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Comment by dkural | Hacker News Reader

I think Bret Victor is a living genius. So much of what is designed today implicitly accepts the layers of nonsense imposed on us as "the way to do things", convinced that nothing better is possible. It is somehow hard to see when you are the person who prefers a horse cart to a car, accusing Model T of being impractical, if it was so great why is everyone using carriages etc. claiming it's a "well debugged and understood system". He is attempting a rethink of the entire field starting from first principles, asking at every decision point if we needlessly separate modalities. He is one of the few people that gets me excited about computing and its future.

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Tangential, but it always irks me when people who do interesting things get exalted as geniuses. To me, it's just a roundabout way of allowing yourself to lower your expectations: "that guy/gal is a genius, so clearly I shouldn't even bother trying to accomplish things on their level".

Recently, I've been really impressed by the stuff Bret Victor, Vi Hart, and Nicky Case have been doing. But I don't put them on a pedestal. I dig into their source code, learn some lessons, and set my goals a little higher. That's how we make progress.

This isn't just a tech problem, either. The concept of "canonical" artists, writers, and musicians can really stifle creativity and make people aim way lower than they ought to.

I haven't thought of it this way before. Thanks for changing my perspective.

And I think he's heavily overrated because he presents well.

For one thing, his basic premise is not really much different from Engelbart and Kay.

For another, he doesn't propose specific processes or nuts and bolts design. The thinking trails off after "and then we make it more interactive..." Again, Engelbart did this. We've incorporated some pieces of it. We can still refine things. But the design problems always exist in the realm of compromise - if we automate more, we also have to specify more. General purpose solutions tend to fall back towards tried and true. When you put up a slick interactive demo, you have the benefit of being able to solve a very small problem, very precisely.

You know what UX problem needs the most solving? Documentation. You made a thing to automate a thing. But you didn't document it. So it's too non obvious to bother with. So it doesn't get used. The best work that Victor, Case, et al have done is fundamentally a form of documentation, not expressive tools. I've seen lots of folks try to take the lesson to heart and make their app more like that documentation. But it's a mess because it tends to leave out some necessary level of power or performance to be a good tool. It's extremely expensive to add the interactivity in many real world cases.

I have never followed him before and the article does little mention his actual accomplishments. Do you think he is a living genius because of his talks/ideas or has he actually implemented anything revolutionary to back up those ideas?

You must have an idea to implement. Innovation begins with philosophers who think up thought provoking concepts, then scientists set out to discover/prove/disprove these concepts, and engineers implement. You can be a genius at each one of these stages.

Sure, but can these ideas be called genius until these concepts are tested and implemented? These ideas may sound great on paper (or on computers as his interface of choice), but the implementation details may not necessarily succeed and create this revolutionary new paradigm.

Yes, his work has directly influenced key projects at Apple (iPad, Swift), Chris Granger (Light Table, Ada), and his work has inspired countless other projects, initiatives, and people interested in UX.

You are right that only time will test, if Bret's ideas are long-lasting and it might be a bit premature to put him on a pedestal. But it can be said that he has already inspired a lot of people with his work, which to me is a sign that these ideas have been bubbling under on other people's minds too.

You may not consider him a genius. But Bret does have some pretty innovate ideas on Programming and Design (and more). Good examples:

Inventing on Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

The Humane Representation of Thought: https://vimeo.com/115154289

My opinion is based on his writings and talks, available on his personal homepage worrydream.com ~ he has prototyped a number of his ideas as interactive webpages, responsive development environments, demos as part of his talks etc. The genius scale is not usually known to be an objective and absolute system of measurement :) Part of the magic is (I believe) that he was outside of any narrow corporate project, or the confines of the paper publishing & grant system; and was able to explore and develop some of the ideas with the free thinking and depth required on his own time - in this day unfortunately true freedom today lies outside of both industry and academia.

I also reject in more essential terms the line of thinking around "actually implemented anything revolutionary as opposed to talks/ideas". Don't underestimate the power of well-argued ideas. See re: horse carriages above. You need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is ideas, sketches, equations, talks. If it doesn't make sense to you, fine. If it makes sense to some people, they'll go and use, reuse, some of the ideas in a hundred different projects and implementations. The turing machine was a mathematical device invented to solve a rather abstract mathematical / logical problem. It took some time to get to the iPhone from there. You need free space for the next Turing Machine to come from. Those types of ideas are very rare.

Side note - It is curious to me that some of the most interesting projects start out as "side projects" of PhD students, since they have the free time (the true quantity of which rarely admitted), usually not directly related to narrow research focus of whatever P.I. they work below minimum wage for asked them to work on.

I think it'd be fair to refer to him as such once people use his ideas as inspiration to create something revolutionary, but it seems weird to do so preemptively.

I might be missing something but a website that intentionally breaks scrolling and wrecks havoc with the standard page display doesn't really speak too highly of UX genius.

I'm not saying he's not a genius, I'm just frustrated that he's making such elementary mistakes on his own website for the sake of graphic design "beauty". It's almost ironic because he has articles up there that kinda rant about just this type of thing...

Everything about the website screams scroll down, (Chrome Win10) but the scroll wheel doesn't work and there is no middle click option(!), On MSEdge the scroll does work but veeeeeery veeeeeeery sloooooooowly (and still no middle click).

What you're missing is that Bret Victor isn't the author of that web page.

