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Parable of the Boy and the Steam Engine (2014)
- jahnu 11y agoI don't know if it's the limit of my own imagination or if I'm tired but the writing feels almost like it's the result of a Markov chain pseudo text generator.
- ggchappell 11y agoCan anyone explain the part about "ignorance"? > McLuhan cites the parable as a productive use of ignorance and indolence, .... I can understand indolence. This is a pejorative term, but it basically means the desire to avoid doing work. Certainly productive use was made of this. But ignorance is lack of knowledge. I do not see how the boy made productive use of any lack of knowledge. Rather, he made productive use of his knowledge of what needed to be done, and that it was always the same thing.
- mbubb 11y agoMaybe in the sense that he did not bother to become an expert in optimizing the manual process but decided to circumvent it altogether. As for indolence - makes me thing of ESR's sentence in the "Art of UNIX Programming": "Constructive laziness is one of the cardinal virtues of the master programmer."
- mbubb 11y agoIgnorance and Indolence... There is an apocryphal story about Gauss (18th cent mathematician). As an 8 yr old he was given a punishment or busywork to add the numbers up from 1 to 100. The kind of tedious task intended to punish or control kids. He had the quick insight that it was really just 50 pairings of 101 so solved it in less than a minute. So there is a kind of productive laziness and a constructive ignorance of the process. Even as an 8 yr old I imagine he understood what the teacher was trying to do by giving him such a task and he remained willfully ignorant of it.
- mbubb 11y agoDrudgery killing the soul. I was listening to "99 percent invisible" podcast about elevators and it was a person's job in some European palace to stay hidden in a tiny closet and work the pulley to raise and lower the king between floors. Something about that stuck with me as having its own particular horror. I imagine a space that is dark and cramped. Nothing to do but wait for a signal to pull on a rope... The desire to play is the most moving part of this parable. Amazing things come from this impulse even though it is transitory and trivial on the surface. I am pretty sure that Space Travel is not widely played any more but the desire to play it has shaped my life in more ways than I could count: "When Bell Labs withdrew from the Multics research consortium, Ken Thompson was left with some Multics-inspired ideas about how to build a file system. He was also left without a machine on which to play a game he had written called Space Travel, a science-fiction simulation that involved navigating a rocket through the solar system. Unix began its life on a scavenged PDP-7 minicomputer[14] like the one shown in Figure 2.1, as a platform for the Space Travel game and a testbed for Thompson's ideas about operating system design." http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html