Thinking

You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.

These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).

For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.

Annotation tools feel great to use, but they don’t support the follow-up thinking you need to do. Text editors give you a flexible canvas for making sense of snippets, but their design is often cumbersome and disorienting when used in this way. If you could move fluidly between these tools, you could use each where it excels and, perhaps, get the best of both worlds. In this paper, we present Latticework, a system which unifies annotation with freeform text editing, in the context of personal knowledge management tools.

[In Latticework], you forage through messy source documents, accumulating key snippets into a working document for sensemaking (i.e. rearranging and elaborating that material for insight). But, as prior work has described, this process isn’t linear. It’s often convenient to do a bit of preliminary sensemaking in the midst of foraging; conversely, observations you uncover during sensemaking will often lead to another round of foraging, and so on, in a loop.

Latticework’s main goal, then, is to enable fluid movement between these foraging and sensemaking stances. By extension, that means fluid movement between acting on source documents (which emphasize foraging) and on your working document (which emphasizes sensemaking). Ideally, you should be able to shift your focus as it makes sense in the moment, and the work you do in each place should remain visible in the other.

The existing personal knowledge management tools are insufficient to help us process information, especially during web-based research.

The tree structure and unique file path inherited from analog metaphors encourage collection, not connection, of ideas.

They make it harder to reuse and cross-reference ideas, and easier to hoard information.

...Can building associations be more intuitive?
...Is playfulness possible?
...Can web discovery be an organic extension of the existing knowledge base?

Semilattice is a collection of system and interaction concepts for personal knowledge management tools.

Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.

But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.

Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this commuity - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.

Obsidian 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.

I threw myself into this kind of associative note-taking. I gathered links around concepts I wanted to explore (“the internet enables information to travel too quickly,” for example, or social networks and polarization). When I had an interesting conversation with a person, I would add notes to a personal page I had created for them. A few times a week, I would revisit those notes.

I waited for the insights to come.

And waited. And waited.

• mapping huge spaces onto small screens seems to be one of fundamental problems in "UI"
• somehow free panning in x/y makes me feel like looking through a loupe - I don't get that feeling when scrolling only vertically though
• I'm curious how many and what kinds of projectors would I need to have a wall for doing/thinking

...

• another thing to keep in mind is the "data-ink ratio" idea from Tufte - for power users the best UIs allow for making a lot of information visible at once, with the least amount "UI cruft" possible
• another idea to gain pixel space is to filter out what's irrelevant
• maybe the problem is not so much about the size of the display, but about the DPI? (for reference: reMarkable 2 has 226 DPI, Apple iMac Retina 5k has 218 DPI, so only ~18% of what's possible on paper)

I’m now more inclined to attribute Looseleaf’s power to its visual texture than to some cognitive media-style abstraction. And the visual texture owes more to the beauty (yes, beauty!) of the original pdfs from the Vasulka Archive. Perhaps the demo is best understood not as a prototype generic tool, but as a specific curated experience in its own right, with form and content claiming equal importance in its overall success.

Even so, I think there are some general lessons that can be drawn from this demo:

• Content is not inert
• Visual texture lets content breathe
• Visual texture lets the eye wander without losing itself

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

If large groups are not ideal, what is the perfect group size? A fascinating 2019 study explored this question by looking at citation networks. They found that papers with more authors tend to receive more citations — large teams are good at developing a field. However, they found that the smallest teams — between one and three authors — were significantly more likely to publish disruptive results that could change the course of a field. So, in terms of sheer creativity, smaller groups seem to have an advantage.

With three or more people, group think and social dynamics kick in; there is an audience to impress. Thus, the ideal group may actually be of a minimal size: two. When working with just one other person, one must remain fully focused as the pair iteratively move the discussion forward. Two people who support each other's thinking can travel far in their thinking without getting distracted. With just one other person, it is also easier to be at ease and to enjoy the experience — to get into a state of 'flow'.

Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, “I undressed the banana!”? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend’s remark triggers the offhand reply, “That’s just sour grapes”? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making—the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights.

Ping Practice is a method for developing a practice of unblocking yourself.

You can think of the method a bit like using a pause button or a camera...

When you notice yourself resonating with or resisting something, the method invites you to name what's giving rise to that sensation and then letting it go.

