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Screenshot Saturday: Learning How To Learn
🕑 Added 2018-07-21 23:54:07 +0000 UTC This week, I made two mini-prototypes for my next explorable, on the science of learning! You can see them in the GIF above. (imgur link if you don't see it) The first one is a crappy clone of Flappy Bird/Helicopter Game, because I want to show how learning in games is similar to learning in anything. The second half is a visualization of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of Flow, combined with Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development highlighted in yellow. I'll explain this better (...it better be better...) when the full thing comes out – hopefully late August!Other Updates & Behind-The-Scenes:
- The Explorables Jam starts next week! It's an online hackathon from July 28 to Aug 19.
- My essay on Humane AI, How To Become A Centaur, won an MIT Competition, and will be published in an open-access MIT Press compilation in 2019! I'm a Real Author™ now, hooray
- Speaking of writing, I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing short stories. Here's a 6-minute story, my response to the writing prompt: “The dead can still create works of art for the living to enjoy.”
- And finally, a question for you: what books do you recommend, on writing? I want to improve my writing craft + start a habit of writing for a half hour a day. I've already read Pinker's The Sense of Style and Zinsser's On Writing Well. (although those might be worth re-reading) Any other how-to books you recommend on improving one's writing?
Thanks! <3
~ Nicky Case
Comments
Lorenzo Romeo
I quite enjoyed How to write short by Peter Clark. It has some marketing undertones but it's still quite interesting in underlining the importance of brevity in certain situations and how to craft impactful messages.
Mark Zimmermann
to learn to write better, read great books! -- Shakespeare, Gibbon, Tolstoy, et al. -- it really makes a difference ... and "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life" by Anne Lamott is a rather nice idiosyncratic guidebook for some types of writing ... likewise the longish 2013 essay <a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/endless-rewriting/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://theamericanscholar.org/endless-rewriting/</a> = "Endless Rewriting" by Helen Hazen re advice given her by Jacques Barzun ... and Arnold Bennett's 2013 long article "The Author's Craft" is worthwhile (see <a href="http://zhurnaly.com/HowToWrite" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://zhurnaly.com/HowToWrite</a>for a summary of some points) ... ditto Chapter 66 of "I. Asimov: A Memoir", an autobiography of Isaac Asimov (cf. <a href="http://zhurnaly.com/Asimov_on_Writing" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://zhurnaly.com/Asimov_on_Writing</a> ) ...
Ian Gilman
This isn't a book about writing, but since you mentioned centaurs, I've been reading <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34836326-after-on" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34836326-after-on</a> (which indeed features discussion of centaurs (in the AI/human sense), though it's only a small portion of the book). I've been thoroughly enjoying it, and therefore recommending it (even though I haven't even finished yet) to everyone (which now includes you). That said, looks like there are some strong negative reviews on that Good Reads page… My recommendation is to read the first 5 or 10 pages, and if you love that, the rest of the book is like that. If you hate it, well, the rest of the book is like that! ;-)
