael Nielsen: Re: The Primer and Enaction