No categorizing or sensemaking. In these tiny moments, you’re simply creating a breadcrumb for your future self.

...A ping can take on any form: word, phrase, title, rhyme, name, lyric, quote, place, color, texture, melody, idea, feeling, etc.

The most important thing about Pings – and what differentiates them from other thoughts – is that a Ping is language that moves you, "clicks," or otherwise causes you to feel something in your body.

You are likely encountering a Ping if the movement or attraction you sense seems intuitive, automatic, reflexive, and happens without thinking...as if what you are encountering relates to something latent within you.

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.

...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.

It’s not that I advocate for no note-taking. I just strongly believe in keeping it as elementary as possible, such that the note-taking itself doesn’t become the thrust of the endeavor. Leonardo da Vinci kept all of his notes in one big book. If he liked something he put it down. This is known as a commonplace book, and it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci. Taping a bunch of cryptic phrases to the walls is also acceptable, or keeping a shoebox full of striking phrases on a jumble of papers, as Eminem did.

Previously, I tagged content generated collaboratively with GPT-3 with a curation ratio, intended to give an approximate sense of the amount of cherrypicking involved in its creation. Others have similarly used a ratio to indicate curation selectivity. However, this description doesn’t distinguish between, say, choosing the best of 5 entire essays generated by GPT-3 and choosing the best of 5 sentences every sentence. The latter text has received much more optimization pressure per token and is likely to look a lot more coherent.

Gurkenglas made the excellent suggestion that I track the number of bits of selection for an objective and exact measure of human intervention. Normally, this would be a lot of trouble, but fortunately Loom trees contain sufficient information to retroactively calculate bits of selection and intervention. From now on, I will label content that is generated with the assistance of GPT-3 or other language models with the metrics presented in this post.

Everything has been composed, just not yet written down.

How do artists and scientists work? The same.

I have reason to believe, which for brevity’s sake I will treat elsewhere, that the most complex class of processes and structures we humans can consciously prescribe, reduces mathematically to a tree. A tree has a top, bottom, left and right. Its branches fan out from the trunk and they don’t intersect with one another. They are discrete, contiguous, identifiable objects which persist across time. Trees are Things.

Software and websites, however, reduce to arbitrarily more complex structures: they are graphs. A graph has no meaningful orientation whatsoever. No sequence, no obvious start or end—at least none that we can intuit. It is better considered not as one Thing, but as a federation of Things, like the brain or a fungus network, or perhaps a composite artifact left behind from an ongoing process, like an ant colony or human city.

Kill context switches in online reading & research. Organise, annotate & discuss websites, PDFs, YouTube videos without leaving your tab. By yourself, with your peers & enhanced by AI.

This talk is about a particular kind of media, which is "media for thinking in." And it's about a particular kind of thinking, which is understanding systems.

...Media are our thinking tools. Our representations of a system are how we understand it.

To understand and build new complex systems, we need powerful new representations, and we need a powerful new medium in which to work with these representations.

Today's representations were designed for the medium of paper. This talk will show examples of new representations for systems, and offer hints as to what a new medium might be look.

A zettelkasten consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. The notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other. For example, notes may contain tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format and structure of the notes is subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.

My hunch is that digital Luhmann-ism really only provides dividends for a small population of academics and writers of non-fiction who need to cite references or make connections across disparate texts.

For the rest of us, just writing down notes is all that really matters. Any tool that allows you to compose and save text will do. It is the act of writing, not the act of linking or reading or revisiting, that clarifies thought and leads to insight. The rest is all superfluous.

• laying out information spatially seems to work well for me for divergent thinking - putting ideas next to each other, recombining them, rich media and text intermixed on the same infinite canvas
• keeping in mind Thinking by Writing ideas, canvas for thinking should probably be a very personal thing
  • all my attempts so far, to share the work in progress canvases have failed - they seem to be too close to my internal concept map for them to be useful to anyone else in the spatial form

Apparatus is a hybrid graphics editor and programming environment for creating interactive diagrams.

