- #[[E: Ad hoc book clubs]]
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Goal
- getting a deeper understanding of the book
- 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
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Book
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Thinking Fast and Slow
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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
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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
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Participants
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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
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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?
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Synchronous ideas
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silent meetings - how would that work focused more on exploration than taking decisions
- the P2PU course on CSCL, with editing in Etherpad
- can we use Minerva platform?
- FROG?
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Annotations
- Hypothes.is on a pirate PDF?
- Collecting Kindle highlights and overlaying them for a heatmap (doable, but useful?)
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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
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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
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Individual writing
- Writing prompts, questions - write before you see anyone else’s reactions
- Are there study group questions for this book anywhere?
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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)
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stimulate questions and connections, applications
- somehow use Knowledge Building scaffolds?
- epistemic fact checking - distributed looking into citations and seeing how well he represents them
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collectively building an argument map of the points he makes, and the evidence?
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then reading another book on mind/thinking etc (maybe from different perspective), and seeing how they contrast, the evidence maps mesh
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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…
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Public artifacts
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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
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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?
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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?
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Expert visitors
- Could bring in someone from Minerva for example (faculty in neuroscience) once we have specific questions that stump us
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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