📕 subnode [[@flancian/tools for thinking]] in 📚 node [[tools-for-thinking]]
📓 garden/flancian/tools for thinking.md by @flancian ️👁 ️📝

[[How Do We Define Tools for Thinking and Why Do They Matter?]]

[[Inflection Points for Tools for Thinking]]

  • [[john borthwick]]
  • #push [[readwise]]
  • [[john borthwick]] where do you see us by the end of the decade?
    • belief that there will be a lot of change in this space
    • when they started, [[evernote]] was the most popular request -- that's changed a lot since then
    • on a macro level
    • why did [[evernote]] get stuck?
      • they nailed the [[consumer]] use case, never were able to do [[enterprise]] like [[notion]] did
        • that held them back relative to notion
      • they got very distracted in the middle of the growth, they were developing a [[recipe app]]
      • they fumbled their way
    • one of the promises of the internet:
      • you can just build anything, no need to ask for permission (if you have the basic resources, etc.)
      • [[notion]] raised VC, a million or two before going mainstream
      • [[roam]] raised very little before really growing
      • #push [[readwise]] didn't want to raise any money, unsure of the venture scale
        • started charging a monthly fee for a consumer product (shock! :)), now can support a small team
        • [[bootstrapped]]
      • if you don't have the enterprise use case and are consumer based instead, it's unclear how sustainable you can be a priori (-> in the current landscape; but that might be ripe for a change, enough people want a way out of walled gardens, want a choice.)
    • [[q&a]]
      • [[anki]] for writing?
        • have been exploring something, dogfood
        • [[theme reviews]]
        • some people do this:
        • [[repeat]]
          • you can get to 80% of the work fast this way
      • how does this compare to [[gpt-3]] generation? asker feels that AI based suggestions aren't really that great
        • can't speak about better/worse, but for some people this might feel easier
    • [[core thesis for ai]]
      • the AI can't be the product
      • you won't print an essay ghost written by [[gpt-3]]
        • -> yet? what about the recent paper that was written by [[gpt-3]], and for which they got first [[authorship]]?
    • [[john borthwick]] many silos enforcing separation between ideas; also a risk of being fascinated by the technology or the tool
      • [[jerry michalski]] is a good example of focusing on the thoughts, on the information, going beyond the [[tool]]
      • it feels like the space has gone [[mainstream]] now
    • [[audio]]?
      • grown a lot in audio
      • 15-20% a year (check?)
      • transforming audio to a block or a highlight: there are early attempts, podcasting [[air]] or [[snipped]] (?)
      • not a seamless experience
    • [[uncanny valley]]
      • [[transcripts]] almost at human level but not quite
      • but it seems like [[text to speech]] and [[speech to text]] can be assumed to be coming, you can probably assume that transcripts for everything will be available
    • #push [[amazon]]
      • one company is controlling ebooks and is making it hard to innovate (if I got that right?)
    • bet: innovation more likely either on [[podcast]] side or [[text to speech]]
    • [[john borthwick]] the downsides of [[silos]]
    • #q over the last n years the [[tools for thought]] space has been changing; how has usage of your tool changed with that?
      • started with [[srs]]
      • started with [[kindle]] highlights, disentangling and making useful
      • there was a period when people thought they would do anything in a particular tool, like [[roam]]
        • people were trying to get everything into [[roam]]: putting documents in blocks there to be able to annotate them.
        • that has [[cooled down]]
      • at some point they asked: what's the number one feature we need to implement to actually make money, charge for it?
        • [[evernote]] was the first big one, that would not be the case before
      • [[tweet threads]]
        • the user of [[twitter]] has helped advance the space
    • #q if you did [[enterprise]], what would you do?
      • [[consumer vs enterprise]]
      • enterprise is in the back of their minds, but it's not currently core
      • enterprise saas is a great business model though, but there's not as clear an enterprise vision for now
    • #q on [[information density]] are people reading slower? it takes twice as long to listen than to read
      • attention is more often split when listening
      • less information absorbed when people are listening
      • are you able to unplug and read for, say, 20 minutes?
      • "throw all your technology away, go into a cottage and read paper"
        • the problem can probably be solved this way, but that's not feasible actually
        • "fight technology with technology"
        • maybe it's good to be able to read on your smartphone, how do you accomplish that?
        • [[emergent reading]] (?)
    • #q it seems you're in the position of [[owning the plumbing]]: can you lean into that, are you blocked by the players in this space?
  • [[john borthwick]] on the [[knowledge blob]]: it should be transportable
    • they had to come up with their own core abstractions when developing their reading app.
    • why don't we build on top of a [[block]] architecture]]?
    • "like it was the fashion at the time" :)
      • metaphor from user feedback: no, it doesn't really work, it's too soupy (?)
      • it felt "too liquid"
      • how to turn [[fluid thoughts]] into [[coherent text]]
      • [[document]] ~ [[doc]]
        • you have [[blocks]] and [[docs]]
        • imagine your thoughts being injected into a doc
      • meaning exchange for [[knowledge blobs]]
        • annotation
        • highlight
        • notes that you take while reading
      • when you want to read a 120 tweet thread, you actually want to see that as a [[document]] that you can [[annotate]] as a whole
  • #q on the toolchain aspect of the [[plumbing]]: love how you can jump from tool to tool. How much effort do you put into customizing the ingestion engines? On the Enterprise side: would love [[readwise]] for [[slack]] :)
  • #q Use cases in education; have you been thought about getting involved with schools? Have you thought about the impact of adoption by students who could be forced to use it? :)
    • Education just hasn't been something they've been successful at, haven't found a way to penetrate that field.

