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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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In practice, I’m finding now that when I have a new nugget to add, from whatever headspace I’m in (working, at the gym, random thought during in a meeting, half-asleep thought in bed), I can always make a quick judgment of approximately where a thought belongs, and put it there.
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By contrast in weaker media, I have to be in high energy, direct focus headspace, having warmed up around 30 minutes to get situation awareness around the whole project. Only then can I reliably lower entropy and turn interest rate positive. Roam lowers threshold to 10% of that.
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This btw is the maker time/manager time problem pg wrote about. Making needs 4 hour chunks because anything less tends to increase entropy rather than decrease it in any non-trivial knowledge work project. So anything that lowers that lower limit is a big win.
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My suspicion is, a good KPI for a knowledge tool is minimum threshold of time required to make a negentropic update to it, with every halving of the threshold increasing its capacity to hold positive-interest-rate knowledge repos by an order of magnitude.
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So a tool with a 2h minimum can sustain a 10x bigger positive-rate knowledge base with the same budget of people/money than a 4h minimum. I suspect for Roam, a very suitable project may get it down to minutes, and for a typical project, maybe 30min. Something like that.
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Hmm trying a 2x2 :diagram in roam. It is pretty janky but close enough to usable that for simple ones, I'm likely to use native rather than import from a more complex tool.
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