generating artefacts and processes that help us retain that knowledge in the long-term
possibly generating public artefacts useful for others
getting much wider perspectives through the diversity of group members
Book
Thinking Fast and Slow
pro
interesting and relevant to many of us
Andy Matuschak specifically called it out as an example of a book that many of us have read, but few retain much understanding from
con
very long (is it possible to choose sections, or are there sections that are fluffy and can be quicky skimmed?)
could also be something like Knowledge Cartography edited volume
Participants
How much energy do we expect for how long?
do people have to commit to a certain cadence or drop-in/drop-out
enable peripheral participation - seeing our work and commenting, posting on Twitter etc?
How Roam-centric is it, how much familiarity with technical tools, or specific processes?
Initially people like Jon, Joel etc, but could be expanded to people at Minerva, CSCL people, big communities
Cadence
One chapter or more per time unit (two weeks?). Would be useful to be able to divide it into chunks of equal "idea density" - maybe someone who has read it could do that
Reading book, and then spending several weeks organizing ideas instead of just chapter by chapter and that’s it… But hard to keep momentum going?
Synchronous ideas
silent meetings - how would that work focused more on exploration than taking decisions
Collecting Kindle highlights and overlaying them for a heatmap (doable, but useful?)
Automated emails
reproducing Email-driven SRS by Quantum Country
JSON dumps of Roam pages, and a script that automatically merges comments to the same block
Roamex
Download JSON dump every day and have a script that uses updated-at and updated-email or other things to generate change logs, email diffs etc?
Importing JSON over existing JSON fails, because IDs are identical, if we were able to overwrite, would be able to update externally
Individual writing
Writing prompts, questions - write before you see anyone else’s reactions
Are there study group questions for this book anywhere?
Note taking/summaries
useful to have some kind of summary, at least as a roadmap/collective thing to refer to (maybe there are good notes already we can use)
stimulate questions and connections, applications
somehow use Knowledge Building scaffolds?
epistemic fact checking - distributed looking into citations and seeing how well he represents them
collectively building an argument map of the points he makes, and the evidence?
then reading another book on mind/thinking etc (maybe from different perspective), and seeing how they contrast, the evidence maps mesh
could be distributed - one group reading Kahneman, another reading another book. could we generate questions for the other group?
flash mob - let’s read 10 books on brain science in teams of four, and figure it all out…
Public artifacts
What would be useful for
people who are not planning to read the book
people who have not yet read the book, but plan to
people who have read the book
second cohort of book club members
Spaced repetition
reproducing Email-driven SRS by Quantum Country
collectively creating cards
sharing privately created cards
collecting SRS analytics, to determine which cards are more useful? But what is a good metric - retention? Understanding in five months? How to test, how to isolate?
Experiment
Are there hypotheses that we can formulate up front?
Is there data that we should be collecting during the process?
With a shorter book - we could iterate faster (run again, organized differently)
Lead to some kind of public write-up of the process
Second cohort?
Expert visitors
Could bring in someone from Minerva for example (faculty in neuroscience) once we have specific questions that stump us
Using our Zettelkasten
being able to bring in notes and comments from other books
but problem is that we can spend the rest of our lives discussing these issues, with the book as a thin alibi