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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted adam of the north

      Ok starting to kick the tires on @RoamResearch ... this is going to be my starting point.https://twitter.com/adam_keesling/status/1196864450520727552 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      adam of the north @adam_keesling
      If you want to try yourself, here's the link: https://roamresearch.com/  Demos / articles: https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-ZAAN … Other resources that were helpful for the understanding what makes good notes: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1 … https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T382CLwAjsy3fmecf/how-to-take-smart-notes-ahrens-2017 …
      Show this thread
      8 replies 11 retweets 210 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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      So it's like workflowy but with transclusion links? I like the premise so far. I've used workflowy half-assedly for years and this zettlekasten thing sounds similar to how I do index cards though way too disciplined.

      2 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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      Not sure I like bulleted lists as the first class citizen. My basic unit is the paragraph and I don't think in lists well. We'll see. There's a soft line break within a bullet point, but no way to just have an unbulleted prose chunk as a page it seems.

      4 replies 0 retweets 38 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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      What's with this Daily Note thing... is it a soft prompt to create a journal-like log as a throughline for non-chronological notes? Slightly unclear on how this is not a wiki.

      5 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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      My first expt is to try and bring notes from Scrivener for my book project over. I have a folder called "nuggets" that I'm porting manually. Copying smaller fragments to roam and moving larger chunks to a different Scrivener folder. Roam is clearly not for composing long texts.

      2 replies 0 retweets 20 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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      Wtf is a cose layout?

      10:57 AM - 26 Nov 2019
      • 10 Likes
      • OTAGAKI Satoshi Max Yakin Bozek ス James 'Recovering Rationalist' Stuber mesh Dan Finlay Rahul Ramchandani Frédéric Renken vidy thatte Maybe: Th𐃏mas Lisankie
      2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          This thing needs Hebbian synapses. I'm creating a big pile of chaos here, in large part because most of the organization is latent, in rhymes and associations that don't have strong overlap in vocabulary. Still unlinked-mentions is a sort of ersatz Hebbian synapse mechanism

          4 replies 0 retweets 29 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Ok I have my first feature request... email-based page creation. And some way to capture tweets and tweet threads in 1 step as pages.

          2 replies 0 retweets 46 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          My dangerous working theory is that if I dump all my unintegrated fragmentary thoughts, discovery notes, and links for book project into Roam, when I work on the chapters of the book, I can search this set of notes or wander the graph to collect up what I need for JIT compilation

          2 replies 1 retweet 44 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          So I can confirm one thing: the tool does encourage you to frictionlessly capture latent connections explicitly. I'm not seeing "new" connections as such, but finding it much easier to capture ones I've already seen cleanly.

          1 reply 0 retweets 38 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Another thing it is forcing me to do is clean up my foundational definitions to avoid creating redundant pages that will create merge-work later. The merge feature is a powerful forcing function.

          1 reply 0 retweets 36 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          I'm creating a real mess here, but hopefully it will lead to enlightenment soon.pic.twitter.com/ej3crR5XEp

          2 replies 1 retweet 40 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          Hmm... I've reached a point of complexity, where it's actually helpful to create what I called a Dramatis Memetae. Something between an index and a glossary, but with a bit of structure to it.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1189782933831180288?s=21 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          I wish a lot of nonfiction books would start with a glossary. Like some pulp fiction (eg Perry Mason novels) begins with dramatis personae like in plays. Dramatis Ideatae? Dramatis Memetae? Someone latinize these.
          Show this thread
          3 replies 1 retweet 42 likes
          Show this thread
        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Yikes, the current view of my graph looks suspciously like a yak. I might have to shave this thing. So far this is a view of a single project. I wonder if I put more disconnected projects in if it will start looking like a zoo.

          3 replies 1 retweet 26 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Alright, spent nearly 6 productive hours digesting 70% of email notes and 30% scrivener notes from multitemporallty into Roam, and found it improved greatly in the process. Still a condition of Chaos > Order, but Order is now winning.

          2 replies 1 retweet 45 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          To do: * Rest of email and scrivener * ~100 twitter bookmarks * ~50 index cards * ~50 iPhone photos of book pages * ~12 scapple mind maps * ~ half a moleskine equivalent paper notes * ~1 moleskine equivalent iPad pencil notes My second brain clearly has mad cow disease

          4 replies 0 retweets 52 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          This feels right because processing into Roam feels like progress against entropy, not merely porting from one unsatisfactory tool to another. Moving the ball forward rather than sideways. I’m gaining authoritah.pic.twitter.com/pRilIlYB55

          2 replies 1 retweet 57 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Tentatively, I think this deserves hype it’s getting. If they solve intake, it will be a genuine paradigm shift. They’ve managed to actually do what we tried valiantly to do with trailmeme at xerox a decade ago. I can spot all the things they’ve done right that we got wrong.

