

Parable of the Boy and the Steam Engine (2014) - benbreen
http://praxicum.com/home/2014/5/5/parable-of-the-boy

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mbubb
Drudgery 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)

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jahnu
I 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.

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ggchappell
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
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.

