Knowledge

As someone who flies business class on American a few times per year, I am zero percent surprised that [American Airlines CEO Robert Isom] doesn’t know or care about the experience flying American’s competitors.

...I think it comes down to the classic idea of a “businessperson”. That an executive can just have a knack for “business”. That an MBA trains a would-be executive to run any sort of company. That’s probably the sort of executives who run most companies in most industries. But I don’t think it’s how excellent companies are led. Excellent companies, in any industry, seem to be led by executives who live and breathe whatever it is their companies do, and they stay up at night and wake up in the morning thinking about how to lead their industries in quality.

If the CEO’s primary perspective on the company is via spreadsheets — if it’s all just P&L to them — that company is not going to excel at quality. Or if they do excel at quality, they won’t for long.

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.

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.

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge.
By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little.
By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more.
With a bachelor's degree, you gain a specialty.
A master's degree deepens that specialty:
Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge.
Once you're at the boundary, you focus.
You push at the boundary for a few years.
Until one day, the boundary gives way.
And, that dent you've made is called a Ph.D..
Of course, the world looks different to you now.
So, don't forget the bigger picture.
Keep pushing.

A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs.

Most fields have a problem with ‘ghost knowledge’, hard-won practical understanding that is mostly passed on verbally between practitioners and not written down anywhere public. At least in programming some chunk of it makes it into forum posts. It’s normally hidden in the depths of big threads, but that’s better than nothing.

I decided to read a bunch of these visual programming threads and extract some of this folk wisdom into a more accessible form.

• we’re beginning to visualise the previously invisible deep structure of text
• comparatively
• in real-time
• and then we’re learning how to manipulate text based on these hidden features.

I’m reminded of that famous series of photographs, The Horse in Motion, from 1878.

Until that moment, neither scientists nor the public knew whether or not all four of a horse’s hooves came off the ground when it runs. Imagine! It was a controversy!

The camera was a new instrument that showed what was already present, but inaccessible to the human eye.

But the camera isn’t just a scientific instrument like the, I don’t know, Large Hadron Collider. By the Saturday Evening Post, here are 5 Unintended Consequences of Photography (2022):

Photography Decided Elections
Photography Created Compassion
Photography Liberated Art
Photography Shaped How Americans Look
Photography Gave Us an Appreciation of Time

So the camera doesn’t just observe and record, it changes us.

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Text is becoming something new, that’s what I mean.

We’re inventing the camera and Photoshop simultaneously, and all their cultural repercussions, and to begin with this means new apps with new user interfaces, and where it goes after that I have no idea.

The famed physicist Richard Feynman once said, “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something,” a lesson from his father. I think too often we in the statistics/machine learning field are guilty of “only knowing the name of something.” Well, in most cases, we may know a bit more than the name, but not as much as we should to be able to use the concept usefully.

...The post is aimed at developing insight beyond “the name of something” in causal analysis (CA), a data science topic that is not new but has become much more prominent in recent years. As you will see, I am something of a skeptic on CA, and hope to dispel some common misunderstandings regarding it. Make no mistake–I do believe CA is a useful tool–but I hope here to demystify some of the ideas, and bring it down to Earth in terms of the extent of its value.

Given there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?

Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but

neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.

Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.

The labour of two days, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!

No, I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

Historical facts, knowledge, or thinking are not isolated atoms in a formless cloud of information, as digitalized bits; on the contrary, they form a dense network of causalities and interactions. This endless interaction and intertwining is crucial in all creative thoughts, and it makes knowledge even seemingly far from one's discipline useful in one's own work.

I wish to create a kind of forest of thought in which the reader can become happily lost. The side note references are not given to show the extensiveness of my library; my numerous quotes are only intended to leave traces that the readers may follow beyond the contents of these condensed texts.

There seem to be two major clumps of engineers.

There are the engineers who have read 1+ books on a given topic, and sometimes on several topics, and they all come off as extremely competent. These are, for the most part, the people that make up the audience of this blog. Of course, you do not literally need to read a book - a sufficiently high volume of technical blogs or courses are probably the equivalent at varying levels of efficiency - but take it for granted there is some Large Sum of information that someone has studied.

