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[[john borthwick]]
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#push [[readwise]]
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[[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
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on a macro level
- (missed one beat here I think)
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paradigm shift with #push [[notion]] (2017-2020), block based architecture
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then #push [[roam]] (blew up in 2021), first somewhat mainstream [[graph database]]
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then many tools coming online, but no clear next item of big innovation
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why did [[evernote]] get stuck?
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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
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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
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#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.)
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[[q&a]]
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[[anki]] for writing?
- have been exploring something, dogfood
- [[theme reviews]]
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some people do this:
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[[repeat]]
- you can get to 80% of the work fast this way
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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
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[[core thesis for ai]]
- the AI can’t be the product
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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]]?
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[[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]]
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it feels like the space has gone [[mainstream]] now
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[[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
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[[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
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#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]]
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[[john borthwick]] the downsides of [[silos]]
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#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
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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]]
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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
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[[tweet threads]]
- the user of [[twitter]] has helped advance the space
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#q if you did [[enterprise]], what would you do?
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[[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
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#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?
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"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]] (?)
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#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?
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[[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]]?
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"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"
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how to turn [[fluid thoughts]] into [[coherent text]]
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[[document]] ~ [[doc]]
- you have [[blocks]] and [[docs]]
- imagine your thoughts being injected into a doc
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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
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#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]] :)
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hacked into something like the latter :)
- -> I think bots like [[agora bot]] are sufficient?
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[[jinja]] seemed to solve all problems for customization cross tool
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#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? :)
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Education just hasn’t been something they’ve been successful at, haven’t found a way to penetrate that field.
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[[gordon brander]] on [[subconscious]]
- (87 people watching at this point in time)
- actually talking about something on a larger scale than [[subconscious]]
- the internet is already a tool for thought
- we’ve gone through [[sense making crises]] several times on a historical level
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we’re going through another and we’ll need to get through it
- (missed the first minute)
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[[jerry michalski]] with [[howard rheingold]]
- how do communities work? how do we get smarter humans?
- pass the floor
- (split screen with [[jerry’s brain]])
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[[howard rheingold]]
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[[jerry michalski]]
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#q [[jerry michalski]] what from the original vision has worked (and maybe we take for granted) and what hasn’t (yet)?
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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
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#push [[works]]
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[[a work]]
- service or product that your enterprise created
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[[b work]]
- part of the enterprise that works on improving ability to create that product
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[[c work]]
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#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]]
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note taking apps, rapid learning apps
- we need to integrate these things as a [[toolkit]], integrate [[thinking environments]]
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there are [[relationships]] that really need to be made more clear
- there are ways of using visualizations of what we know to think
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#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.
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[[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
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-> 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.
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[[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
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some tools are very workflow opinionated, very rigid
- e.g. tools that enforce color coding
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#q [[jerry michalski]] you set out to explore these tools and report back; what did you learn from your journeys?
- [[howard rheingold]] throughout history, we see that people who use tools find things to do with them
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the [[internet]] is a good example: there is a myth that it was created as a bomb proof communication medium.
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#q [[jerry michalski]] on the problem of assigning truth values (paraphrasing, check)
- daughter started using search engines to do homework
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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)
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technology is advancing so fast that [[fake info]] risks becoming uncontrollable
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solution unknown but might require algorithmic filtering
- who do you [[trust]]? can you adopt their lists (adopt their trust)?
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[[sift]] if you’re trying to check the veracity of that webpage, get off that webpage
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[[jerry michalski]]
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#push [[fellowship of the link]]
- remembers asking questions on (forum name missing)
- a maybe nicer/simpler time, but points at potential
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#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
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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
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#push [[agora]]
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[[jerry michalski]]
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case: [[blair]] (sp?) scribbling all posts in the [[well]] before suicide :(
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#q is there a place for [[authority figures]] without going back to [[gatekeeping]]
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#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
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one problem with teaching critical thinking:
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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?
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#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?
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experiments with new interfaces
- move blocks around and change the computer landscape
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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
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[[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?
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[[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)
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#q what’s the more psychoactive experience you’ve had with a computer?
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[[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
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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]]
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#q what do you think about [[tools for thought]] for modeling, simulations
- (had to context switch but this sounded interesting)
- [[betterverse]]
- Have to drop out for the day by now to prep dinner and start winding down for the night :)