3 ms·

Can anyone explain the part about "ignorance"? > McLuhan cites the parable as a productive use of ignorance and indolence, .... I can understand indolence. Th

Can 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 ago
Maybe 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 ago
Ignorance 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.