Then there are engineers (and people in every profession) who never try for the entirety of their careers, and this is the majority of every profession. I spoke to a reader who is employed as an extremely high-level engineer...who described the average professional as sleepwalking through their working lives, and this rung true. Of course, they are not literally asleep so something else is going wrong, but the description still seemed apt. There is movement - enough movement to fall down a flight of stairs - but none of the awareness needed to avoid such an outcome.

Once 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!

A note-taking tool for networked thought.

About once a year, I like to take a step back from the news cycle and write about a different kind of platform: the productivity tools that attempt to harness artificial intelligence and other innovations to make us better at our jobs.

A year ago this week, I wrote here about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. In short, it took me too long to learn, software can’t automate your thinking. But I do think it can create the conditions for improved thinking: for making new connections between ideas; for reducing the number of times during the day that your attention flits from one app to the next; and for organizing your reading and making it more useful to you in the future.

With that in mind, here are three apps I started using since I last wrote about that subject — and some free alternatives for folks seeking cheaper alternatives.

Two relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.

Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.

The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.

[Frederick] Taylor’s model of workplace productivity depended entirely on deskilling, on the invention of unskilled labor—which, heretofore, had not existed. More than half a century later, long after Taylor died while gripping a watch, Peter Drucker would pick up the baton he left behind and intone about the arrival of “knowledge workers.” But his definition of this new class of workers existed entirely in opposition to Taylor’s stories of their supposedly unknowledgeable peers.

...In other words, Drucker’s now-infamous formulation of knowledge workers only makes sense if you accept the premise that other workers do not themselves truck with knowledge. But that premise was the product of theft—an outcome of Taylor’s extraction rather than a natural or immutable fact of the work.

...Perhaps it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers. There have only ever been workers.

I 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”.

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

And therein lies the joy of reference books: You as the reader can make them comply with the demands of your knowledge, intellect and time constraints, not vice versa. We have all continued slogging through books we weren’t really enjoying because we were a third of the way through and it didn’t seem right to not finish them. (Yes, this is an example of the sunk cost fallacy—it’s also a very human fallacy, especially in an environment in which reading is gamified by completion). 

Nobody has ever scolded themselves for failure to complete a reference book. They are intended to be used as the reader demands—nothing more. You owe no obeisance to the author; there is no pretense of a conversation.

...Curated well, organized logically, illustrated with appropriate diagrams and maps, reference books can be a joy. And I suspect they’re a joy that many of us share, even if we are loath to say so publicly for fear of being labeled midwitted.

Maintenance 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.

Too 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.

Form 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?

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows - that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius: You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’

The results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition.

There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.

Which is to say you get a feeling about English that Calvin once got with his pet tiger on a day of fresh-fallen snow: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Let’s go exploring!”

A list of types of bricks used in the Hagia Sophia may help one to build an interesting brick wall, but it poorly suggests the great edifice from which they came.

In a world with over 5 million podcasts, Dwarkesh Patel stands out as an unexpected trailblazer...of all the noteworthy parts of Patel’s journey to acclaim, one thing stands out among the rest: just how deeply Patel will go on any given topic.

...This level of deep research is, for him, a way of respecting the opportunities he has in being able to speak to highly-regarded figures with influence, despite starting from a place of little influence himself.

During the construction period, the project architect—who has been involved since the beginning intuitive drawings—supervises the construction. Often on larger projects, the project architect has moved to the site for as long as a year and half. In this way as questions come up during the course of the project, the choices that are made are made with a sense of the history of the idea and they are true design decisions that accrue to wholeness. They are not simply the result of expediency in the field. This position of “not knowing a priori” is antithetical to the general model of the architect as hero. This is a damaging model because it discourages the slowness of process that comes from the patient search. Certainty is a prison.

Related to The Management Strategy that Saved Apollo 13.

A study in the European Journal of International Management has looked into the relationship between learning from failure and the internationalization process in entrepreneurial ventures. The researchers show a subtle link that perhaps challenges the received wisdom regarding success and failure suggesting that a cyclical process exists where the global expansion of entrepreneurial firms is intricately linked to experiential learning.

