The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” - because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in - the one that we think is reality.
The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.