Lu Wilson and Top Down vs. Bottom Up
Scrappy fiddles but expert presentation? What gives
Recently I’ve been writing these appreciation posts for people I read online.
I did one for Bret Victor, I did one for Simon Sarris, and I’ve been thinking of doing one for Patrick McKenzie.
This post is a cross between an appreciation post, and my thoughts on a tweet exchange I saw. This is apt, because I only know of Lu through twitter, and rarely read her blog. They are always sharing cool little demos on twitter, weird front-end magic like a sketch board with a built-in calculator that can tell you ‘three’ + ‘two’ is 5.
Anyway, he recently retweeted some stuff about her philosophy on sharing their research.1 He’s been an evangelist of normalizing the sharing of scrappy fiddles. I don’t know the proper definition of scrappy fiddles, and I’m not gonna look it up. But I imagine that a scrappy fiddle is a half-working thing, an unfinished idea, a sketch of a greater whole.
The tweet2 I’m thinking of was from a third party. This person was complaining that when he shares his scrappy fiddles, he gets no engagement, and feels discouraged. A different third party3 told him to do what Lu does, scrappy fiddles, combined with expert presentation.4
https://twitter.com/anselm_io/status/1850937222763335755
Why the disconnect? I love the scrappy fiddles, that’s classic bottom-up, but a great presentation, that’s so top-down. One of the ideas of this blog is that bottom-up is good, top-down is bad.5 Why should we make the presentation even more top-down using (god I don’t even want to utter this word) practice?
One answer would be that presenting is by nature top-down, so you gotta suck it up and make it good top-down. Sorry bro, you are the sage on the stage, you gotta actually be the sage now. This is fine, except it doesn’t explain anything.
A ‘better’ ‘explanation’ is what Anselm says in the tweet above. It’s the only way to get noticed. Why? Why do you need such a top-down presentation in order to be noticed?
Oh fuck me, this is what I get from not doing my research, I was about to talk about how Lu mentions top down in this post, but never talks about bottom up.6 Then I google todepond top down and find this fucking post, where Lu clearly delinates the difference: https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/bottom-up/screw-it/
Anyway, this only furthers my idea, as Lu is a proponent of bottom-up, yet he practices his presentations. Why does he defect from the bottom-up approach he recommends in research? In the community post, he even talks about how researchers hamstring themselves with the top-down by thinking about use cases. If even the idea of a use case can tarnish exploration, then what is Lu doing polishing his talks?
Well, that gets into the idea of top down vs. bottom up being
order vs. chaos, or
sense vs. nonsense
People, every single day, every single second, are being bombarded with nonsense from all directions. All this nonsense cannot be attended to, there is far more than can be sorted through. If you give other people nonsense, they will ignore it.
Instead, you need to give them some sense. Sense might be the wrong word here, you need to give them some order. You have to spoonfeed a little, or a lot. You’ve been steeping in the jungle, communing with the thoughtforms, your familiarity with the work is not shared by the class. They need handholding, they need grips, they need places to latch on. They need top-down.
Okay, that was basically the point of my piece, when showing new stuff to other people, the presentation needs to be much more top-down than the process that was used to find it. But that makes sense anyways, top-down is noun, bottom-up is verbs. Things vs. actions.
Is there anything else I can generalize from this post? Probably. Can’t think of anything right now though. Shoot, this could’ve been a tweet.
Anyways, Lu, now that we’re best friends I expect to collaborate on a full list of top-down bottom-up dichotomy glossary.
Lu’s pronouns can be found here. I respect the disrespecting of pronouns, Douglas Hofstadter really seems to have the right idea with pronouns and gendered language, see https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html At the same time, I say “guys” all the time, like, does he really expect me to change my language, c’mon man!
Honestly though, this is getting annoying to read for me so I’m going to stick to he/him pronouns for the rest of the post because that’s what came up when I clicked the link to his pronouns.
There’s probably an insanely tortured analogy to make with respect to pronouns and top-down, this need to categorize, but I’m not gonna make the analogy, you’re welcome.
(remember, this is all from Twitter, the place where I get all my news)
A fourth party???
This post will have terrible presentation, this isn’t a demo, it’s a response for me, and maybe other people.
This goes double for the idiotic top-down view espoused about how top down is bad, bottom up is good.
Rereading the post, he mentions bottom-up in the same place, hell he links to the bottom up post in his first reference of top down wtf was I reading?????