![](https://rdl.ink/render/https%3A%2F%2Fthesephist.com%2Fposts%2Fnav%2F) # notes --- - [[thinking is the process of navigating our knowledge graph to find interesting paths or associations between unrelated ideas]] - [[thinking tools should help us navigate through our knowledge]] - [[{2.2a2b} digital gardens more closely resemble how we think than chronological feeds]] # Highlights --- > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > For thinking about thinking, a good place to start seems like association. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > If we imagine the repository of ideas and memories in a mind as a kind of tangled web of ideas, “thinking” definitely involves traversing and scrambling across this web somehow, with some intent > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > **good thinking is effective navigation through the idea maze.** > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > This model of thinking as “traversing a graph of ideas” leaves out an important element, though, because most good thinking happens with a goal. > > surfing vs navigating > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > If thinking is navigating the idea maze, then **good ideas may be interesting paths through the maze.** > [!check]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > That is what writing is: turning a net into a line. > > Holy shit… This is from an article called Reader-Generated Essays, which is on my list to read. Update: [[Karlsson, Henrick - 2022 - Reader-generated Essays]] > [!action]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > I’ve written previously about how we can think of inte[](Karlsson,%20Henrick%20-%202022%20-%20Reader-generated%20Essays.md)ence | thesephist.com](https://thesephist.com/posts/notation/#intelligence-as-data-compression) > [!check]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > **Creative, “divergent” thinking involves our minds going out and exploring our idea mazes to try to find latent explanations** – associations or relationships between previously unrelated ideas that may make our worldview more robust. > > I love this too! > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > Solution-seeking, “convergent” thinking involves the reverse – searching for explanations and associations in our minds that fit some problem at hand, so that we can decompose new problems into patterns we recognize how to solve. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > **we should think of “thinking” as a purposeful pathfinding process through this graph, where we wander in search of satisfying latent connections with high explanatory power or aesthetic value.** > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > As we encounter new observations, we try to find latent associations – new explanations composed of things we already know – that can satisfyingly explain things we see in the world. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > A good tool for thinking should make the combined human + tool system more effective at hunting for novel explanations within our idea mazes. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > It should tell us what’s around us. When we’re thinking of an idea, we should be able to immediately recall other, related thoughts from our past: have we thought the same before? Have I read something about this? Does anyone I know work on this stuff? Are there any traps – fallacies or obvious but disproven hypotheses – we should avoid? Tags in notes, semantic search, and hyperlink-dense notes are all about making these tools better at telling us which ideas are in the neighborhood of other ideas. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > I often feel like our individual notes and ideas only fill out a vacuously sparse subset of the space of good ideas, like dust motes suspended in stale air. With better tools, we should be able to map out entire sections of the idea-space, instead of optimistically poking holes in the space of ideas. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > A good tool should also tell us where the well-travelled paths are. A map with a thousand interesting places is no use if we see no roads to get us there. Our map of the idea maze should tell us which roads have been travelled before – which passing thoughts we may have thought already, and which unexpected connections between ideas came before us in someone else’s mind. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > When we look at the various features that have gained popularity in “tools for thought” on the market, like bidirectional links between ideas, hierarchical bulleted-list notes, or the “daily notes” journaling system, they all boil down to different ways to help us find interesting new paths in our idea mazes: > >Bidirectional links highlight for us connections we may otherwise have missed. >Bulleted-list notes make it easy for us to get a sense of place – it tells us where an idea stands in relation to every other idea in our notes. >Daily notes are like a traveller’s log – they tell us where we’ve been to help find past ideas quickly, and provide a kind of de-facto “index” of ideas previously visited. > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > With further advances in AI and interface design, we may invent tools that proactively search for interesting explanations amongst known ideas > [!action]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > In the novel Accelerando, Charles > [!highlight]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > Sometimes, I feel that a part of my work studying and writing about thinking tools is convincing the rest of the world that the space of possibilities in this domain far exceeds the space of possible note-taking tools and productivity workflows. > > yes! > [!check]+ Wed May 22 2024 20:57:03 GMT-0400 > > Notes and search engines are merely text buffers that we use to store information in between the times when we occupy ourselves deeply with those ideas.