2018-11-29 BPStudy135th event page Part 1: âThe Intellectual Production of Engineersâ and Physical Education
My book, âThe Intellectual Production of Engineers,â has been well received, but books are a one-way mechanism in which textual data simply flows from author to reader. Study group lectures often tend to be one-way affairs, with the presenter speaking and the participants simply listening. For example, in a physical education class, if the teacher gives a PowerPoint lecture and the students just listen to it, will the students learn to play sports? I donât think so. Similarly, the skill of âintellectual productionâ cannot be acquired by simply listening to a one-way talk. In this issue, we would like to conduct an experiment of mixing a physical education-type class with a study group presentation.
- [[Classes are physical education]]
summary
- [/shimizukawa/BPStudy-135 Part 1: âIntellectual Production Techniques of Engineersâ and Physical Education type class](https://scrapbox.io/shimizukawa/BPStudy-135 Part 1: âIntellectual Production Techniques of Engineersâ and Physical Education type class).
- https://togetter.com/li/1293315
- [/komofr/Is there ever a time when the person answering wants to think for a minute?â](https://scrapbox.io/komofr/Is there ever a time when the person answering wants to think for a minute?â)
- Nothing Every Day: The Intellectual Production of an Engineer - NISHIO Hirokazu -
transcription
Moderator: Well, itâs time to start the 135th edition of BTSTUDY. Today, in the first part, the author, Mr. Nishio will speak on the theme of intellectual production techniques for engineers. The second part will be a talk by Mr. Saito on the theme of mathematical optimization. The third part will be an LT. Now, Mr. Nishio, I would like to ask for your cooperation.
Nishio: Nice to meet you. My name is Nishio, whom you just introduced to me. I would like to make a presentation titled âIntellectual Production Techniques and Physical Education for Engineers.
This book, âIntellectual Production Techniques for Engineers,â was published in August. The book is called âThe Intellectual Production Techniques of Engineers: Learning, Organizing, and Outputting Efficiently. This is the kind of book Iâm talking about. Books are a one-way street.
What I mean is that there are many people who only listen. It is often a one-way street where I speak one-sidedly and you just listen one-sidedly. Itâs like watching TV; you donât often give feedback to the TV after watching a broadcast. If you receive information in the same way as if there were a TV screen playing a video, you are not making effective use of the opportunity, and I think that is a waste. I would like you all to consider this as a thought experiment, but can you learn programming without writing a program?
Or can you learn to play catch just by reading a textbook?
Can I learn to play catch if I watch an instructional video on TV? If a school teacher prepared a PowerPoint slide presentation in front of a physical education class and explained how to play catch in one hour, flipping through about 60 slides, would anyone learn to play catch? What I mean is that skills cannot be acquired without practice.
Skills cannot be acquired without practice. And since intellectual production is a skill as well, I believe that it can only be acquired through practice.
By the way, this is the ninth slide, so we are about halfway through. I would like to make the workshop more physical, like a game of catch, rather than a one-way TV watching session.
Part II: Still a little more one-sided talk, Part II. Iâll talk about the before and after.
I think the concept of âbeforeâ and âafterâ is very important, but it is difficult to convey to others, so I will try to explain it clearly this time.
In a book, the author writes the text first. You, the readers, the customers, buy the book and read it. In other words, I donât have the opportunity to get feedback on what the customer really wants, but I first produce the output. Then the customer buys and reads what you have created. So this is a pre-produced state of intellectual production. But agile intellectual production is not like that; I want to create things through dialogue with the customer.
Intellectual production through dialogue. We create through dialogue. That is what we want to do. What happens in this type of intellectual production is that the more questions the participants ask, the more likely they are to hear what they are interested in and what they want to hear. Incidentally, I forgot to mention this earlier, but I am currently recording what I am saying, so I will transcribe it later. This way, content will be created after the fact. The presentation materials are prepared in advance, and the content is not just one-sidedly spoken for an hour and then everyone listens to it and that is the end of it, but the content that was exchanged with everyone here becomes content afterwards. This is the separation between pre-presentation and post-presentation.
Letâs connect this to the âstudy group is TV type.â
If you donât come prepared, you are afraid. Whatâs scary is that if you donât come prepared with rails, you donât know what will happen.
Iâm going to go back one more time to the question of what scares me, but what in particular scares me is that if I donât get the question, Iâm afraid.
