[347/366] rhubarb!

[cosmolinguist]

Here's a fun game I got from jesse_the_k

1. Comment on this entry saying Rhubarb!, and I'll pick three things from your profile interests or tags.
2. Write about the words/phrases I picked in your journal and link back here. Spread the love

The three I got were

• linux
• narrativium
• extelligence

This shows that I haven't looked much at or changed my list of interests in quite some time, probably a decade or so? The three I've been asked to talk about are all things I was keen on in my twenties.

Linux will probably have been on this list since I first started having a LiveJournal back in 2002. That was around the time I started using it, my boyfriend having made it sound so appealing. It was Slackware in those days, mostly maintained by him too but I did learn a lot (including how many problems could be fixed by googling error messages and copying stuff I didn't always understand into the terminal.

I went to precisely one local LUG (Linux user group) meeting in college, where I met someone from a nearby town who was amazed to find a girl who used Linux. I still tend to get along pretty well with Linux people (technically currybeer is part of manlug, Manchester's Linux users group) but I am not really one. Partly I drifted away from knowing even as much as I did (which was never a ton) when Linux got a little easier to use (I switched to Ubuntu pretty early on) and when I started living with Andrew who finds this all a lot easier than I do so it seems most efficient to outsource that.

I'm back to using Linux again after years of Windows for uni, and it's nice to see the inbuilt accessibility options like magnification and screenreading have improved a lot since the last time I bothered to look, some years ago.

I wouldn't put Linux on a list of things I'm interested in today, to some extent because it gives an inaccurate impression of what I actually know or talk about, but partly because it also attracts "fossbros" -- FOSS as in an acronym for free and open-source software, a thing not limited to Linux but overlapping with it, and bro as in the most pejorative sense of the word. To the point where several people I know in Mastodon see someone mentioning Linux in their profile as a reason not to accept a follow request or engage in conversation with someone. Fossbro culture thinks all problems can be solved with their preferred software and doesn't value things it doesn't know as much about, such as any kind of social or cultural problem which it will inevitably overlook by failing to appreciate that there are aspects of life that are not best understood by a white, male, abled, cishet subgroup.

Narrativium and extelligence both reference the Science of Discworld series of books, which I loved so much when I first read them.

Narrativium was such an important idea to me that the first time we dated (and occasionally even afterward) Stuart would call me "narrativium girl." They articulated a power of storytelling that has enchanted me ever since. Narrativium is the element that permeates everything else and makes stories work.

Dragons breathe fire not because they have asbestos lungs, but because that is what dragons do. Heroes only win when outnumbered, and things which have a one-in-a-million chance of succeeding often do so.

People will often believe a good story rather than anything else, which I thought was exciting and endearing in my twenties and am finding increasingly infuriating and terrifying in my thirties.

Extelligence is, as you might guess, contrasted with intelligence. The writers of these books, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, say that if intelligence is the knowledge and cognitive processes in an individual's brain, extelligence is the information available to a culture that can be readily accessed on external media, be that folk songs or nursery rhymes or books or video games or whatever.

One of Cohen and Stewart's contributions is the way they relate the individual to the sum of human knowledge. From the mathematics of complexity and game theory, they use the idea of phase space and talk about extelligence space. There is a total phase space (intelligence space) for the human race, which consists of everything that can be known and represented. Within this there is a smaller set of what is known at any given time. Cohen and Stewart propose the idea that each individual can access the parts of the extelligence space with which their intelligence is complicit.

In other words, there has to be, at some level, an appreciation of what is out there and what it means. Much of this ‘appreciation’ falls into the category of tacit knowledge and social and cultural learning. As an example, a dictionary may contain definitions of many words. But only those definitions that can be understood by the reader.

I liked this idea of connecting people to the collective potential of what their society could offer them, and what they could offer it. I included "intelligence" on my interests list, for basically snobby reasons (I was a horrible snob in my twenties...and before...and no doubt since, though I'm trying to be better about that), so I wanted "extelligence" to be there too.

Comments

[askygoneonfire]

I enjoyed reading about these interests - and very strong agree on the good story thing. It's a proved a good way of making sense of *gestures around* this mess



Rhubarb!

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I am still Narrativium Girl even though I'm Narrativium Not-a-Girl now. It helps a lot to deal with the world by stories, especially in this pandemic year.

Your interests list is so great! It'd be easier to list three I don't mind so much whether you talk about.

But I had to choose
* "alphabetising the world" (I just read a book about alphabetical order! It's called A Place for Everything and I really recommend it)

* overcoming decadence and nihilism
And
* queer theory - practice and content

[askygoneonfire]

Oooh, I have not heard of that book, I'll look it up - thank you!

[barakta]

Hearing you on the linux... I use it cos it's more accessible than Windows to me (less white, better fonts, better window borders, less rude) but Kim does all the maintenance of it... And ugh yes to FOSS-Bros, aka techbros *shudder*.

