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Ok starting to kick the tires on ... this is going to be my starting point.
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If you want to try yourself, here's the link: roamresearch.com Demos / articles: roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page Other resources that were helpful for the understanding what makes good notes: lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oH lesswrong.com/posts/T382CLwA
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Or possibly every tool has a foxy or hedgehoggy bias and this is the key stylistic difference between and 🤔 Roam as hedgehog second brain for natural foxes, Evernote as foxy second brain for natural hedgehogs You two should do a podcast conversation together
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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.
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This probably also explains why and I beef over 2x2s and why I don’t really use wardley mapping myself despite recommending it enthusiastically to other people
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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.
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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).
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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) ...
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Compare for instance Wikipedia (~100s-1000s unpaid) or Stanford Encyclopedia or Wolfram Mathworld (single digits -100s, but paid, directly it indirectly). This is probably because Roam allows one mind to effectively act as many (Fox > Hedgehog)
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