The lecture will be over in about 5 minutes, and we will have 45 minutes for questions. If a scene were to occur, it would be extremely frightening. If you have an image of television, a scene on TV would be called a broadcast accident. That is why we try to avoid it. What we do to avoid broadcast accidents on TV is, when something goes off the rails as planned, we rush to fix it. We fill in the gaps by putting in some kind of content to make up for it. But if you want to have a catch-all study session, rather than a TV study session, what are the symptoms of not getting any questions?
The situation is that you throw a ball and the ball does not come back immediately. Do you think it is OK to say, âThe ball didnât come back immediately, so I have to throw the next ball! Do you think it is OK to say, âI have to throw the next ball! Or, what if the next ball comes along just as you are still hesitating to throw it because you are not used to catching it, but you are still not used to throwing it? Then, it will not be a catch ball, it will not be a catchable ball, and it will just be a place where the ball is thrown around.
If I prepare a lot of slides and I just talk and talk, thatâs what will happen. So if there are no questions here, what is necessary is not to throw a new ball, not to talk about new content. If there are no questions here, what needs to happen then is not to throw new balls, not to talk about new content, but to be in a big hurry to talk about this or that. I think it is necessary to take the time to wait calmly and carefully.
So, what I would like to do this time is to start thinking time for one minute after this presentation.
This is a new experiment this time. During the thinking time, people who had questions raised their hands, but the conversation did not start. After this one-minute thinking time is over, the people who raised their hands talk to each other in turn, but after the people who raised their hands in advance are finished, we go back to the one-minute thinking time again. In this way, everyone will be given at least one minute of thinking time each time. So, I would like to experiment with such a one-minute thinking time system this time. That is the end of the slides.
So now the one-minute timer will start. If you have any questions, please raise your hand and we will number you. Okay, number 1. You may put it down. When I finish, I will say who is number 1, and you will be number 2. Just remember what number you are. Then, number 3. Yes, number 4. I would like to ask the first four. For the first one, what is your question?
Male: I would like to know how you came up with the idea of doing this presentation, or rather, how you came up with the idea.
Nishio: Yes, thatâs right. Actually, there is a professor in the law department at Seikei University named Mr. Shiozawa, who is an extremely skilled user of IT. I heard him give a lecture at one of his events and found it so interesting that I became an auditing student and went to his class for the entire semester. That was the start. First of all, I was able to move around like this, imitating the teacher. When he is teaching a class and students are lined up in a row, he walks around like this. And then they handwrite. I write notes. Drawing diagrams and so on. After explaining everything, I say, âOkay, now who has a question? If no one raises their hand immediately when I say who has a question, Iâll move on to the next topic. I would say, âIf no one raises a question right away, weâll move on to the next one,â but I really kept on saying that. Iâm holding on for a long time. I just took a minute of thinking time, but didnât you feel that one minute was a very long time? As a silence. Normally, when there is one minute of silence in a workshop like this, I think the speaker would have said, âI donât see any questions in 10 or 15 seconds, so Iâll move on to the next topic. But we usually donât even have that much time to think about it. In Mr. Shiozawaâs class at the Faculty of Law, he was teaching Civil Law to second-year university students, and he wanted them to have a place to think by themselves. It was not a class where information was just poured out and they were told a lot of legal information and they just had to memorize it. He was a professor who thought a lot about how to draw out what he thought and how he would interpret it. And he is a professor in the law department, so it wasnât like he was presenting at a study group of IT engineers, but he was presenting and teaching in a way that we IT peopleâŚI donât know if I should say we IT people, but I had never seen before. I had a sense of urgency to see if I was being left behind, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to give it a try.
Man: Thank you very much.
Nishio: Yes. Now for the second question. Yes, please go ahead.
Man: If you already knew the contents of this book when you were a college student, how much would your subsequent efficiency change?
Nishio: Yes, thatâs right. It has been at most 7 years since I clearly began to verbalize and understand what is written in this book. So this period of time after I learned about it simply doubled or tripled. This is very 00:18:18 beneficial? I think it is ă. I know it sounds like an advertisement (laughs), but recently I have been working on a project called âUnexplored Junior,â which supports young students under 17 years old who want to challenge themselves in programming, etc. I have given them one book each at my own expense, and I think this book will last for 5 or 10 years, so I hope they will be able to use this book for 5 or 10 years. I will be very happy if they are able to transform themselves 5 or 10 years from now and say they are glad to have this book. This is an experiment to see what will happen in the next 5 to 10 years. Whether or not this book will actually last for five or ten years remains to be seen, but I am taking on the challenge in the hope that it will.
