🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (13 tweets)
do you see the association between "being a nerd" (I define this as "being directed by one's curiosity") and "making lists" (even if just mental lists?) I feel like there's something here but it might not be a strong/obvious link and idk if I'm forcing it or I'm on to something
I feel like there's an old Ribbonfarm post about this, or something adjacent to this – lists, collections, collectors... ah, https://t.co/REkqEnzVGz
maybe lists imply ordered, although we do have bullet lists that are unordered (<ul>). "collecting stuff" is certainly a nerdy pursuit, "cabinet of curiosities" etc here's vgr: https://t.co/GSxRqOUxQJ
you pick an area of interest, start looking for interesting things, assemble a mental Pinterest board, collect facts and esoterica, ask questions, compare and contrast, and you begin to discern the relationships between things, you begin to understand https://t.co/qAPrPXTCS1
ahahaha hell yea love it when a more established nerd asserts my hunch much more aggressively than I would dare to! (h/t @louispotok) https://t.co/ereX4U7ZuX
@louispotok I think I'm increasingly confident in saying that nerds do just two things 1. ask questions 2. make lists idk if there's a meaningful third that doesn't fall into 1 & 2 I guess you could say "Make Stuff" – build, tinker, fiddle etc, and I kinda wanna force it into "make lists"
being deliberate here about expanding "list" into something more dramatic and profound could also say "threads" but that's less intuitive in some cases. threads, lists, sutras, all manifestations of the same thing, relative order out of chaos https://t.co/f9pPiswImn
(Riffing) A life is a thread of experiences A social graph is a thread of friends A sentence is a thread of words Reality is a thread of cause-and-effect events A worldview is a thread of beliefs A science is a thread of experiments A scene is a thread of practitioners
@visakanv I'm strongly driven by curiosity but meh about lists. maybe I associate lists with the forced organization that took the fun out of school, around that age when teachers stopped being like miss frizzle and started being more like dilbert's boss