[[Demo: Protocol Design for Tools for Thinking]]

[[The History and Future of Software as Tools for Thinking]]

  • (missed the first minute)
  • [[jerry michalski]] with [[howard rheingold]]
    • how do communities work? how do we get smarter humans?
    • pass the floor
    • (split screen with [[jerry's brain]])
  • [[howard rheingold]]
  • [[jerry michalski]]
  • #q [[jerry michalski]] what from the original vision has worked (and maybe we take for granted) and what hasn't (yet)?
    • materialized:
      • pointing and clicking
      • multimedia
    • shared notebook for people working on projects was part of the original demo
    • tried going with [[organizations]] where these tools didn't work out, but the vision was as follows
    • #push [[works]]
      • [[a work]]
        • service or product that your enterprise created
      • [[b work]]
        • part of the enterprise that works on improving ability to create that product
      • [[c work]]
        • #push [[agora]]
          • improving your ability to improve
      • vision of [[c work]] done as [[skunkworks]], introducing innovation to [[b work]] sections
    • vision was an [[integrated toolkit]]
    • note taking apps, rapid learning apps
  • #q [[howard rheingold]] do you think of the brain as a way to think or a tool? (check?)
    • Jerry thinks of it as [[photoshop]] for ideas
    • (Demo bridging several nodes to [[cholera]].)
    • Putting all nodes side by side in a single tool (interface) is instrumental.
    • thebrain's flexibility is one of the most attractive factors.
    • [[howard rheingold]] it externalizes your memory
      • [[the magic number 7]]
      • offloading leading going to higher levels of abstraction
      • thinking visually w.r.t. the network of connections leads to a new framework of thought that would be otherwise difficult to hold in our minds at once
    • -> Howard wrote books before some of these tools; his office was plastered with papers and notes
      • Stacks of notes that could be moved around.
      • Ability to externalize was there; the ability to think with symbolic items.
    • [[jerry michalski]]
      • [[expressive capacity]]
      • different tools have different expressive capacity
      • when [[cad]] was new, it lacked a lot of the features it has now
      • when [[shopping for a tool]], it's hard to figure out which features we need a priori
      • some tools are very workflow opinionated, very rigid
        • e.g. tools that enforce color coding
  • #q [[jerry michalski]] you set out to explore these tools and report back; what did you learn from your journeys?
  • #q [[jerry michalski]] on the problem of assigning truth values (paraphrasing, check)
    • daughter started using search engines to do homework
    • had to explain that up until now when teachers assigned a book, there were a number of authorities participating in that assignment (and could potentially act as gatekeepers)
    • technology is advancing so fast that [[fake info]] risks becoming uncontrollable
    • who do you [[trust]]? can you adopt their lists (adopt their trust)?
    • [[sift]] if you're trying to check the veracity of that webpage, get off that webpage
      • search name of the author for example
      • -> metadata overlay for the web? provided by [[hypothes.is]], [[noosphere]], [[agora]]
    • [[jerry michalski]]
      • #push [[fellowship of the link]]
        • remembers asking questions on (forum name missing)
        • a maybe nicer/simpler time, but points at potential
  • #q On [[misinformation]]/disinformation. Politically: what's your view on the human mind itself, thinking of it as self-reinforcing loops? if you have a personal belief and you may or may not reinforce it.
    • [[confirmation bias]]: more attuned to evidence that supports what we already believe
