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Joel Chan 🔍 | synthesizing knowledge
@JoelChan86
What a delightfully incisive summary of my talk! Yes, integrating into loose structure and incrementalism really is key!
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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Really exciting talk from @JoelChan86 demonstrates an interface for incrementally generating semi-formal "discourse graphs" (X supports Y, Z informs W) through naturalistic note-taking structures: youtu.be/nbpq8HpaDnc?t= The loose structure and incrementalism seem really key!
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Joel Chan 🔍 | synthesizing knowledge
@JoelChan86
This is a crucial point: ultimate aim of this work is collective intelligence, but tragedy of the commons looms large: it's not *as* immediately beneficial to do work like this, so we need to lower the cost to as close to zero as possible.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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Probably more formal and machine-readable structures are essential if one aspires to network this work across many scholars, as Joel does.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
I think one of the good points you make here (and in your Commonplace paper) is that a key path for these affordances is to emphasize the immediate value to the individual author. If they're quite useful up-front, the tragedy of the commons isn't as much of a problem.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
I do fear that the time-discounted optimum behavior for the individual probably doesn't produce as much structured data as the time-insensitive collective optimum would desire. Not sure those curves can be bent to meet.
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C𐃏rtex Futura
@cortexfutura
Maybe not for all individuals, but with the cost getting to close-to-zero for doing this, I see the potential for a much larger subset of people than those who actively write Wikipedia articles. Could pack a big punch even if comparatively tiny minority, no?
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
I think often of Clay Shirky's observations about cognitive surplus; at the time, Wikipedia had taken 100M hours of work; Americans spend a total of 100M hours *just watching commercials* in a single weekend! If 1% of total US TV-watching were redirected, that's 100 Wikipedias/yr
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