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”.
ALAN KAYOf course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
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The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
ALAN KAY