Topic
thinking
- Vin Varma's notetaking system
Vin Varma's thoughtful notes on his note-taking process. As my understanding deepens, it naturally precipitates into action. Projects start to emerge at various scales. The form follows the understanding. As confusionā¦
- Exploiting Locality
I recently wrote about the tendency of creators to keep messy versus clean workspaces. While sometimes the mess is a certifiable inefficient disaster resulting from laziness, the "organized chaoos" messy space acts liā¦
- Mental Models
āPace layersā
- Walking And Talking
Low-tech dictation is a new technique Iāve adopted for creativity.
- Walking and Talking
I've been looking for a way to use outdoor time as a spur for creativity. Many of us do our best thinking when our brains and bodies are otherwise occupied ā we even call them "shower thoughts" for a reason. Running aā¦
- Mental Liquidity
Morgan Housel: Visa founder Dee Hock had a great saying: āA belief is not dangerous until it turns absolute.ā Thatās when you start ignoring information that might require you to update your beliefs. It might sound crā¦
- Pond Brains and GPT-4
Are complex ecosystems like ponds actually smarter than we are? Are they "thinking"? Gordon says yes: Evolution is a pragmatist. It only cares about actual behavior. It is the getting and the doing that matter. The hoā¦
- New Metaphors
New Metaphors is a project to help spur creative thinking through metaphor. It's a deck of cards you can use in exercises to help stimulate new perspectives on an existing idea: A metaphor is just a way of expressingā¦
- The Simplest Thing
When working through problems, the most impressive creators to me aren't those that divine an entire solution in their brain for an hour, then slam out a perfect result (spoiler: this doesn't exist outside of the occaā¦
- The Midwit Trap
Some solutions rely on convoluted chains of logic that are strictly dependent on every single statement being true. They are more likely to have hidden ādivide by zeroā problems that may be easily noticeable to the exā¦
- Sam Hinkie's Resignation Letter
This resignation letter from former Philadephia 76ers GM Sam Hinkie is full of gems. Here are a couple. On contrarianism in a short-sighted league when you're always under the microscope: To develop truly contrarian vā¦
- Second-Order Thinking
Shane Parrish on the power of second-order thinking: Second-order thinking is more deliberate. It is thinking in terms of interactions and time, understanding that despite our intentions our interventions often causeā¦
- Concept-based Notes and Composable Ideas
If a note is an idea, we want to make the idea as atomic as possible, so we can find and stitch them together into an interconnected web of ideas. We want composable building blocks. Composability helps us stack, mix,ā¦
- Hammock-Driven Creativity
Here's Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) on the benefits of stepping away from the computer, in his talk on "hammock-driven development": He differentiates what the "waking" mind and "background" mind are good at, whicā¦
- Downtime Thinking
Of the hundreds of posts I've written here over the past few years, I would guess that 80% of the topics spawned in my head while exercising. Running is my primary regular means for alone time to think in silence. I uā¦
- Phase Transitions
David Perell's been putting out a series of 100 posts, 1 per day, brief essays about writing. I enjoyed this one about the evolutionary, and recombinant, nature of ideas: All creativity is inspired by other peopleās iā¦
- The Idea-to-Reality Production Stack
A great overview of mental models, thinking approaches, and techniques to, as the piece says, go from "idea to reality."