          1 reply 5 retweets 87 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Still wrapping my head around transclusion as a working concept rather than vaporware ideal. It’s not been really necessary so far though I’ve done a few to get a feel for it. I suspect doing a second compression pass after this discovery/intake pass could be transclusion-heavy

          2 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          The fact that I put in 6h of work despite intake automation being basically non-existent and high-friction suggests that once even a few basics are in place there (email-to-db would be my most used, followed by something to grab tweets easily) this could really take off.

          3 replies 2 retweets 42 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          I guess I leapfrogged past Notion, and there were a couple of other tools I started using like http://paper.supply  but in view of this, I don’t think others hit the right mix. Hey @vidy___ you still working on your thing?

          1 reply 0 retweets 20 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Interesting reflection. I wouldn’t have paid much attention to this 20 years ago. I had the heavy lift capacity to hold this kind of big-mass memeplex in my head. There is a sense in which this is a prosthetic particularly well suited for aging brains with big picture fatigue.

          2 replies 0 retweets 67 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Fox/hedgehog may actually be patterns of aging, based on relative rates of decline of distinctionist, pointillist, phenomenological cognition vs integrative, holistic, reified cognition. I need my second brain to be a hedgehog. Wonder if hedgehogs could use roam as a fox brain.

          1 reply 1 retweet 33 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          Or possibly every tool has a foxy or hedgehoggy bias and this is the key stylistic difference between @fortelabs and @Conaw 🤔 Roam as hedgehog second brain for natural foxes, Evernote as foxy second brain for natural hedgehogs You two should do a podcast conversation together

          3 replies 3 retweets 83 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          That whole idea of the power of centralization in a decentralizing world has 2 solutions: internal and external locus. Either your first brain centralized or your second brain is.

          3 replies 1 retweet 19 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          2x2: x = first brain, y = second brain both from centralized to decentralized CFB/DSB: Hedgehog DFB/CSB: Fox CFB/CSB: Cactus DFB/DSB: Weaselhttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-weasel/ …

          3 replies 1 retweet 36 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Nov 2019
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          This probably also explains why @swardley and I beef over 2x2s and why I don’t really use wardley mapping myself despite recommending it enthusiastically to other people

          2 replies 0 retweets 23 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Dec 2019
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          Alright one week in, I've settled into some steady habits using roam, so there's a habit attractor here. Progress has slowed to more day-to-day but it still feels like winning the war on entropy as opposed to losing it in scrivener, email, or twitter.

          1 reply 2 retweets 43 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          Gonna start documenting subtle features here. First up: Roam is probably the most efficient prosthetic memory I’ve used, as in, creating efficient recall of thoughts I’ve already thunk and written up. A killer feature when you’ve written as much as I have (good or bad).

          1 reply 3 retweets 42 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          On a scale of 1 to 10, ranking media I’ve used Paper: 1 (no recall aids unless you create ToCs or indices yourself) Email newsletters: 2 (weak searchability, weak theme/thread continuity, weak gestalt, though substack is better than mailchimp) ...

          1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          Twitter: 4 (strong searchability, strong threadability, weak gestalt) Wiki: 5 (strong searchability, medium threadability, strong gestalt) Blog: 6 (strong searchability, strong threadability, strong gestalt) Roam: 8 (all of the above plus low friction update/create/rename)

          1 reply 1 retweet 40 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          The thing is, recall is a virtuous cycle. The better a medium supports recall, the easier it is to attach new information in the right places. Which makes recall even easier. And the easier it is to add content, the faster this process snowballs. So a compound interest effect.

          3 replies 2 retweets 56 likes
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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          Knowledge generally depreciates, and a holy grail of knowledge modeling and capture for a long time has been to reverse the default negative interest rate it accrues and turn it positive. There was a “knowledge banking” project at Xerox back in the day that aimed at this for eg.

          2 replies 6 retweets 38 likes
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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          In the past most such efforts have failed because they relied on automation to try and keep entropy at bay, which sort of works weakly with relative legible and structured information. But for more squishy information, the only thing that works is a “many eyeballs” process.

          1 reply 2 retweets 28 likes
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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          Anytime I’ve seen a positive-interest-rate knowledge repo, it’s because many people were resurfacing bits and pieces at random and making point improvements. So the only known solution to date for positive interest rate has been to collectivize and socialize the prosthetic memory

          2 replies 4 retweets 63 likes
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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          So a good measure of the technical sophistication of a medium is to measure the number of people (eyeballs) and money (how much they’re paid) required to sustain a positive interest rate. I think Roam reduces both to the limit: 1 person and self-funded hobby time.

          1 reply 1 retweet 36 likes
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