Talk:Engelbart's law

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It's Not a "Law" Because It's Wrong.

Things only get better for a while. Then they uniformly level off -- unless, like cancers, they destroy their supporting substrate or circumstances, in which case they self-destruct.

If we're looking for capital-l "Laws," it would make sense to go with the S-curve, it seems to me. If we're looking for observations about intrinsic rates of human performance, I think the dominant one would be that they vary, sometimes "increasing," sometimes "decreasing." I use quotation marks to mean that the rate of anything resides in the description, not in the thing or action itself. If you get more wheat out of a field that may be an increase in wheat per unit area or a decrease in the productivity of fertilizer, water, or labour. Whether or not it's an increase in your crop of wheat depends on how many fields you have planted, not just on the one.

Parenthetically, I've sorry to have just found out that Doug died a couple of years ago. He was a good and creative man, and I don't for a moment blame him for the fact that people have taken his sound observation -- that any improvement makes previously impossible changes possible -- into an unsound "law." The bogosity is ours, the enthusiasts', not Doug's.

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 16:14, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What does it mean?

What do 'the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential', 'Humans have long performed at exponential levels', 'visualization of this exponential phenomenon', etc, etc, mean? I know what 'exponential' means; I mean I *really* know what it means, I'm not just one of those idiots (growing in number?) who pepper their conversation with it because it sound clever. And, because I know what it means I can make no sense of the items quoted. Engelbart was obviously a clever fellow, so if he came up with a law let's be told what it it is. I can't help but wonder if 'law' is being used for the same reason that 'exponential' is: just because it sounds clever (there is a growing list of such words: 'demographic', 'methodology', 'iconic', ...). 86.142.126.226 (talk) 13:28, 23 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]