Facts & Knowing
The edifice from which they came
A realization that this leaves out something essential
Interdisciplinary
As though born to them
A small corner of the world of things
What the fixer knows
The curse of knowledge
Gifts of knowledge to humanity
Not an accumulation of facts
How to be a genius
An affection for words
A tiny rivulet in a distant forest
Skill vs. knowledge
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
Building a knowledge base
An Article by Will DarwinStepping stones in possibility space
An Article by Gordon BranderIf we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new.
Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting.
...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting!
Maintenance and Care
An Article by Shannon MatternMaintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry precisely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices.
A Day at the Park
A Comic by Kostas KiriakakisOnce you see that an answer is not serving its question properly anymore, it should be tossed away. It's just their natural life cycle.
They usually kick and scream, raising one hell of a ruckus when we ask them to leave. Especially when they have been with us for a long time.
You see, too many actions have been based on those answers. Too much work and energy invested on them. They feel so important, so full of themselves. They will answer to no one. Not even to their initial question!
We are surrounded by ghosts
An Article by David R. MacIverI'd like to call the more general phenomenon that this is a specific instance of "ghost knowledge": It is knowledge that is present somewhere in the epistemic community, and is perhaps readily accessible to some central member of that community, but it is not really written down anywhere and it's not clear how to access it. Roughly what makes something ghost knowledge is two things:
- It is readily discoverable if you have trusted access to expert members of the community.
- It is almost completely inaccessible if you are not.
In this sense, most knowledge is ghost, particularly if you take an expansive view of what counts as an epistemic community.
Wikipedia
A WebsiteObsidian
An ApplicationObsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
In Obsidian, making and following [[connections]] is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph.
Andy's working notes
A Website by Andy MatuschakI haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either
An Article by Rach SmithI have never felt like an “imposter”.
I have always deserved to be here, I’ve worked hard.
I don’t suffer from a “syndrome”.
Identifying the gaps in my knowledge and being aware of what I don’t know is part of my vocation.In recent years it’s become trendy to discuss how we all apparently suffer from this imposter syndrome - an inability to internalize one's accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. I take two issues with this:
- it minimizes the impact that this experience has on people that really do suffer from it.
- we’re labelling what should be considered positive personality traits - humility, an acceptance that we can’t be right all the time, a desire to know more, as a “syndrome” that we need to “deal with”, “get over” or “get past”.
The Internet Is Rotting
An Essay by Jonathan ZittrainToo much has been lost already.
The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Links work seamlessly until they don’t.
And as tangible counterparts to online work fade,
these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge—
they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts.How am I doing, wonder?
A Quote by Louis KahnForm comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?
Seeing and Knowing
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition.
Roam Research
An ApplicationA note-taking tool for networked thought.
- are.na
A Dao of Web Design
What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.
Conventions of a medium
When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, “ritual,” and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off existing conventions that don’t make sense.
If you ever get the chance to watch early television drama you’ll find a strong example of this. Because radio required a voice-over to describe what listeners couldn’t see, early television drama often featured a voice over, describing what viewers could. It’s a simple but striking example of what happens when a new medium develops out of an existing one.
To abandon control
In print the designer is god. An enormous industry has emerged from WYSIWYG, and many of the web’s designers are grounded in the beliefs and practices, the ritual of that medium. As designers we need to rethink this role, to abandon control, and seek a new relationship with the page.
The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must “accept the ebb and flow of things.”
The journey begins by letting go
The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible.