I recently finished Exhalation, a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang. This one (The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling), which interleaves a near-future journalist, with a colonial era missionary and tribe, I found very insightful regarding the effects that thinking tools have on thinking - http://web.archive.org/web/20131204053806/http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang

Counterpoint: supposedly Euler did math even after he went blind

🤔 hmm yes a good point... Although I wonder if something like this might have been going on (watch to the end)

That’s interesting @Chris Knott cos some code I write is like that I need pen and paper.

This was as fantastic a short story as I expect Ted Chiang to always be. Thank you @Chris Knott! Hadn't seen it before.

I liked the ideas about how using a tool heavily actually affects your brain. I am sure my brain has adapted massively to having a computer at my fingertips all the time. I don't remember stuff in full any more, what I do is remember a compressed link/pointer, that I will know I will be able to use to recover the information - via the internet - if necessary. Not deliberately, I think it's a kind of optimisation my brain's adopted. I find it very, very frustrating sometimes when I can half remember something

My mind is blown by the idea that the transition from oral culture to written culture is an example of a broader phenomenon where the shift in quantity of memory turns into a qualitative change.

Here are TC's notes from the back of Exhalation

But the illumination does not come easily. Understanding the

relations of orality and literacy and the implications of the relations is not a matter of instant psychohistory or instant phenomenology. It calls for wide, even vast, learning, painstaking thought and careful statement. Not only are the issues deep and complex, but they also engage our own biases. *We—readers of books such as this—are so literate that it is very difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe.*

I think people have talked before about how this must apply to us, as programmers. This is why I am sure a key tool in FoC will be studying the experience of highly intelligent, computer illiterate people. How easily can, for example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg learn Python? What are her fail modes? I would be fascinated to find out. (Apologies to RBG if she's actually a computer wiz!).

Ivan illich wrote "ABC: the alphabetization of the popular mind", on the transition from orality to literacy. I found it insightful.

Orality and literacy is a popular topic—Neil Postman talks about it as well, across all his work