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Tools for thought are a beautiful idea—inventions which can “change the thought patterns of an entire civilization.” But that’s a 30 year old quote. Why are they so hard to make?
@michael_nielsen and I try to answer that question and suggest paths forward:https://numinous.productions/ttftShow this threadThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo -
Andy Matuschak Retweeted
1/ Did you know that Vannevar Bush (you know, the guy who helped enable everything from radar to the manhattan project, the NSF to memexes) wrote an autobiography? Turns out that yes he did, it's been out of print since the 70's, and it's *excellent* BOOK REPORT THREAD
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Lovely, personal thread on making a book on zero-proof drinks from some of my culinary heroes.
@Gachatz's fascinating perspective as a chef: "Yeah, this is what we do all day...we try to combine flavors in interesting ways. [Non-alcohol cocktails] are the same, just with liquid."https://twitter.com/dhemberg/status/1220832453348220929 …
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Curtains seem like a good solution though I suspect few homes can sacrifice that much precious contiguous wall space. https://twitter.com/jongold/status/1221109469456687105?s=21 …https://twitter.com/jongold/status/1221109469456687105 …
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One clear barrier to having domestic whiteboards anywhere but home office seems to be that one can hide them on demand. Persistent scribbles on an enormous surface in a living space are too visually noisy. And yet persistence is important. Tough tension.
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Lots of people mentioned putting whiteboards in their home offices, but I think if you really did this right, you would be able to have one on demand in your living room, for spontaneous use when conversation turned in that direction.
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Whiteboards—particularly whiteboards persistent and big enough to accumulate writing for many days—create a change in consciousness! I straight-up think different thoughts when one's present. Doubly true in a collaborative situation.
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A ceiling-mounted retractable solution is appealing, but it seems hard to get the rigidity you'd need. Switchable glass seems promising. It's available as an aftermarket film @ ~$50/sqft. But it'd feel obtrusive to leave writing up for days, though, which is no good. …AR? :/pic.twitter.com/F7zgBM0hFO
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Weird/fun prompt—how much marginal problem-solving capacity could you create by making good domestic whiteboards way more viable? Domestic whiteboards are usually either too small or too obtrusive. There's rarely enough unbroken wall space; free-standing boards eat huge sqftage.
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It's not clear how to get leading indicators for any of this! As far as I can tell, you want to be on the lookout for very strange stories, like
@mairwatching casually making an animation system in Smalltalk at age 12. Do any of you have good leading indicator stories here?Show this threadThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo -
It's all a variant of Kay's "Sistine chapels per generation," I guess! But the marginal meaning doesn't have to be a grand edifice: Twitter's most powerful metric as a tool for thought is in creating transformative (off-platform) personal connections.
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That is, you can talk about Mathematica's value by asking how many students use it, or if it helps their test scores, or by timing people solving problems using different tools. But its most significant value is in producing marginal profound mathematical insights.
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How should we evaluate tools for thought? There's no simple metric, as far as I can tell. The best tools change your paradigm anyway, so your old metrics (books printed per year?) aren't what matter. Here's one (vague, but focusing): how much meaning is unlocked on the margin?
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Andy Matuschak Retweeted
Striking analogy between the mnemonic medium and supervised learning. Makes me think about analogies to things done in supervised learning: adding noise to the data (questions) to improve generalization; changing the loss function (overall scoring), etc. Fun to think about!https://twitter.com/mlpowered/status/1217892894075260928 …
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This is less unusual, but it's a time of year when many people are thinking about starting/changing habits, so I'll also re-share this weird approach to habits. Wrote this two years ago—still works great, have used it to start many new habits since then!https://blog.andymatuschak.org/post/169043084412/successful-habits-through-smoothly-ratcheting …
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(One of mine: what's the best single thing I ate this year? [This year: a grilled diver scallop, served plain in butter, at Angler. I wept! I ordered another.])
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It's "annual personal review" season! Lots of people are writing about setting their 2020 goals, or looking back on what worked or didn't in 2019. Those practices are cool, but in this thread, tell me—what's the most _unusual_ "annual review" practice you enjoy?

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The best theory I have is something like: it takes so much effort to do these "expert" reading practices now that such readers burn their willpower and mental energy on running those processes, rather than on the ideas themselves. But I don't know! Gives me pause!
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There's a funny response curve: folks who are super-diligent about note-taking practices or building simulations seem to generally end up with less insight than their somewhat-less-diligent neighbors. Maybe it's a explore/exploit thing? Or maybe just a wonk/gestalt thing?
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One way to dream up post-book media to make reading more effective and meaningful is to systematize "expert" practices (e.g. How to Read a Book), so more people can do them, more reliably and more cheaply. But… the most erudite people I know don't actually do those things!
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Andy Matuschak Retweeted
A couple of weeks ago I asked on Twitter what people felt they, individually (not others!), should do about climate change. There were many thoughtful replies:https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1204129299369877504 …
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