Here's a neat idea I had today: an art teacher app. Basically it runs you through a series of drawing exercises where you take a picture of what you've drawn with your phone, and it analyses the result and gives you feedback. So if your circles aren't circular enough, or your lines aren't straight, it can tell you, and give you a specific score for each exercise that you improve over time.
You could add in-app purchase type stuff for learning to draw specific things or licensed characters. So you can learn to draw Mickey Mouse if you're willing to pay a couple dollars, and Disney gets a cut. Maybe even have some kind of marketplace where people can put up their own exercises or figures, and take a cut that way. Then the app and basic exercises could be free, which would be a nice thing for kids who want to learn to draw.
I quite like the idea of a specific kind of educational software that works even without any other education. The idea that someone could learn with nothing but code to teach them is one of the coolest things I can think of.
I was doing an exercise today that involved goal factoring, where you attempt to break down a complex motivation into much simpler sub-motivations. For example, you like to read books, but why? Maybe you enjoy the quiet and relaxation of reading, or you just like knowing things, or you enjoy the identity of being someone who reads. Depending on those sub-motvations, you might find better, more targeted ways to achieve them.
The specific question in this case was to goal-factor my time sinks: things I put a lot of time into without much reward. Obviously there's some sub-motivations there that are actually valid, becuase it's not very common to choose to do something that doesn't appeal to you in any way. So I thought about a few of the beneficial factors of social news sites like Reddit or Hacker News, things like being a constant source of novelty, information and new ideas. But I also realised there's another important effect that you get, not just from social news but from all entertainment: analgesia.
I've noticed that the times when entertainment is most appealing to me are when I'm experiencing some kind of psychological discomfort. If I've been thinking too hard and my brain's tired, boom, Reddit. If I'm trying to avoid thinking about something, TV lets me avoid it for hours. If I'm in a bad mood, if I'm frustrated at some problem, if I'm tired and irritable, the internet is there, waiting with open arms to take me away from my worries by bombarding me with constant novelty.
Viewed from that light, it's easy to see one way that entertainment becomes pathological, much the same way as any other painkiller. It gives you relief from discomfort, but unfortunately doesn't address the discomfort's source; that's still there waiting for you when you're done, giving you every reason to continue avoiding it with more entertainment. Not only that, but over time you can become accustomed to using entertainment to avoid problems, making it difficult to deal with them any other way.
That's not to say that entertainment is necessarily unhealthy, or that analgesia is the only value it has, but it's worth considering that at some point it turns from recreational into pathological. And the real danger is that it feels good the whole time.
Today I happened upon the marvellous Elian Script. It's a kind of pigpen alphabet, where each letter corresponds to a position in a tic-tac-toe grid. The first nine letters are represented with equal-length lines. The next nine by unequal-length lines, and the last nine (well, eight) represented by unequal-length lines with a mark of some kind. The rules are so simple that they leave an enormous range of calligraphic expression, and the results can be really striking.
It got me thinking about the idea that there's a certain fundamental relationship between ambiguity and art. What I mean is that art relies on making creative choices that can't exist if those choices are prescribed by necessity. So I wouldn't describe the integers as art, for example; there's really only one possible set of integers. But I wouldn't be totally opposed to more abstract mathematics being described as art, to the extent that there's no particular right answer to a lot of high-level maths.
I've heard it argued that languages are redundant to serve as a kind of error correction. You can say "he is at the beach", but if you say "he are at the beach" people will look at you confused - but why? It's not like the meaning is unclear. On the other hand, maybe you meant to say "we are at the beach". The redundancy works as a kind of fallback so you can catch problems. Some constructed languages set out to remove that redundancy, at the cost of less error correction.
But that error correction actually provides an interesting source of artistic choice. You can break the rules of grammar and rely on there being enough redundant information to fill in the blanks. A lot of poetry relies on creative breaking of traditional grammatical rules. But even without breaking rules there's a lot of creative choice between valid but equivalent words and structures. You can order words in numerous different ways. There are numerous different ways you can order words. The different ways you can order words are numerous.
And there's maybe no better example of ambiguity and art going together than the delightful phenomenon of QR code art. QR codes are designed with a high degree of error correction (much higher than English) so that they can be easily identified even when captured by bad phone cameras in bad lighting conditions, out of focus, and tilted or rotated in crazy ways. All that ambiguity gives you a lot of space to play in.
Elian Script fascinates me because I'm not used to (western) character systems having that much ambiguity. They're possibly the most strictly symbolic system I can think of. Even calligraphy is fairly limited by having to faithfully represent so many different shapes. By contrast, having such a minimal and distinctive set of actual constraints, Elian Script leaves so much choice and so little direction that you feel obligated to create your own.
It seems to me that there's something unique about performing something, as opposed to practicing it. Normally we think about that distinction in terms of the arts, but I think it applies equally well to other work. Part of what makes code-on-a-whiteboard interviews so famously bad, for example, is that most people are used to writing and rewriting code in private before anyone else gets to see it. That's not to say you can't write code in public, but it's a skill you'd have to develop separately.
I think the distinction between practice and performance involves a kind of bar that you set, saying "until it gets to this point, I'm not making it public". And you behave differently when that line isn't there. It provides you with a kind of safety: if you make a mistake or do something wrong, you can just go back and fix it before it passes the bar. Not having a bar forces you to deal with your mistakes rather than erase them, and it forces you work differently because you know you whatever you do is going to be judged immediately, rather than waiting until you're ready.
Maybe that's not what you want all the time, but it seems very valuable to be able to perform what you know, rather than just practice it.
There's a funny thing that happens to beginner musicians, singers, runners, and just about everyone doing something physical: they tense up. Runners tense their fists, guitarists their forearms, singers their throats and so on. It's like a reaction to being slightly out of your depth: you overcompensate by trying to add more power the only way you know how. Of course, all that extra power is just your muscles fighting themselves, and an important part of getting better is learning how to stop doing it.
I think there's an analogue in psychological tension too: when we have a difficult thing to do, it's easy to add extra unnecessary difficulty to it and make it seem bigger than it is. I sometimes pick up an old project that I abandoned and feel a sense of guilt that I didn't see it through the first time. Of course, that guilt is nothing but another kind of tension: your thoughts fighting themselves.
Ideally, you want each thing you do to take only as much energy as it actually needs. Anything extra is just inefficient.
