A Friday Letter: Intelligence Augmentation


Hello from Braidwood, New South Wales.
You have not heard from me for two weeks so I thought I would write you a letter about one of my days this week. It starts with a tweet and ends up with pizza.
Twitter is an important resource for me. I joined up in 2008 when it was a small community.
My use of it is haphazard.
I do try to catch up with daily activity with my aggregator on Paper.Li. Sometimes I stumble upon a tweet accidentally. Yesterday, a photograph sent me off on a day of research.
I am not sure how you manage your time but this post is a way of sharing eight hours of research with you in a Friday Letter from Abbotstown.
This is the picture:


I use the word ‘augmented’ a lot in my conversations about performance analysis. I started thinking more about augmentation after reading Richard Schmidt’s (1991) paper, Frequent Augmented Feedback Can Degrade Learning: Evidence and Interpretations.
Until I saw Angela’s slide, I had not thought carefully enough about the distinction between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation. I do think this clarification is important as we make more and more use of machine learning in performance analysis.
I have collected some resources in this Google Doc if this might be of interest to you. There are links to the literature if there is anything that grabs your attention.
I wast struck by this Ross Goodwin quote (19 March 2016):

When we teach computers to write, the computers don’t replace us any more than pianos replace pianists—in a certain way, they become our pens, and we become more than writers. We become writers of writers.

I really liked the idea of performance analysts as writers and pianists.
Hopefully we have enough experience to share a story or a musical composition that enables coaches and athletes to flourish. We do what Melanie Cook (2017) recommends:

In a way that recognises our skills and our limitations.

My hope for IPAX is that our community shares cumulative experience to support personal and collective learning and in doing so extend our representative sample of reality.
My experience of communities of practice is that we can grow asynchronously but we do need to unmeet in person.
These meetings should involve lots of coffee and in the case of my weekly analytics unmeet ups in Canberra at Cafe Mizzuna … lots of pizza.
Next week at our Canberra unmeet up, I am going to share this quote from Peter Skagestad before we arrive for the coffee:

the pioneers of the personal-computer revolution did not theorize about the essence of the computer, but focused rather on the essence of human thinking, and then sought ways to adapt computers to the goal of improving human thinking.

Photo Credit

Broches (Chechi Peinado, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)