‘Extelligence’ is a concept developed by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart that I first encountered in their ‘Science of Discworld’ books. It is a simple, but effective concept: human beings store their knowledge outside of themselves. This means that each indiduum can stand on the shoulders of giants: we learn the condensed version of what people before us have learnt, which frees to to make our own contributions to that pool of knowledge. Without ways of transmitting knowledge – stories, books, the Internet – we’d be condemned to learn the same things over and over again.
I have spent hours, if not days, working out relatively simple things, like how to open a window or what, exactly, an application controller does – information that is available _somewhere_, but the accepted way of learning to do things is to try, fail, read some more documentation, find a tutorial that almost does what you want to do, experiment some more, ask questions of fellow programmers who tend to also be a little shaky about underlieing principles, and experiment until it works.
For different human beings to solve the same problem over and over again is a waste of time. All that creative energy could go into figuring out things for which no solutions exist.
This is my place to record them.