Foo the Bar

Through some story on Slashdot (even though I've been trying to give up reading news) I found out about Live Simplicity which is a kind of colloquial pattern wiki for life hacks. It's quite interesting but I wonder if a wiki would be more suitable for it, getting people to organise around FooTheBar style topics better rather than just opening up endless discussion threads.

The people contributing to the site seem to be fairly knowledgable, but without being experts of course. It's not really a disciplined field, so there probably aren't all that many experts on it (i.e. small scale convenience and organisation) anyway. Most people think in terms of productivity rather than convenience, which is disturbing since the latter is the cause and the former the effect. History started because of civilisation, not vice versa.

It seems that there is, to some extent, a conservation of knowledge amongst people. I hold to the theory that intelligence isn't transitive, but we still use transitivity as a model. I wonder if that relates to radial categories and the fact that they weren't "discovered" for so long because the radiality is not a smooth slope and it has to map onto discrete words. For example, a labrador is more like a greyhound than a tree, but it's still beneath the "I call that a greyhound" threshold. I love the folk etymology of the word threshold. It also occurs to me that I should give the clear examples before the handwavy mumblese, not after.

Anyway, conservation of knowledge. It's the theory that we all have similarish amounts of knowedge as one another, but in different fields: and it's the fields that are thought of as having a value, not the level of knowledge itself. So an expert in philosophy is thought of as more clever than an expert in cooking, even though the former is less useful than the latter. I wonder if it's because philosophy is something that only the convenienced can do, whereas good cooking seeks to make an inconvenience into an art. Note that IQ tests don't test for artistic intelligence (those shape diagrams are for logic aptitude).

I don't know which I dislike more, oversimplification or redundant complexity. I'm not sure whether social classes are part of the former or the latter. I guess they're more descriptive than prescriptive anyway, apart from the ack [sic] of radiality.

So today I read a review (ugh, The Guardian should use shorter URIs) about some book written by a grown up skeptic. I'm not much into philosophy and politics, but being a history and technology geek I find that history is often just politics and philosophy in disguise. In fact, it's whatever the subject matter is in disguise; that's why I like it. It's an interdisciplinary discovery process. Anyway, I started chatting about it with Christopher Schmidt, and we spoke about being too limited in fields. As he wonderfully put it, "There's so much to learn, see, and do: why should I stop when I've not done it all yet, etc."

I noted that I often try to make topic lists, and that probably my biggest problem is getting back to he middle of the art vs. science divide. But making topic lists suffers from the same generative problem that writing memoirs does: you can best think of topics and memories when some external stimulus or chain of thought reminds you; and then you're so caught up in what you're doing you have no time, and sometimes no means, to record it. That must be why Chesterton used to take notes fanatically—he'd stop in the middle of a road with traffic to take a note, sometimes.

So inasmuch as I know any philosophy at all, I don't find humanism and skepticism very compelling. Yet they're all around, it seems. It's like science in general, it seems to pervade things more thoroughly than art. Still, it's interesting that 71.75% of people listed their religion as the erstwhile compulsary Christianity on the 2001 England and Wales Census, and only 14.81% said no religion (7.71% didn't state). Wigan is one of the most religious, mainly Christian, places in the UK apparently.

My essaying style on Strange Strands is quite conversational for me, but it's interesting that it's only just now starting to become pigeonholed. With What Planet, I developed a style much quicker, and it was a much more interesting style. This is evolving slower, and I just write about boring things. I wonder if essaying is really descriptive, a reflection of what's on your mind at the moment, or prescriptive, giving one a rut to settle into and explore for a while. I suspect primarily the latter.

Just to elucidate one of my initial points, I like to avoid the news because it's pretty boring, but to counter that, most news sites deal with more wider issues and act like magazines. Pretty good magazines too, sometimes. I'd like more of the magazine aspect and less of the news, but that's rather tricky to achieve since the medium doesn't really allow for it at the moment. Current affairs bore me, but interesting debate about current affairs that have some lasting resonance is okay. Sensationalism is bound to triumph a lot, but at least there are usually a few sources that don't venture into that.