Male: Yes.
Nishio: Yes. Now for the third question. Yes, go ahead.
Man: If you were to write a second edition of The Engineerâs Guide to Intellectual Production, what would you add?
Nishio: Iâve actually been thinking about writing an expanded edition for a while now, and there are a few things that I havenât included, but youâll have to wait a bit. But wait a minute, there are some things that are not in the book. But if you search for âexpanded edition,â you will find it. For example, what I want to write about is intellectual property lawâŚI think people should know more about copyright law and so on. The technology of drawing, intellectual property rights, and contracts. Everyone produces intellectually. Programmers write programs. For example, if you are a writer, writing is a kind of intellectual production, but if you donât know anything about the laws that protect the intellectual property that is created as a result of writing, the publisher will send you a publishing contract, etc., as you are told, and ask you to stamp it and send it back. If you say âYes,â stamp your seal, and send it back, you are not protecting your intellectual property. This is a story that I am currently working on, but it has grown into a bigger story than I had expected. I havenât yet signed a publishing contract for this book. I have not yet signed a publishing contract for this book. What I mean is that I want the right to publish the contents of this book. The publishers say that if the book is made public, it wonât sell. Thatâs not true. There are plenty of publishers who have made their books available to the public, such as this one and this one. The debate is going on as to why this is not allowed. If they do not have a publishing contract, strictly speaking, they are making and selling books without the authorâs permission, which is a pseudo-illegal situation. I am not suing them. On the other hand, since there is no publishing contract, there is no obligation to pay royalties. I am saying that whether I get royalties this year or next year is not important at all, so letâs take our time and do it right. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future, and I am wondering if the publishers will not like it if I include it in the expanded edition. To blur the lines nicely, Iâm keeping a log of all the discussions about the publishing contract, but with dates. Iâm not posting them here. One interesting point that was quickly settled is that all the diagrams in the book are copyrighted by me, so I can use them to create an English version of the book without permission. I asked him if I could publish an English version of the book using these diagrams without permission, and he gave me the OK. This is because legally, it is so. I apologized if there were any expressions that might mislead people into thinking, for example, that authors are not allowed to use diagrams in a book for other publications without permission. That was concluded fairly early in the discussion. That kind of thing happened. I would like to add a lot of interesting storiesâŚI guess you could call it a column ideaâŚincluding that. I would like to add not only what I am thinking of adding at this stage, but also what I would like to add over the next five years. They say that information will be gathered by those who output information after this book is published, so I am sure that many things will be gathered by me over the next five or ten years, and I would like to incorporate new things that come up. I would like to incorporate new things as they emerge. Why donât you give names to your methods? I think it would be good if we could incorporate new things that have emerged from the information gathered. That kind of thing. I would like to write a story about how mind mapping and KJ method are all on their own and that there are many articles on the Internet that explain them appropriately without reading the books they are exhibited in. I would like to write a story like that. Is this an okay answer to your third question?
Man: Thank you very much.
NISHIO: The fourth one, please.
WOMAN: Now you said that the person asking the question can think for a minute, but when you receive a question, donât you sometimes think, wait a minute, let me think for a minute?
Nishio: I think there are times when I am asked a question and I donât know what to answer, so I ask them to let me think for a minute. I should probably say, âLet me think about it for a minute,â but I think that the atmosphere of standing in this place, or the feeling of elation, makes me say what I think.
WOMAN: What do you do in that situation? In Nishio-sanâs opinion, do you just run your mouth anyway?
Nishio: Perhaps it is not a good idea to be caught up in the TV-type habit I mentioned earlier, but you tend to run off at the mouth. I think itâs not good, but itâs not good either, because itâs not good for the TV habit I mentioned earlier. I think there are a lot of things that can happen. To be honest, when I am standing here talking, my brain is in a state like a runnerâs high, so I donât really know objectively what kind of state I am in. Therefore, when I receive a stimulus, my brain is in a state where it is turning over and over in response to that stimulus, and the result is coming out from here.
WOMAN: Very clear. Thank you very much.
Nishio: Yes (laughs) So now we have one minute of questions for the first session. Now I would like to move on to the next one minute of thinking time. Is everyone ready? After the excitement, there will be a minute of silence. We shouldnât be talking about this. Letâs be silent.
