Thread by @fortelabs

1/ Just realized that what progressive summarization provides is a "medium-resolution" view of a text, with self-contained ideas as the unit of resolution

2/ Tags have topics or themes as the unit of resolution, which are often too broad to be useful (it doesn't help me much to know that a note has something to do with neuroscience)

3/ Search has words or terms as the unit of resolution, which are often too specific to be useful (it doesn't help me much to know that a note contains the word "neuroscience")

4/ Progressive summarization splits the difference, highlighting the most important ideas, but crucially, nested within the context that allows them to stand on their own as useful building blocks

5/ Take this note for example. My eyes immediately go to the highlighted portion, which is just enough to intrigue me (practice judgment by writing things down?), while requiring the surrounding context to fully understand (second paragraph elaborates the point)

6/ Providing a medium-resolution view might seem like a pretty minor benefit, but the power is that *you control the resolution.* It's like an adjustable slider you can fine tune, instead of a dial with two settings: 1 (tags) and 10 (search)

7/ So for articles/books/topics you find more interesting or useful, you can dial it up to 6-8. For things that are just passing interests, dial down to 2-4. Also, because highlighting/bolding is easy to change, you can even change the resolution after the fact

8/ Why is the level of resolution so important? Because the "best" resolution at which to view a text can change moment to moment. When writing, I may go from adding a semi-colon one moment, to zooming out and thinking about the purpose of a whole section the next

9/ This is possible with writing because I have the content loaded up into my brain, making it easy to move between levels of abstraction seamlessly. But this is very hard to do with external knowledge you're intaking, because changing its resolution is very time-consuming

10/ If you wrote down only a pithy quote, tracing its source and finding the context is a pain. And the opposite is true: if you kept a whole article, going through and identifying the key points is almost as bad

11/ PS recognizes this situation and "pre-compresses" the text as you're reading it, providing a layered view like a topographical map, where you can see the elevation lines and know which direction to go to climb uphill or downhill

12/ This makes the widest possible number of options available to you: you can skim 20 sources in minutes and make them into a high-level survey of a topic, or just as easily, dive deep into 2 or 3 articles and pull out common patterns. OR a combination of the two (my favorite)

13/ This is very, very similar to professions that require specific info to do their jobs, while also needing to take decisive action (chefs, firefighters, police, soldiers, extreme sports, athletes). So much prep goes into the the affordances of making tools easy to grasp