Here's a fun game I got from
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jesse_the_k - Comment on this entry saying Rhubarb!, and I'll pick three things from your profile interests or tags.
- 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.
