903: Extended Mind

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Extended Mind

Title text: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

Explanation

When Wikipedia is down, everyone is considerably dumber as they lose their main source of information. This comic takes that to the extreme. The only Wikipedia outages that have occurred in the news are from March 2010 and the SOPA protest outage of January 18, 2012.

The Extended Mind is a theory proposed by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, which postulates that the mind isn't only in the skull, but also incorporates external things, like for example Wikipedia.

The title text refers to an uncannily accurate observation of Wikipedia's page links, which likely arises from the fact that the first few links in any article tend to categorize the article into more abstract ideas that tend eventually towards philosophy.

Transcript

[An IM window is open over a Chrome window with tabs for Spark Plug, Feeler Gauge, and Wikipedia.]

Message with Mike1979

Mike1979: I replaced my spark plugs and now my car is running weird.

Me: The spark gap might be off.

Me: You can check with a feeler gauge.

Mike1979: What should the gap be?

Me: Usually between 0.035" and 0.070".

Me: But it depends on the engine.

[An IM window is open over a Chrome window with a single Wikipedia tab, marked ERROR. The page says: "Wikipedia has a problem. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading (can't contact the database server: unknown error (10.0.0.242))]

Message with Mike1979

Mike1979: I replaced my spark plugs and now my car is running weird.

Me: What is a spark plug??

Me: Help

Me: What is a car??

When Wikipedia has a server outage, my apparent IQ drops by 30 points.

Trivia

• The error code shown in the right panel caused a bit of a discussion from the wiki techs.

Randall replied with:

Randall: " I drew it based on an older error message where the IP was 10.0.0.243. I changed it to 242 (a) because I try not to get too specific with those things, and didn't want people poking the actual machine at .243 (if it was still there) -- I actually considered putting .276 and seeing how many people noticed, but figured they'd just think I made a dumb mistake. and (b) as part of this ancient inside joke involving the number 242 ... " "

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Discussion

Title text is true - unless you happen to stumble upon any one of: Fact, Proof (truth), Evidence, or Truth. Then you'll be stranded in an eternal loop.

--T0IVI (talk) 09:27, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I hit a loop on the page Community. Went right from National community to Community again. 69.91.105.111 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

These infinite loops seem to be 'fixed', I went through fact and other stuff right to philosophy. 141.35.48.11 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

What can we learn?

I've learned that memorizing facts is so yesteryear. Over next few years facts will be even easier to find, understand, use, reference and forget. When in school we should concentrate not on memorizing facts we can look up later, but rather new methods to think outside the box full of facts others placed inside it. (Thank you Mr. XKCD) - E-inspired (talk) 13:42, 28 February 2013 (UTC)