Leila Hurmerinta, Niina Nummela, and Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki of the Turku School of Economics at the University of Turku in Turku, Finland, explain that this process involves a reciprocal transfer, analysis, and internalization of experiential knowledge. Failures within the entrepreneurial landscape act as stimuli whether they are failures of the entrepreneur themselves or their peers.

If 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!

Knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, nor is it even a set of facts and their relations. Facts are only rendered meaningful within narratives, and the single-page document is a format very conducive to narrative structure. The hypertext books that have gained popularity (I’m thinking here of Meaningness.com) have largely conformed to this in two ways: 1) there is an intended reading order, and 2) the longer essays within the project do most of the heavy lifting in terms of imparting the author’s perspective to readers.

On the other hand, the notion of the “document” that is intrinsic to web development today is overdetermined by the legacy of print media. The web document is a static, finished artifact that does not bring in dynamic data. This is strange because it lives on a medium that is alive, networked, and dynamic, a medium which we increasingly understand more as a space than a thing.

About a decade ago, my friend Richard wrote a short blog post entitled This is what the internet was invented for.  In it, he linked to Ian’s Shoelace Site, his point being that if you suddenly realise you’ve always laced your shoes in a particular way without really wondering whether it was the best way, then there’s probably someone out there with sufficient interest in shoelacing that they’ll have compiled everything you need to know about how to lace your shoes… and this turns out in fact to be the case.

...There are so many ways in which the internet is getting worse, and making life worse, all around us, that it’s nice to be reminded, from time to time, of all the ways in which it can also make things better.

I've made the mistake many times through years.

Recently I've talked about the struggle of trying to keep up with too much content and manage it and I'm starting with shrinking my 21K bookmarks to a list of essentials resources, taking inspiration from Łukasz's method for purging them.

I'm using my Gimli axe with the intent of getting rid of the whole problem.

The classroom chair. The long benches of a lecture theatre. The stairs I fell asleep on. Chairs and education seems somehow emotionally entwined. Picture a classroom and you’ll think of rows and rows of chairs facing the blackboard. The idea that you should sit down and listen.

🪑

...my courses are like little trojan horses burrowing into people’s mental models to try and help them see the world a little more clearly.

🪑

Anyway. I’m just here sat in a chair, thinking about teaching, tacit knowledge, memes and mental models.

Most organisations have a lot of documents and data floating around that hardly ever gets revisited or used. They all have research, reading, and relevant information collecting dust.

Stuff that should be informing the decisions and strategies of the company. Some of it sits unread in a knowledge base or a wiki. Some of it lies in the drives of individual employees who don’t have a way to share it productively.

So much knowledge not being applied!

Except that’s not how we work as human beings. If you haven’t read it, experienced it, and contextualised it, then it isn’t knowledge to you. Knowledge is a quality that people possess, not documents, and the only way to transfer it from one place to another is for people at both ends to apply themselves and make it their own.

Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts.

We should say that anybody has skill enough to build a good dry-stone wall but that few know how to design one, for the placing of the stones is a matter of knowledge and judgment, not of dexterity.

These papers are probably to be called interdisciplinary—an “in” word these days—but any value they may have derives from the fact that the author started with a rather deep immersion in a single discipline. One cannot hope to understand the nature of interaction between impinging areas without a firm knowledge of at least one of them.

He shall know your ways as though born to them.

Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources.

It need not be only the likes of engineers, politicians, and entrepreneurs who have a hand in shaping the world and its things, for we are all specialists in at least a small corner of the world of things.

Can repair sites and repair actors claim special insight or knowledge, by virtue of their positioning vis-à-vis the worlds of technology they engage? Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of "designer" or "user"?

There are many commonalities we can admire in these endeavors: the dazzling leap of imagination, the broad scope of applicability, the founding of a new paradigm. But let’s focus here on their form of distribution. These are all things that are taught. To “use” them means to learn them, understand them, internalize them, perform them with one’s own hands. They are free to any open mind.

In Hamming’s world, great achievements are gifts of knowledge to humanity.

I'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:

1. It is readily discoverable if you have trusted access to expert members of the community.
2. 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.