- The Zettelkasten Method
Lately I've been pouring time into Roam, finding ways to improve my long-term memory, and reading about taking notes, all in service of getting better at synthesizing new ideas. Central to all of these is the Zettelkaā¦
- A System for Publishing Evergreen Notes
In Sƶnke Ahrens's book How to Take Smart Notes he describes the "zettelkasten" system (the "slip box") developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann created the system to help himself organize notes and thouā¦
- Weekend Reading: Two Elites, DOS in VR, and Personal Brainstorming
šļø A Tale of Two Elites Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites: The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-plaā¦
- Weekend Reading: American Production, On Bikeshedding, and Glyphfinder
šļø Why America Can Make Semiconductors But Not Swabs Dan Wang on American industrial production: Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should thinā¦
- Knowledge Synthesis in Roam
What does it mean to "synthesize" knowledge? Joel Chan, author of this post and professor of human-computer interaction, describes it as "creating a new whole out of components." In reading, digesting material, and taā¦
- Getting Comfortable with Roam
Roam Research has been making the rounds on the internet in the last couple months. I've written a little bit here about it, but promised this longer overview of how it's working for me so far. What is it? Roam is a tā¦
- How to Make a Memex
Been reading more about how others are using Roam the last few days. In this post, Sarah Constantin draws an apt connection to Vannevar Bush's "memex" concept from his 1945 paper "As We May Think". It was an early infā¦
- Roam: A Tool for Metacognition
I'm deeper these days into Roam for info storage and notes. It empowers a looser, free-form version of writing (or as Roam describes it "networked thought") that's hard to do in a linear note document. I've been workiā¦
- Weekend Reading: Chess, COVID Tracking, and Note Types
ā Chess Tom MacWright on chess. Reduce distraction, increase concentration Once you have concentration, you realize that thereās another layer: rigor. Itās checking the timer, checking for threats, checking for any ofā¦
- The Idea Maze
I ran across this set of lecture notes from Balaji Srinivasan's "startup engineering" course. He proposes this format for thinking about the phases a company moves through ā from idea to profits: An idea is not a mockā¦
- Weekend Reading: Tagging with Turf, Mars Panorama, and Kinds of Easy
šŗ turf-tagger Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser. š Mars Curiosity Hiā¦
- 100 Little Ideas
Ideas, quips, and heuristics from Morgan Housel. Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone whoās done what youāre about to try doesnāt apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do tā¦
- Weekend Reading: Tradeoffs, the Margins, and PR FAQs
āļø Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making Farnam Street: Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you canāt use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seemsā¦
- Getting Paid to Change Your Mind
Thereās a really strange phenomenon in certain arenas (particularly politics) where itās considered a virtue to strongly hold a viewpoint and never change your position. This is strange because, as Rory Sutherland poiā¦
- The Full Reset
On the power of starting with no baggage, sunk costs, or past poor decisions: Part of the reason the economy recovered slowly after the financial crisis was that businesses, spooked by the recession, relentlessly reviā¦
- Weekend Reading: Universal Laws, Tandem, and Computers That Can See
š Universal Laws of the World A list of broad laws that apply to all fields. Thoughtful stuff as always from Morgan Housel: Parkinsonās Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. In 1955 historiā¦
- Caution on Bias Arguments
Ever since reading Kahneman's Thinking Fast, and Slow, biases are always in the front of mind when considering approaches to problems. Scott Alexander has some interesting thoughts on this topic, namely that bias is eā¦
- Surfing Uncertainty
The predictive processing model is a cognitive framework for modeling how the brain synthesizes information from two channels: The "bottoms up" stream of raw data coming in through our senses for processing The "top dā¦
- The Danger of Oversimplification
Many people are familiar with Occam's razor, the principle summarized as: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. There's a tendency you notice all over for people to overcoā¦
- Gates' Law: How Progress Compounds
āMost people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.ā My post from yesterday got me thinking about this piece I read recently on Farnam Street that dovetailsā¦
- Degrees of Confidence
I like this idea from Morgan Housel on positioning and defining levels of confidence on a scale from a low to high position of authority on a topic. We've all seen plenty of instances of "levels 1 and 2" confidence ouā¦
- Mental Models: A Conversation with Shane Parrish
This is a great episode between two guys with interesting perspectives. Parrish's Farnam Street blog is one of my favorites out there, along with his podcast, The Knowledge Project. This conversation covers a lot on tā¦
- Weekend Reading: Running Maps, Thinking, and Remote Work
šš»āāļø On the Go Map Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especiaā¦
- Weekend Reading: Brains and Language, Hillshading in Blender, and Antifragility
š§ Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language "It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk," the authors wroteā¦
- Writing Docs at Amazon
Amazon is famous for its "No PowerPoint" policy for meetings, requiring that those calling meetings for any new idea, project, or effort write a narrative document to describe the ins-and-outs of what's on the table fā¦
- Weekend Reading: Hurricanes, Long Games, and AirPods
ā Hurricane Season 2017: A Coordinated Reconnaissance Effort The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma anā¦
- The Quality of Your Thoughts
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature. ā Marcus Aurelius
- Weekend Reading: Mental Models, Git History, and Notion
š§ A Latticework of Mental Models This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models ā first principles, Occam's Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great reā¦
- The Distrust of Intellectual Authority
I love this brief piece from Shane Parrish about the decaying respect for experience and authority on intellectual topics: This overwhelming complexity of modern life āproduced feelings of helplessness and anger amongā¦