If you want to some of his inspired UX, view https://vimeo.com/67076984

Ah thanks, I knew someone with the amount of work (just from that page) wouldn't make such an obvious blunder.

If you mean http://worrydream.com/ it is made by Bret Victor himself.

This reminds me of a friend of mine who I worked with years ago.

His background was graphic design or photography or something but he had worked at a very high level at a revolutionary software company.

He then went to a small company that was acquired by Google. Once there, he was working with these freshly minted Stanford HCI PhDs.

They wanted to do studies and gather empirical data before making even the smallest decision. My friend would say "trust me, I've seen this before, this is the correct answer" but he'd get overruled and they'd go through all this effort and end up at the very same conclusion.

Some people just "get it". Pay attention to them.

How do you know who "gets it" though and isn't just a cult of personality that sells you on his ideas that may be wrong. I'm sure once his ideas are consistently backed up by the data they pay more and more attention to them?

I don't know why you're downvoted, as this is a very real problem in many sectors with self-proclaimed "gurus".

Anyone who "gets it" will be measurably right often enough that nobody should have to take things on faith for very long.

This is a good question but I think you are exaggerating what OP meant.

What he says is that some people have very good intuition (build on experience and some perspective) which allow them to make good decisions without the need to conduct lengthly studies before they make any decision.

This might not be good scientific inquiry but it does make them very effective in moving things forward. Furthermore much of that intuition is built around a very unbiased view of the world which means they might be wrong but will be quick to adjust.

Compare that to those Phd students who only learned a method but don't have any other way than to ask others what the right decision is.

It's like reading a book and not understanding what it's about.

And keep in mind that you don't have to be right to "get it your way" data can back you up repeatedly and you end up failing anyway because you are measuring the wrong things.

You could use this same argument to argue against testing software. If one of the people who "gets it" has written this piece of software then there should be no reason to test it because they _know_ it works. Anyone coming in for a job interview at a professional company with this attitude will not be taken seriously.

"They" are human and are prone to the exact same errors and mistakes as anyone else. Google is technologically successful because they try to base their decision on analyzed data instead of a gut feeling.

And yet Android UI is mediocre and isn't a qualitative improvement on the previous status quo.

I think the point of GP is that listening to the 'someone who "gets it"' can speed up the development process. Indecision has costs, and you can run studies in parallel anyway. Sometimes costs of having to backtrack every now and then are outweighted by the benefits of moving fast.

RE arguments against testing in code - testing is cool and all, but at some point you have to ask yourself whether you want to ship a product or a test suite.

BTW. the whole anecdote reminds me of a story from Microsoft about problems coming from a group of PhDs:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html

"Getting it" can also mean having already tried something before, or having tried enough things that are similar that you can triangulate on what something would actually be like.

I'm all for testing and empirical studies, but it can be taken too far. Zynga focuses so much on measuring and testing, that it sucks all the fun and personality out of their game designs.

Empirical data tends to find local maximas. You need someone with a vision how it all fits together and which guiding principles to embrace.

The projects in which Brett Victor is involved have serious implications for HCI. Implementing them in a way that makes them impactful requires ubiquity and that NECESSARILY takes hundreds of man-years across many companies/products/individuals.

It would be a waste of his time to do more "implementing" than quick sketches for the purpose of communicating the ideas. His ideas are his "product".

I associate the word genius with thinking and ideas rather than production. Which is to say, accomplishments can be ideas or new approaches (not just implementations). Wikipedia helpfully mentions "new advances in a domain of knowledge". Many people here are not be convinced that an advance has been made without an implementation, without functioning proof. Maybe you would say you can only look back later once ideas have been proven to classify someone as a genius. Not everyone is like that. For me, genius is independent of proven success. It's more a general mode of operation, a type of creativity coupled with directed effort, and you know it when you see it. I think this dichotomy of people is interesting and helpful. Maybe the people calling Bret a genius are just in the latter category, and you're in the former.

I agree wholeheartedly! The premise of his "Magic Ink" article [1], "Interactivity Considered Harmful", ruffled my feathers until I read his explanation.

He argues that interactivity is actually a failure state of software that doesn't figure out what the user wants from history and context, without demanding their time and attention.

>"I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means."

>"Information software design can be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. I demonstrate the crucial role of information graphic design, and present three approaches to context-sensitivity, of which interactivity is the last resort."

Working at TomTom on GPS navigation really drove that one home, where an "interactive" user interface could cost people their lives. Imagine a popup that said "Did you really mean to miss that exit? [yes] [no]", instead of just recomputing the route without asking.

[1] http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#interactivity_considered_har...

Bret is the real thing. His video talks are epic.

I'd like to put him and Loren Brichter (another genius) in a room and be a fly on the wall, and listen.

His ideas are inspiring. But I'm a "mechanical" guy, I want to know how it works. Stop me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be very little on that front.

If you look for instance at LightTables, which sort of scratch the same visualization itch. The demos are awesome, but then you think at what it takes to make them work, you realize it's a lot of case-per-case work. Work people won't always be willing to put in to have a nicer visualization of a problem instance. It's dead in the water for general debugging, for instance. I can see it work for specialized frameworks (animation ...) and scientific research however.

So I'm interested but not excited enough to jump into the bandwagon before I know where it's headed.

I fully agree. Does anyone have an insight into: Why doesn't he make the source the code he uses in his presentations (e.g. the demo in 'Inventing on Principle') available? It would be hugely instructive and joyful to play with that code :)

Edit: typo

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