Nishio: Yes, one minute has passed. Okay, those with questions, one. Is that all, 2, 3, 4. letâs start with the first one.
Male: I think you mentioned earlier that we shouldnât name the keywords, but I think itâs important to name the pattern. For example, I think it is quite important to use the keyword ă0:26:00ă in the scrapbooking system, and I think that if I can give it a good name, it will be conveyed and I can organize my own knowledge.
Nishio: I see. I see.
Male: I was wondering if there is a contradiction. Think about it ă00:26:34ă
Nishio: I see. Iâm a little mistaken in my way of communicating that, so can I think about it for a minute now? (laugh) I thought that if I chose one method in my book and gave it a name like the 00 method, what would happen is that people would not read the book and only the explanation of the 00 method would be passed on to the world. In fact, for example, when I said, âBrainstorming,â I said, âHave you read the book by Alex Osborne called Making the Most of Imagination? If I say, âHave you read the book?â, there will be a lot of people who have not read the book, but only read articles on the Internet about what brainstorming is, and they will use it because they think thatâs what it is. So, to be more precise, instead of creating a method, a complete method, and releasing it with a name, let the book be referred to as âIntellectual Production Techniques for Engineers,â and when there is a discussion about the contents of the book, it will be mentioned under the title of âIntellectual Production Techniques for Engineers. When people discuss the contents of the book, I wanted it to be mentioned under the title of the book, âThe Intellectual Production of Engineers. For example, the title of Alex Osborneâs book, Making the Most of Imagination, is forgotten, and only the name âbrainstormingâ is circulated without people even thinking about reading it because they have forgotten it. For example, the book âJiro Kawakitaâs Idea MethodââŚthe name of the book may have been mentioned because the Idea Method is rather famous, but the KJ method is discussed in the book, and what I would like to see happen is that only the method is distributed without people reading the book. What I wanted to happen was to make it a textbook. Itâs not a book that tells you that one method is a good method, but a book that tells you that there are things like this in the world and that they came into being for this reason, and that you have to adapt them to your situation. It is not a book to teach a specific method, or to give a name to a specific method and spread the word that it is a good method. Itâs not about naming a particular method and spreading the word that itâs a good method. It does not mean that you should just repeat the methods of the past, as in ă00:28:45ă, or that you should ignore the methods of the past, but that you should build on them and improve your knowledge. It is a method of learning by trying it out for your own situation and turning the cycle around with feedback on whether or not it works well for your actual situation. It is a meta-method. I am not trying to teach you a specific method, but how to confront the situation. I expressed the concept that everyone has to create a method of intellectual production to suit their own situation. So the name as a handle to that conceptual mass was the engineerâs intellectual production technique. This is why I donât name my particular method. What Iâm actually naming it, thatâs the way I named it for that book. Is that okay? If you have any further questions, please let me know.
Male: When I reviewed the table of contents again, I noticed that many of the titles of the sections were written in the form of âdo this, do that, do thatâ without using short keywords or titles like the names of techniques. I think this is exactly what the book is trying to achieve, but I wonder if it is difficult to say what the main points of the book areâŚ
Nishio: What exactly do you mean by âhere in this areaâ?
Male: When people who are reading this are talking to each other, they use something from this book, and if you apply it here, this is what happens. When we have a conversation like this, the keyword system is the key wordâŚ
Nishio: I see. The use as a pattern language is very limitedâŚ
Male: I think it is a little weak as a keyword to be used in the construction of a conversation as pattern language.