The Apparatus Editor runs in the browser and interactive diagrams created with Apparatus can be shared and embedded on the web

What might a forest say to a satellite — or to us? Perhaps its communication is more ambient and affective than semantic. Earlier this year, amidst the long, dark days of the pandemic winter, I happened upon a sound archive, tree.fm, that combines photographs and audio recordings to allow you to view and listen to forests around the world; the site’s tagline is “listen to a random forest.” I tweeted about it, and other cabin-feverish folks seemed appreciative. “I’m so starved for other places, this almost made me cry,” was one response. Another responder did cry, at least in emoji. Yet my caption, quoting the tagline, seemed to mislead and even frustrate commenters from the tech world. Apparently, they were expecting to encounter an algorithm and were disappointed to be immersed instead in the rustling leaves of Atatürk Arboretum, in Istanbul, or the birdsong of Bitza Nature Park, in Moscow, or the rushing water of a coastal forest, in Ibiza. Here the randomness wasn’t about parallel computational processing; rather, it was about a kind of grounded sublimity, a sensation of poetic disorientation as one forest after another materialized onscreen.

The popularity of hiking surged during the pandemic. For centuries forests have redeemed us humans. Now we must reciprocate that redemption.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate [designers] being appreciated for our brains (which is a little like being told you have a great personality). But divorcing “thinking” from “making” reduces design to “concepting.” And while concepting is valuable, concepts are much easier to have than finished products. Almost anyone can have a concept.

It is in the detail work that design really happens — that the clever, delightful moments of a design occur. Those are as important, if not more so, than the concept itself. The details are where we earn our money and our respect, and the details can only be worked out through making stuff.

Inspired & focused thinking

Muse is a canvas for thinking that helps you get clarity on things that matter. Think in private or collaborate with others.

Each Muse board is like a whiteboard that can hold even more whiteboards. Stay in the ideation flow, worry about organizing later. Your boards grow organically over time, as you develop an idea or work on a project.

An Integrated Thinking Environment (ITE) is an app that provides tools to make thinking easier, enabling us to be more innovative. ITEs provide features that take care of some parts of the work of knowledge management and knowledge innovation. Some popular examples of ITEs include DEVONthink, Roam Research, Notion, and Obsidian.

I’m building a custom pleroma client so that my friends and I can have a cute, self-hosted social network to post about politics and art. Besides being much more visually interesting than our facebook messenger groupchat, e-worm also attempts to solve design problems around conversational, collaborative thinking. The biggest of these problems is the inherent ephemerality of our groupchat— it doesn’t really succeed as a collaborative thinking space because it has no long-term memory. When messages are constantly buried under new ones, it places the burden on us to remember previous conversations. So the ultimate design goal for e-worm is to create a self-archiving conversational interface that preserves thought and helps us keep thinking new things rather than going in intellectual circles.

Now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

You are undoubtedly familiar with this situation: You’re struggling with a problem—a tough work or school assignment, a complicated relationship, the prospects of a career change—and you cannot figure out what to do. So you decide to take a walk, and somewhere along that trek, the answer comes to you.

No magic answer will guarantee that all three [of Hamming's] conditions are satisfied. But, by making a series of 95% confidence bets and gathering more data along the way, you can quickly find seemingly impossible futures.

A first principle cannot be deduced from any other axiom or assumption. First-principles thinking is about minimizing assumptions, and fewer assumptions mean less risk. So first principles thinking is intertwined with risk minimization. That makes first principles thinking a great decision-making framework.

So clearly, there’s some directed-ness to the way our minds are navigating our internal webs of ideas – good thinking is effective navigation through the idea maze.

If thinking is navigating the idea maze, then good ideas may be interesting paths through the maze. This very essay you’re reading is a kind of a purposeful wandering hike through my own idea maze, laid out in a way that’ll hopefully plant some new seeds in your own garden of ideas. Ideas are paths through idea mazes, and writing is a way to chart those paths for others to follow.

...It seems to me that if we want to model our minds as “graphs of ideas”, which a lot of thinking tools do these days, 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.

This syllabus examines the design of notation. We concern ourselves chiefly with one question: how does working in a particular notational system influence the ways that people think and create in it?