Rhubarb but I may not manage to actually write anything *goes to check DW interests* cos I can't remember what they are either.

[cosmolinguist]

Linux is differently accessible to me, but overall more so. Lovely diffrentcolours did the investigation into accessibility features on his Debian/KDE and then installed Ubuntu/GNOME for me because both of those things seemed slightly better for my needs/preferences (though I might try KDE anyway, GNOME doesn't let me change the mouse color! and the cursor sizes aren't very changeable).

* deaf and non-deaf relationships
* there's lots of German stuff on there (Deutsch, Deutschland, Germany, etc,), anything to say about that?
* lots of lizard stuff too, can you talk about lizards?

[otter]

I don't often play these games, but I like Rhubarb ;)

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I think this is a good game!

* biking
* genderqueer
* sea otters

[silveradept]

There's a lot of FOSSBros around, certainly. I am fine with my desktop stuff working the way it should, but I usually try to avoid asking questions because there's a high probability that they'll come by and make fun of me for it.

I definitely like the concepts of narrativium and extelligence. Very neat things to examine and incorporate.

Also, I wonder why they say rhubarb for this one. Rhubarb, all the same.

[cosmolinguist]

I always say baseball is the most narrativium we get this side of the Discworld, a sentiment that I think is lost on a lot of my friends for one reason or another but I bet you can appreciate it. :)

* equity over equality
* marching bands (being in marching band was my favorite thing about high school!)
* sonic screwdrivers

[silveradept]

I certainly can appreciate such a statement, and I suspect that you are entirely correct about baseball having a greater concentration of narrativium than other things in our world.

[norfolkian]

I'd never heard the terms narrativium and extelligence before - interesting!

Also, rhubarb! This seems like a fun meme. :)

[cosmolinguist]

As far as I can tell they're just from those books, which I can recommend to any Discworld fans, I don't know how much anyone else would get out of them (they're very accessibly written, they just might not be as fun without all the background knowledge).

For you I've picked three things I also like :)

* grey hair
* the good place
* the ocean

[norfolkian]

Thank you! And sorry I hadn't got round to this yet - I'm on it now. :)

[hafnia]

glob save us all from FOSSbros!

I'm glad that accessibility has improved for Linux — it's one of those things that I've wondered about but never remembered to check into. I know it used to be hit or miss; glad it's better!

Rhubarb?

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I ignored accessibility on Linux before and just suffered when using my computer, and some things are still clunky or confusing or frustrating or whatever but that's also the case with the expensive proprietary assistive software I have on Windows.

Heh, I see you've already gotten to my main realization here by including "interests list as a time capsule" on your interests list. :) I might have to go update mine now!

* compositional ambient (definitely not based on us talking about this a bunch lately honest)
* salt
* ts eliot

[mrs_leroy_brown]

What an excellent write-up :)

Rhubarb and note - I deleted all my interests recently because some were super old, some were things that were jokes with ex-friends that I cringed to see, and some were just baffling. So it will three tags for me :)

[cosmolinguist]

Okay so I have to say I was delighted to see you had a tag called "midwestern geekery" and then I clicked on it and it was about meeting me! Hahaha. I think you should talk about that anyway -- midwestern geekery generally I mean, not me.

Your other two are
* lovely jack white i love you for real
* sestina (I love a sestina)

[mrs_leroy_brown]

Thanks for these prompts :) I will get to these at some point as I'm off work from Monday afternoon (yay!)

[worlds_of_smoke]

I really, really need to read Discworld at some point, I suspect. >.>

Rhubarb!

[cosmolinguist]

You probably should. :) The only recommendation I'd make is to not start at the beginning, even completists agree with me on that. It's one of my favorite series and still contains books I haven't read and probably won't read. But what I have read has been enough to shape my whole view on the world and I love it.

Your three are
* gray asexuality
* multiverse theory
* personal mythology

[jesse_the_k]

Your characterization of Fossbro culture thinks all problems can be solved with their preferred software is so damn spot on. In another timeline I think I would have been a fossbro, because whenever I'm facing a new writing challenge I waste at least two days trying to find the perfect tool.

These two Discworld-adjacent concepts are delightful. Looks like the internet was already happening when the concept of extelligence was being forged. Come to think of it, computer mediated social life provides fertile soil for growing story, both true and malicious.

Where would you recommend me starting Discworld?

[diffrentcolours]

Yeah, my interests list is well out of date, so justifying some of them might be interesting... rhubarb me!

[cosmolinguist]

Actually yours seems almost entirely unsurprising to me -- maybe with a few things you might not include today and without a few things that you might, but not bad at all. So here's the few things I don't already know about.

* children on stun
* durham red
* rex the runt