Nishio: Sure, thatâs weak. Itâs hard to do in a conversation because it would be like how many pages of the Engineerâs Intellectual Production TechniquesâŚit would be likeâŚit was in a column called something. Itâs not an easy word to remember. There is a column on naming things in the Engineerâs Guide to Intellectual Production, I believe. For example, here it is. Itâs on page 136. In this book, the words used as handles for concepts created by others are often short keywords such as ă00:31:53ăă, but when I checked what words were used for the concepts I was advocating, I found that there are two ways of reading: âfindingâ and âassembling. I have noticed that many of them are not in the form of a single keyword in an open and coherent manner, such as reading to find and reading to assemble or grasping the big picture and understanding definitions, as I myself have thought recently when I have been writing. So the patterns donât have names. I have not given them short, compact names. On the one hand, I think itâs a good thing to have a name, because it makes it easier to refer to them. There is one reason, and it may be mentioned here as a reasonâŚbut it says exactly what you just pointed out there too. Thatâs how you read it in those words. I wanted to translate this into English, and it was my ambition to translate it into other languages as well as English. For example, if it is Japanese like âtanami,â it is cool, because you look at the shelf, it is âtanaminami. Itâs like, âI see. Itâs good, but on the other hand, when you say âsyntopic reading,â itâs easy for English speakers to understand what you mean. The reason is that, as this book itself explains, âSin means togetherâ and âtopicâ means topic, so reading multiple books on a single topic is syntopic reading, but it is not so easy for Japanese speakers to understand. I like the term ârhetorical afterimageâ very much, but the word âafterimageâ has the character âzoâ at the end of the line break. I like the term ârhetorical afterimageâ very much, but the word âafterimageâ has the character for âimageâ at the end of the new line. This is a challenge for the future. It would be good to have a name for the expanded edition. If you come up with a good name, please let me know. If you come up with a good name, please let me know. Iâll add it. I think I can add footnotes. How many questions was this, or was it two? Is it okay if I ask the second person the next question in this session? So please go ahead with the second one.
Male: I think the phrase âfearâ was mentioned earlier in the mutual direction, and I think it is good for presenters to overcome their fear as they are preparing for the presentation, but on the other hand, I was wondering if there is any way to reduce the fear or make it easier for the participants to overcome their fear?
Nishio: Yes, it is. Itâs fear. I am not very good at asking questions either, so I think there is some fear, but one way to reduce it is to start the conversation by raising your hand as soon as possible. If you raise your hand when you want to ask a question, but you raise your hand when you donât have a clear idea of what you want to ask, and you experience slowness, you will feel that you didnât do very well, and you will be afraid to ask a question the next time. But whether one minute is long or short, once you have had time to think quietly by yourself and ask a question, it becomes easier to have a successful experience of asking a question, which in turn makes it easier to ask a question the next time, and I think it will be a good cycle. This was one of the challenges we tried this time.
Man: The point is to connect to the next one ă00:35:48 ă
Nishio: Yes, thatâs right. I still think that successful experiences are a source of confidence.
Man: Okay, I understand. Thank you very much.
Nishio: The third one.
Male: In your presentation today, you used the word âexperimentâ a lot, but I was wondering if you consciously think about conducting experiments on a regular basis, or if you do conduct experiments, how do you summarize the results?
Nishio: By this experimentation, do you mean a place at a study group presentation or⌠on a daily basis?
Man: Are you conscious of doing such things on a daily basis?
Nishio: Quite a lot of things are experiments on a daily basis. For example, I experimented with using sticky notes to create presentation materials, and it worked well, so I have continued to do so. I recently experimented with handwritten presentations on my iPad, and it worked surprisingly well, so Iâm doing it again this time. I also forgot to use the ability to walk around in places where no wires are connected, even though I had made it possible to do so. I forgot to use it even though I had made it so that the presenter could walk around and ask questions. This was an experiment to allow the presenter to talk to people in the back of the room and do such things. You never know if it will be accepted or not until you try it. On the other hand, the person who is doing something interesting may feel a little relieved when he or she sees the personâs face because he or she has such an atmosphere. I am thinking that it would be interesting to write down how I am composing this in my scrapbook and see if anyone else can copy it. So I am very conscious of experimentation. In the book âThe Art of Intellectual Production of Engineers,â it is said that after gathering information and abstracting it in oneâs mind, one actually does it and learns new things from the results, which leads to the next cycle. This is exactly the cycle of experimentation and verification. By repeating the cycle of formulating a hypothesis, conducting experiments, and verifying whether the hypothesis is correct, the hypothesis will change into a better one. This cycle is one of the points I emphasize in the book.
Man: Yes, sir. Thank you very much.
NISHIO: Was there three people in this session or four? Sorry.
Male: I think Nishio-san is utilizing scrapboxes, and I would like to know if there are any advantages of using scrapboxes in intellectual production techniques. I would like to know if there are any advantages of using a scrap box in intellectual production techniques.