This picture is mildly interesting because instead of immediately collapsing into one rut, your brain hangs suspended between a rabbit rut and a duck rut. We nod and call this Ambiguity. But unless you Sit Down And Think About It For Five Minutes, you’re not going to notice that it could be a hairdryer that has been split open, let alone an erotic BDSM picture of a clothespin attached to a female breast. Maybe if you caught it right out of the corner of your eye, without time to think, or if it was disguised by visual noise, you would notice one of the latter two immediately – at the cost of not being able to see the duck or rabbit.

As I’ve noted before, I spend about an hour and a half every morning on a walk, barring weather or injury or just wanting to sleep in. Typically I walk down the same road, grab a coffee, trudge up the same hill, then cross the same street to the same stretch of coast that I walk along before heading home. Sometimes I do switch it up, but there are several not-supposed-to-be-private-but-the-owners-act-like-they’re-private beaches around here that can limit my walking options. Besides, for this sort of thing, repetition is good, monotony is good; both walking and thinking are all about reps, and I find consistency is conducive to getting them. These walks are for exercise, but also to think. I just ruminate on whatever and, often, it turns into an idea for a post, or else I’ll think of a good angle to take in a book project, or whatever. I don’t know how I would do this job if I didn’t have a regular dose of pure thinking time of this nature. Yes, I’m walking too, but walking and thinking are the same thing. My phone stays in my pocket or, more and more often, on my desk at home. No email no podcasts no nothing. And I walk alone.

Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially. It also has a historic relationship to mental organization that ranges from the Peripatetics, to the philosophers of Kyoto, to the clockwork circuit of Immanuel Kant, to the sublimities of the English Romantics and their passages through nature. It is not simply an occasion for observation but an analytic instrument.

Thinking time — the time needed to concentrate without interruptions has always been central to scholarly work. It is essential to designing experiments, compiling data, assessing results, reviewing literature and, of course, writing. Yet, thinking time is often undervalued; it is rarely, if ever, quantified in employment practices.
Newport's thesis raises a much more fundamental question: what is the impact of lost concentration time on science — not just on the structure and process of science, but also on the content and quality of research?

...Felicity Mellor, a science-communication researcher at Imperial College London, is sceptical about giving managers a role in thinking time. In many cases, researchers are already feeling the weight of their institution's monitoring and evaluation systems. Mellor argues that including yet another box in an evaluation form might not go down well. She also thinks that institutions will not accept this. "Can you imagine the response if a scientist filled out a time sheet where it says 'eight hours spent thinking'?" Ultimately, she says, creating a more supportive research culture needs a much more fundamental change. That suggests an even more radical rethink of the current funding model for academic research.

...[Cal] Newport's thesis [in Slow Productivity] raises a much more fundamental question: what is the impact of lost concentration time on science — not just on the structure and process of science, but also on the content and quality of research?

Decks are easier to prepare than documents, however. Documents require coherence, thinking, sentences. But convenience in preparing decks harms the content and the audience. Optimizing presenter convenience is selfish, lazy, and worst of all, replaces thinking.

• the right interface can have an incredible power

  • making something that was previously extremely hard, available to everyone (switching from Roman to Arabic numerals as an interface to mathematics)
  • making invention possible (Feynman Diagrams)
  • making Solving Things Visually possible (Cartesian Coordinates)
    • Data Visualization can be thought of as an alternative, sometimes more powerful, interface to data
  • working with the amounts of data for which we don't have enough Pixel Space (Collection-Browsing Interfaces)

• new powerful notations "stick around" and infect human thinking for generations

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul.

...I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! Why so slow? Because we read multiple translations of each of those sentences, and multiple commentaries on them, spanning many centuries — plus a bit of social and historical context. Slow, diligent, careful. And…

We asked, over and over: What do we think Paul was thinking, given that he chose those words? What do we think each translator and each commentator thought Paul was thinking? Why do we think they thought he was thinking that? Does it really make sense for Paul to have thought that? For us to think they thought he thought that? A theory of mind hall of mirrors!

At the heart of the course was this question: What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?

Aphorisms of 18th-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

I’ve gone through many versions of notetaking systems in the past decade, from literal “in memory” storage, to writing cheatsheets, to blogging everything publicly, to storing private notes in OneNote, then SimpleNote, then Notion. For focused topics, I have a long history of making markdown repos on GitHub accumulating thousands of stars. I’ve also considered Evernote, Joplin and Roam and its less culty competitors Foam and Athens.

