Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
As an extended toy universe Lego is great but as STEM skills and intuitions catalyst it is a cul de sac of arrested development. There is a weird way it directs your attention away from all the hard problems, which are partly encapsulated away, partly curated out entirely.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
It is an extremely expressive medium for modeling some closed-world subsets of engineering in a way that achieves a certain stylized skeuomorphic fidelity at the expense of insight into base principles. Technic mitigates that somewhat but still feeds the wrong motivations.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Toy universes are like standardized tests. Being good at standardized tests mainly demonstrates that you have a talent for standardized tests. Being good at Lego mainly demonstrates that you’re good at Lego. True of toy-like programming languages/environments for kids too.
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