Nishio: Yes, thatâs right. I wrote the manuscript of this book in 2017, when I had just started using scrapboxes and before I realized the advantages of scrapboxes. If I had written the book now, I would have written a lot about scrapbooks. In that sense, it was a bit of a waste. The best thing about the scrapbox, to put it simply, is that things Iâve written in the past are suddenly suggested to me, and I think that Iâve written something like this in the past. Scrapbox. The fact that a search will find hits from your past writings applies to anything you have written down in Evernote or any other electronic tool in the world. Youâre talking about the usefulness of scrapbox suggestions. What was it, for example? Pro-TheoryâŚif I write âPro-Theoryâ which one is it, Prospect Theory, Flow Theory, or Option Price Theory? Something like that. This ambiguous search is very strong. So, âWhat is that? So, âWhat is that? What I mean by that is, for example, if you open it up a little bit more, you can see that there are no good examples. For example, if you open it up a little more, a good example wonât come up, but the written text will pop up and unexpected things will be suggested. Itâs an ambiguous search, so it doesnât have to be a perfect match. I wonder if itâs one of the scrap boxes. It doesnât come up right away. You can put in not only words, but also slightly longer phrases. So letâs make one page here. Itâs got a scrapbox tag on it, but thatâs okay. I think itâs probably hard to see the ă00:40:35ă, but Iâll try my best to enlarge it and make it look better. When you talk about the impossibility of something, and you put in the word impossible, you get a whole list of things that involve the impossible. I think there is a quote somewhere on this page that says, for example, âDifficulty means that something is impossible, but there is room for ingenuity. If so, I think there is a link on this page to the âImpossibleâ section. Open this page. Then, I would open this page, and I would see that this was a sentence that I was writing (laughs), and I would write the title âDifficulty is not impossibility, but room for ingenuity. The results that are caught by ambiguous searches in this sentence will be suggested there. So, if you put the word âimpossibleâ in brackets around the word in another sentence, it will be suggested, and there will be a page with an interesting title. It is important to make the title interesting, and then the suggestions will come up with interesting stories. What is this? I opened it and this is relevant. Then something happens like, âI wrote this three years ago,â and the person I was three years ago is a little different from the person I am now. Even if I am saying similar things, I am seeing things from a slightly different perspective, so when I think about them together, I can say that my past self was saying this, but my current self is thinking this, and this is what I think about this part, and that is how it develops. This is a very important engine that drives intellectual production, so we are trying to figure out how we can make it more active, and we want to put all the contents of the intellectual production techniques of engineers here, but the publishers are complaining. Because it would definitely be interesting to put it in here, clause by clause, paragraph by paragraph. Whatâs interesting is that I actually made it here, and then it would look like this. Because the image of each page will appear here. For example, if you want to search for something I wrote about in this book, you can find it here. For example, if you want to search for âI wrote something about this in this book,â you can search for it here. For example, creation is subjective, which is a very important keyword, so Iâll put it here. I just linked to this âCreation is subjective,â and now itâs a blue link. The fact that it is now a blue link means that this keyword must be connected to some other page. If you click on the subjective page, all the pages with the word âsubjectiveâ will appear here. You can compare the subjective pages here and here. If you tag the keywords that you think are interesting when you read the text, you will forget about them later, and when you are writing another text, you will think that this is an important keyword, and the moment you tag it as a link, it will turn blue instead of red. Oh, it led somewhere. Workportal connected to somewhere! Itâs like. You donât know where itâs connected, but if thereâs a work portal that looks like itâs connected to somewhere, you jump in. This is interesting. Then, something I wrote three years ago pops up that I didnât expect, and I think, âOh, I see! Itâs very interesting. Iâve done a lot of advertising for Scrapbox, but I donât receive any back margin from Scrapbox, so please feel free to use it for your own personal use, and please use it as much as you like. I hope you will use it for free.
Man: Yes, sir. Thank you very much.
Nishio: Now that we have run out of questions for this session, we have about 15 minutes left, so we will start another thinking time. Letâs get started. Letâs start. Okay, first one. Okay, one minute has passed. Does anyone have any other questions? Okay, letâs start with the first one.
Male: Yes. I asked Mr. Furuhashi of Treasure Data how he started programming and became an engineer, and he said that Super Science High School and Unexplored were important in that. He said that Super Science High School and Unexplored were important.
Nishio: I see.
Male: ă00:46:29ă was asked there, and when I said, then what should we do to increase the number of people like Mr. Furuhashi, he answered, âTaxes.
Nishio: Taxes (laughs) Taxes, huh?