Two months ago I moved my notes to Obsidian, and I’ve been fairly happy with the result.

...As I reached the limits of SimpleNote/Notion/GitHub, I thought about these factors for my next notetaking tool:

• Markdown based
  • If your editor gets in the way then you are paying cognitive overhead
  • If your editor uses proprietary data formats it will be hard to migrate/render
• Git version control
• Offline-ready mobile app
• Bidirectional linking
• Publish with search
• Image and file storage

Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness) and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism.

Build ideas mindfully.

Save content, create collections, and connect ideas with other people.

It seems, my dear friend, that the brains of the greatest men contract when they are gathered together, and that where there are more wise men, there you will also find less wisdom. The great assemblies are so preoccupied with minutiae, with formalities, and with empty orthodoxies, that essential issues are always relegated to the end.

Let me spell that out: the shared assumption, the axiom that both sides accept, is that math education shapes the intellect. Arithmetic is not just arithmetic. However you manage matters of multiplication, that’s how you’ll also approach matters of democracy. The rival camps favored opposite kinds of minds, and opposite kinds of math. But they shared a deep principle: Math makes minds.

• The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
• Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
• Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote in the Economist recently on whether modern large language models are conscious. As part of this, he and his colleague David Bender claim that GPT-3 has a "mind-boggling hollowness hidden just beneath its flashy surface" because of exchanges like:

Dave and Doug: What's the world record for walking across the English Channel?

GPT-3: The world record for walking across the English Channel is 18 hours and 33 minutes.

Setting aside the fact that a Sudanese Refugee actually did (nearly) walk across the channel in 2015, this is not actually evidence that GPT-3 is incapable of distinguishing sense from nonsense as Hofstadter claims.

With a prompt that clearly indicates that the task includes distinguishing sense from nonsense, GPT-3 is able to reliably distinguish Hofstadter and Bender's nonsense questions from sensical ones.

Vastness is a visceral, continuous sense of the universe being incomprehensibly bigger than your conceptions of it can ever be. This need not be a sense of the unknown, though much of the vastness is in fact unknown. Isolated bits of the vastness can in fact be known, named, pointed to, and even rise to familiarity.

Design by First Principles is simple, really: all design projects, be they video games, cathedrals, constitutions, etc, all come from the interplay of three things:

• First Principles (FP's)
• Limitations
• Design Decisions (DD's)

First principles are your goals. But more important than that, they have nothing to do with implementation. If you're trying to cross the river, your first principle is "get to the other side," not "swim across."

It’s such an eternal cognitive location, night driving.

Different thoughts come when you access that state.

Like writing PowerPoint in hotel lobbies.

...I think you access something other and special when you escape time, escape selfhood, whether that’s driving in the dark or sitting in a hotel lobby or walking, that’s another one.

It does a disservice to this cognitive state to believe that it can be found only with psychedelics or meditation or whatever, whereas there are mundane apertures too.

A related problem is that Barthes's thought is inseparable from the elegance and cunning with which it is formulated. Style, as Martin Amis rightly insists, "is not something grapples on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception." In The Pleasure of the Text—a useful guide, naturally, to his own work—Barthes had asked, "What if knowledge itself were delicious?" The corollary is: What if that knowledge were robbed of all that made it so tasty? ...To copy out and formalize Barthes's argument is not simply to diminish it, but to rob it of so many subtleties as to misrepresent it entirely (all in the name of representing it more clearly and rigorously).

Here's a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming?

Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.

Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond with two thoughts about learning:

• Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Learning about "for" loops is not learning to program, any more than learning about pencils is learning to draw.
• People understand what they can see. If a programmer cannot see what a program is doing, she can't understand it.

Thus, the goals of a programming system should be:

• to support and encourage powerful ways of thinking
• to enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs

A live-coding Processing environment addresses neither of these goals. JavaScript and Processing are poorly-designed languages that support weak ways of thinking, and ignore decades of learning about learning. And live coding, as a standalone feature, misses the point.

Alan Perlis wrote, "To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program." This view is a mistake, and it is this widespread and virulent mistake that keeps programming a difficult and obscure art. A person is not a machine, and should not be forced to think like one.