    • the role of emotion and [[attachment]]
    • don't know the answer to how to solve these tensions
    • how to pull in the right people into the right discussions/contexts
    • human prejudices which keep us from learning things that we have not been yet trained to learn
      • doesn't mean we won't discover ways to work around that
    • we have to think of the strong connections between artifacts, language, metodology, training as they enable us to understand the psychology of the individual and the group
    • [[experts on the well]] (sp?) is still around
    • #push [[agora]]
  • [[jerry michalski]]
    • case: [[blair]] (sp?) scribbling all posts in the [[well]] before suicide :(
  • #q is there a place for [[authority figures]] without going back to [[gatekeeping]]
  • #q (missed the gist of question about tools for thought, check)
    • [[howard rheingold]] standard psychological tests with people and substituted a computer or cartoon rendition of a person or a computer voice: people attribute human qualities to things that computers do
    • we have not evolved to make a distinction between synthetic and organic voices
    • understanding our limitations can lead to working around them
    • one problem with teaching critical thinking:
      • if you teach questioning authority, they will question:
        • teachers
        • family
        • schools
        • governments
        • ...and they tend not to like that :)
      • when do you teach it? is elementary school too early?
  • #q [[michael]] thank you for your book. Two pieces to the description earlier of analog thinking extension: (...). How do those map, or not, to digital tools?
    • experiments with new interfaces
      • move blocks around and change the computer landscape
    • book: [[the extended mind]]
      • there's a lot of research that shows that teachers who use gestures are more effective teachers
      • our bodies and how we manipulate forms in space communicate a way of thinking
    • [[jerry michalski]] sometimes a computer can slow you down and ask: how are you feeling right now? there's many processes (e.g. somatic) ongoing; slowing down and becoming mindful can help you become aware of them.
      • physiological responses to new information.
      • can we find that moment and call it out? offer a chance to slow down then, going deeper?
    • [[jerry michalski]] there are people who are aware of their heartbeat and people who aren't
      • stock brokers: people who are aware of their heartbeat make better financial decisions (I think; the stream cut out for 10s)
  • #q what's the more psychoactive experience you've had with a computer?
    • [[howard rheingold]] talked way into [[xerox parc]], got access to an [[alto]] computer with a [[5mb]] hard disk
      • being able to move a paragraph around without retyping a page (!)
      • "it was [[blissful]]" :D
      • "it was not just a way to manipulate information, I could think better with it"
    • computer programming does this with abstraction
    • what people did early online, late 1980s, people took psychedelics and chatted online
    • took [[lsd]] again at some point, put on [[google earth]] and had a realization that what [[google]] was doing was building an [[ai]]
  • #q what do you think about [[tools for thought]] for modeling, simulations
    • (had to context switch but this sounded interesting)
    • [[betterverse]]

[[Q&A]]

  • Have to drop out for the day by now to prep dinner and start winding down for the night :)

[[Tools for Thinking Product Demos]]

  • TBD.

[[Leveraging AI and ML in Building New Tools for Thinking]]

  • TBD.

[[Idea Dimensionality and Representing Semantic Meaning]]

  • TBD.
📄 pushed from garden/flancian/journal/2022-08-16.md by @flancian
📖 stoas
⥱ context
To see links, go up to full node [[tools-for-thinking]].