Male: You mentioned Super Science High School and Unexplored. He said that he was able to grow as a teacher through a system backed up by the taxpayersâ money. But he said that this was a measure to make the best students even better. So ă00:46:53ăăă, I think you asked this question because you have recently given birth to a child. How can I get children who donât know whether they can do it or not to become interested in software development, programming, etc. and develop their abilities? When I asked Mr. Furuhashi, he replied, âI donât know.
Nishio: I see.
Male: So I was wondering if you have an answer to this question.
Nishio: I see. First of all, the question is whether programming thinking is the right place to start,
Male: Yes.
Nishio: At this point in time, there is a lot of talk about programming thinking, but the children born today will become adults 20 years from now, and I think it is possible to narrow down the field of what will be important skills in 20 yearsâ time to programming, communication skills, project management skills, and so on. I think the most important thing is the ability to improve through trial and error, and thatâs what I wanted to emphasize in the âIntellectual Production Techniques of Engineers.
Male: Okay. So then itâs not just about programming?
Nishio: It is not limited to that. However, in the process of learning programming, I have learned programming by repeating this cycle of actually writing a program, running it, saying why it did not work, fixing this part, and then making it work. I think this is the most important point of learning, and I believe that repeating trial-and-error and experimenting to improve is an effective way to learn not only programming, but also in a wide range of fields.
Man: So if you want to teach children or young people, you have to read or chew up this book on intellectual production.
Nishio: Oh, I think it is difficult to make people read, so programming, for example, is a chance to actually experience this way of learning. There are things in the world that can be learned through repeated trial and error, and there are things that cannot be learned through repeated trial and error. For example, if there is a child who wants to draw a picture but doesnât want to do so unless he or she can draw a good, beautiful picture from the start, I say, âLetâs try it first, even if you make a mistake. If a child tries to write a picture but doesnât want to do it because he/she doesnât want to be afraid of not being able to draw a good, beautiful picture from the beginning, you teach them that it is a good thing if they donât do well and that they should try to improve their drawing. This is the same concept. Do what the child is interested in. It is not limited to programming. But I think that the cycle of improvement is a common and useful essence.
Man: Thank you very much.
Nishio: Thank you very much. So I tried one more time to go to the back because I had forgotten all about it (laughs)⌠Who was the second question? (Laughter) Who was the second questioner? So letâs go there.
Male: Yes. Now that you mentioned trial and error, I would like to know the balance between input and output. I read many people who say that you should not only acquire knowledge, but also take action! I wonder how Nishio-san thinks about the balance between input and output.
Nishio: I see. That is the first part of the cycle of this⌠When you say âbalance,â you may feel that there is a certain amount. But there is no specific good cycle. When you want to learn something, the first thing you do is gather information. This is input. After gathering information, you should not just gather information and then gather information again, but rather, as soon as you have gathered information, you should actually try it out and then verify whether or not the concepts that you have accumulated as a result of gathering information are correct. It is important to quickly turn this cycle around. For example, I donât think that you should spend three years collecting this information. For example, if I say I am going to study machine learning, how can I make this cycle go faster? So, if balance is not a ratio, but a number of times, it would be 1:1. I think it is better to try to collect information as many times as possible. I donât want to do only input, and I donât want to do only output.
Man: Thank you very much.
NISHIO: Okay, can we have one more session, and Iâll start the timer for one minute. Yes, one. two. three. four. five. six. Anybody who has not yet asked a question? Okay, time out. Letâs start with the first person and answer shortly.
Male: First of all, we had a session in which we had to think of a question and Nishio-san answered it, but you didnât give us a subject at first.
Nishio: Subject?
Male: Subject. You started without asking us to think of a question on this theme. Why is that?
Nishio: I did not have the idea of setting a topic, but I did not set a test for everyone to try to think of a question. I wanted to have as many opportunities as possible to ask some questions. But I wanted to have as many opportunities as possible to ask some questions. So I never thought of simply narrowing it down.
Male: I see. I felt that it would have been easier to ask questions if you had narrowed down the scope of what questions I should ask.
Nishio: I think it is important to have free thinking. It is reactive to do something in response to a given subject, isnât it? I think it is important to be proactive and verbalize what you want to know, rather than just answering a test ordered by someone else. Even if the questions are more gentle, I think it would be better to train to challenge them without narrowing them down.
Man: Yes, sir. Thank you very much.
NISHIO: Who was the second person? Yes, the second person.
Male: Many of you mentioned that you are using scrapbox as your main tool today, but have you compared other tools besides scrapbox?