How do we get people to understand programming?

We change programming. We turn it into something that's understandable by people.

TiddlyWiki is a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organising and sharing complex information
Use it to keep your to-do list, to plan an essay or novel, or to organise your wedding. Record every thought that crosses your brain, or build a flexible and responsive website.

TiddlyWiki lets you choose where to keep your data, guaranteeing that in the decades to come you will still be able to use the notes you take today.

the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking. — Dave Rupert

I have to constantly remind myself of this. Especially in an environment that prioritizes optimizing and maximizing personal productivity, where it seems if you can’t measure (let alone remember) the impact of a book in your life then it wasn’t worth reading.

...And in a similar vein for the online world: I cannot remember the blog posts I’ve read any more than the meals I’ve eaten; even so, they’ve made me.

It’s a good reminder to be mindful of my content diet — you are what you eat read, even if you don’t always remember it.

And the practice and habit of writing not only drains the mind but supplies it, too.

The images used for the lessons are either scans from books in my office or materials found through banal online searches. While preparing the lessons, I redrew all the images from the screen of my laptop: the point of the sketches was just to identify and memorize the images and to gain the time, while making them, to think about something to say.

When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.

Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.

Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.

The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

An ex-Apple interface designer’s 40-year plan to redesign not just the way we use computers, but the way we think with them.

For the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fast. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer. Erasmus wrote his famous "Éloge de la folie" in several days while travelling in Europe. He would never have done it in a couple of hours in a plane while the small screen in the backseat would show him advertisements.

...There’s no silver bullet. There will not be any technological solution. If we want to claim back our focus and our brain cycles, we will need to walkaway and normalise disconnected times. To recognise and share the work of those who are not seeking attention at all cost, who don’t have catchy slogans nor spectacular conclusions. We need to start to appreciate harder works which don’t offer us immediate short-term profit.

Our mind, not the technology, is the bottleneck. We need to care about our minds. To dedicate time to think slowly and deeply.

We need to bring back Sapiens in Home Sapiens Sapiens.

Knots, a 1970 book by the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, is based around a collection of patterns of human thinking, metacognition, and theory of mind, drawn from real experience with patients but turned into abstracted examples. The approach has the potential to be adapted into a range of formats which enable systemic design phenomena such as recursion, reflexivity, theory of mind, and second-order effects in systems to be explored, as a way of thinking about systems for design students and adding to their conceptual vocabulary, but potentially also as a method for doing research with people.

This paper illustrates example 'new knots' around topics including sharing data, social media, clickbait, and 'smart' homes.

I am inclined to believe that the physical aspect of reading a printed book is a significant benefit in one’s retention of its content, but I’m not aware of any proof of this: research is slight and rather ambiguous, suggestive rather than probative. I also believe that writing something out by hand forces you to work at a speed similar to that of careful thought and that this improves your prose — but can anyone prove that? What I do believe/know is that we have not been reading or writing for long enough for any kind of evolutionary changes to have taken place in our brains to make one format obviously better than any other format.

In order that the mind may not be taxed, moreover, by the manifold and confused reading of so many such things, and in order to prevent the escape of something valuable that we have read, heard, or discovered through the process of thinking itself, it will be found very useful to entrust to notebooks...those things which seem noteworthy and striking.

Free from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression

On two occasions, I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Walking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?

The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.

Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.

When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves "Can I believe it?" Then...we search for supporting evidence.

...When we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves "Must I believe it?" Then...if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must.

If the mind needs to wander, best let the body do the same. A short walk is more effective in coming up with an idea than pouring all the coffee in the world down your gullet.

Design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.

The architect-philosopher Paul Virilio observes that "the most important product of today's culture is speed"; in agreement, I advise my students to resist the insidious erosion of meaning and value that results from haste and carelessness. Secrets and treasures can only be encountered slowly, attentively, and laboriously, and this is part of the value of letters and thinking toward our work through letters.

It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.

I think everyone in this country should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school — I don’t think anyone should be a lawyer, but going to law school could be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way. So I view computer science as a liberal art.

Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involved gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intense concentration. And now I too do this.

The details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me.

There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous.

The hand is the window on to the mind. — Immanuel Kant

American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.