Eric Dobbs
@Ralf Barkow via matrix 
: In our industry's popular understanding of software, we talk exclusively about things below the line. [⇒ Above and Below the Line]
Above the Line / Below the Line framework draws attention to a hard tradeoff of human cognition. It is Drs. Woods & Cook trying to get us software fish to Recognize the Water We Swim In.
We humans cannot see our own cognition [⇒ Blind Spot]. First, our retinas and lenses are pointed the other way. Second, our very visual perception is itself a cognitive process: the interpretation and understanding of the signals that we get from our eyes is cognition we cannot actually see. Most of us have an internal illusion of very visual cognition. (N.B. some people explicitly don't have mental pictures). For those of us who do have mental pictures, it doesn't work the way we imagine, literally & figuratively (& now also distracted by the "figure" in the concept "figurative"—can't even talk about this stuff in UTF-8 characters without reaching for visual metaphors built into my language).
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Grady Booch: "Replacing the term 'Architecture' with the phrase 'significant design decisions' helps to avoid the emotional and historical baggage associated with the term." tweet
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Eric Dobbs: My experience from an education in architecture and then also from decades of drawing software things on whiteboards in small groups, I learned that the visualization in my head breaks down almost immediately when I try to transfer those "images" to paper or whiteboard. Once I have transferred the ideas from mental to actually visual I get to see how the spacial rules don't work the way I imagined. With just me and something to draw on, I can create a dialog between different internal cognitive workers [⇒ Ghost in the Box], one thinking and visualizing and imagining, and the other actually perceiving and interpreting what has landed in the drawing. There's an interesting feedback loop there. A stick and some dirt, or Pen and Paper as the original tool for thinking.
When there's a small group gathered around a whiteboard, we get to also encounter all the blindmen-elephant complexities wikipedia of "transferring" knowledge and insight between human brains through words and drawings and gestures.
It turns out our cognition itself is also social, not only individual. This is even harder for humans to see, and maybe more so for humans, like Eric Dobbs, raised in the United States' overwhelmingly individualized value system—this is extra relevant given the US' outsized cultural influence in software. See https://wiki.dbbs.co/joint-cognitive-whiteboard.html for the place where he captured that lightbulb going off in his own head.
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Yesterday I learned something new to me about joint cognition and socio-technical systems. A group of software engineers gathered around a whiteboard are a joint cognitive system. The scrawls on the board are spatial cues for building a shared model of a complex system.
> It turns out I need to be in the same room with a white board in order to even have that Conversation. Because I need to build a shared spatial model in order to situate the Components of the discussion so I can point and waive and look around and trace Paths with Pen or finger in order to talk about how the tokens of identity will flow through the components of the system.
In short, Eric Dobbs doesn't foresee obsolescence of "Above the Line / Below the Line" in any near or distant future.
> I think that insight may be inherent to being human and something we need in perpetuity like we do with Beginner's Mind. That said, I definitely feel very excited about how federated wiki's architecture and these recent experiments with Graph Collaboration can maybe also help us humans to get glimpses of our cognition, our social cognition, and have better tools to think with TOGETHER.
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> (wow! look at that wall of text! I'll have to move that to a wiki page. Sorry for flooding the chat with that!) matrix