Nishio: Before Scrapbox, I used to use Evernote, but I didnât make much use of it. I was using Evernoteâs wiki extension, but it didnât make much difference, and I didnât really feel any advantages of switching to Evernote. I was using Evernote as a tool for comparison, not as an electronic tool for storing information, but when I think outside of the box, the KJ method fits well for me, writing on sticky notes and giving lectures. I donât have it with me right now, but I have sticky notes that I wrote on before the presentation, and I am compiling them into this. Is this how it should be?
Man: Thank you very much.
NISHIO: Okay, the third one. Yes, please go ahead.
Male: I think you mentioned earlier that you had posted a link to this site three years ago, and I thought maybe you were trying to create an unexpected experience for yourself, but I would like to ask you what else you do.
Nishio: In the scrapbox, links to common keywords are suggested, and it seems to be connected to them. Iâve been looking at it a lot lately because itâs rather interesting to see what I was thinking about 3 years ago. I think itâs because they were not just excited about current news on Facebook⌠but they were posting the results of their thinking about it, so even if you look at them three years later, there are still some useful things in them. Conversely, if you look back at the articles you wrote three years agoâŚfor example, if you are a blogger, when you look at the articles you wrote three years ago, you can judge whether what you wrote then has become obsolete three years later or not. If the articles I wrote were obsolete across the board, I would wonder what I was doing. When you know that one article is not obsolete and another article is obsolete, you can start a cycle of shifting your direction to one that is less prone to obsolescence. In fact, I have been writing a blog for a long time, I donât remember how long, and sometimes I see links to it on Twitter, etc., because I do ego searches, but then I came across an article from seven years ago, and when I looked at it, it had some good things in it (laughs). I was like, âIâm writing good things. I think I need to gradually shift my focus to things that maintain their value over time.
Man: Thank you very much.
Nishio: Yes. Next fourth.
Male: What do you feel most now that the experiment is coming to an end, compared to what you thought at first?
Nishio: Yes, thatâs right. The first one minute of silence was very scary, but after the fourth time, it became less scary, and I was thinking of making it 5 minutes, but I decided to make it 1 minute and if no one raised their hand, I was going to extend it by 1 minute, but it never turned out to be a good idea to extend it. I was going to give them a minute and if nobody raised their hand, I was going to extend it for a minute. So, one of the reassuring points is that this time I found out that if the concept is communicated that after the one-minute thinking time is over, the next response time will start, it will turn around properly. In fact, when I had a one-minute thinking time and no one asked a question, I would extend the time by another minute five or ten times, and my heart would become a wreck. I think that the organizers would raise their hands if they were worried that I was falling apart in front of them. One thing I learned this time was that this part went surprisingly well. Another point was the small size of the letters. I think this was a failure. You canât see the letters on the timer when you come to this part of the room. I think this was a big failure this time. If I do the same thing next time, I will look for an application that allows me to see the letters larger. Thatâs what Iâm thinking.
Man: Thank you very much.
NISHIO: I think there was about one more case, the fifth one.
Male: I think you mentioned that you were aware of experimentation, but I think the first thing that comes up for experimentation is a hypothesis, and I would like to know if you have any tips on how to formulate such a hypothesis.
Nishio: Tips for making a hypothesis. If you think you have to make a hypothesis, and you want to make a very precise one, you may wonder how you should make a hypothesis. For example, what would be interesting if we do something like this? This is a hypothesis. For example, if you are not standing in front, you can do something like this. For example, if you think it would be easier to have a conversation if you came to this area instead of standing in front of it, you could try that. If you call this in a formal language, it is called a hypothesis, but instead of writing a report that it is this way as a hypothesis in writing, you make it more casually. The moment you think, âIs it like this? The moment you think, âThis is what I think,â that is a hypothesis. The more you repeat this cycle, the easier it will become to come up with hypotheses. Also, as you realize how effective, how beneficial, and how much you are learning by doing this, you will feel more and more compelled to do more. I think it is important to first let go of the feeling that you have to make a solid hypothesis at the beginning. I think we have run out of time for all the questions, is that correct? Thank you all for your attention.
Moderator: Weâll take a break for a couple of minutes, and then you donât have any more questions, do you?
Audience: (laughs)
Moderator: weâll take a break for a couple of minutes and then weâll go to the second part.
Nishio: If you think of a question after the event, please contact us via Twitter, Facebook, email, or any other means, and we may look at it.
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