1/ ACADEMIC #ROAMFU AND #TWITTERFU
PART I: My plan for using @RoamResearch for a thesis
PART II: Using Twitter as an inter-brain zettelkasten
PART I: My plan for using @RoamResearch for a thesis
PART II: Using Twitter as an inter-brain zettelkasten
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PART I. I'm officially start doing my thesis in 15 months. I'll do my future self a favor by creating evergreen notes from the papers I've read the past year and the upcoming year. You're welcome!
PART I. I'm officially start doing my thesis in 15 months. I'll do my future self a favor by creating evergreen notes from the papers I've read the past year and the upcoming year. You're welcome!
3/ First step is a process for transferring your highlights from PDFs to Roam. @ShuOmi3 demonstrates a process in this video using Zotero and an add-on called ZotFile
4/ After this, it is a matter of applying my usual zettelkasten process
5/ But instead of creating protodrafts, I'll create protochapters of possible theses.
6/ @LukasKawerau proposes an upgrade to the zettelkasten. He calls it the "Literature X-Ray" roambrain.com/in-search-of-t…
7/ @LukasKawerau Literature X-ray demo vid: using queries to create a page made of blocks w keywords of interests (+ optional exclusion keywords). Useful for writing a synthesis based on your notes from articles you have read and your thoughts on them.
8/ @houshuang cobbled together a Roam-like tool when he did his thesis, using 4 or 5 software. In this vid he recreates his process w Roam. He uses hashtags to produce topic pages for synthesis. Links to his notes of articles makes referencing easy.
9/ In "A new approach to fact-checking using Roam" by @houshuang roambrain.com/a-new-approach… Elizabeth Van Nostrand shows how she uses Roam for fact checking: list down claims, their proofs, and makes an estimate how well-supported the claim is based on the available evidence.
10/ @houshuang proposes a Wikipedia for claims, with a ledger of supporting facts. Books in the future could refer to this database for claims and conclusions they make, adjusting their certainty based on the available evidence at that time (Bayesian probability).
11/ Listing claims and estimating their probability based on current evidence, then updating it based on future evidence, sound like something all academics should do. Even at single-player mode, Roam appears to be a great tool for this. Can't wait for it to become MMPORG.
12/ If you know of academic workflows using Roam, Notion, and other platforms, I'd appreciate if you could share them!
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PART II. Twitter is not only a notes-app with a dopamine slot-machine feature; it is also an inter-brain zettelkasten.
PART II. Twitter is not only a notes-app with a dopamine slot-machine feature; it is also an inter-brain zettelkasten.
14/ If Roam is a programming language for meta-epistemics, then Twitter is the inter-mind API. It is where second brain sex happens.
To extend the analogy, ideas are more like plants than humans. They reproduce both sexually and asexually.
To extend the analogy, ideas are more like plants than humans. They reproduce both sexually and asexually.
15/ Zettelkasten is a way of using Roam to fabricate serendipity between your ideas. But how do you fabricate serendipity between ideas stored across minds? I could not think of tool better than Twitter at this point in time.
16/ "While the unwashed masses flock to non-textual media like TikTok, we Very Online cognoscenti know that Twitter is where all the history-making, universe-denting social media action really is. It is as close to a pure ideas-commons/digital public as we’ll ever get." - @vgr
17/ vgr quote above from ribbonfarm.com/2020/02/24/a-t…
Let me share a an amazing thing that happened IRL via Twitter before my experiment in thinking with Twitter.
Let me share a an amazing thing that happened IRL via Twitter before my experiment in thinking with Twitter.
18/ Quick background for context. I'm an entrepreneur (details in Linkedin) in the middle of a masters in biology. I bet low-cost sequencing will change the world (eg @nanopore). I'll do a thesis and subsequently a business in this area. towardsdatascience.com/this-dna-seque…
19/ I'm also located in the peripheries of science. My guess is that there are still less than 10 @nanopore sequencers in the Philippines (might change after COVID). Yet I was lucky enough to get some hands-on training from visiting scientists
20/ How did this happen? I want more of this lol. Two things I think:
First, seeing the opportunities. This only happens when you design your feed to focus on what you want. I trimmed down the people I followed then followed the hell out of @nanopore Twitter
First, seeing the opportunities. This only happens when you design your feed to focus on what you want. I trimmed down the people I followed then followed the hell out of @nanopore Twitter
21/ Second is simply cold outreach. I had to learn this to survive in business. It is both a craft and a numbers game.
22/"The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated." codusoperandi.com/posts/increasi…
23/ Here's an example of a failed Twitter outreach, by the way. It's like email. The more people are in the to: field, the less the chances of getting a reply.
24/ The other intriguing usage of Twitter is the actual production of ideas. As an example, let's trace the evolution of this current side-obsession of mine: "Life is antifragile information traveling through time using the fragility of matter as its vehicle."
25/ This has been an inchoate germ of an idea since around May 2019, when I finished reading The Gene by @DrSidMukherjee I vaguely remember occasions when I tried to articulate this but failed. It finally became an actual thought due to this tweet
26/ My first reply was at 10:34AM of March 19. By 12:11PM, I finally got to write down what has been trying to grow out of my intuition for the past 10 months.
27/ After my exam week, I cleaned up the wording and snuck it in my first Roam-Fu thread. I was hoping to get some books or articles, as Google and G Scholar were dead ends.
28/ @moreina replied with this Talebian angle, and I incorporated it.
29/ I found this book: "Now: The Physics of Time" by Richard A. Muller. On April 10, I posted a screenshot of a passage tagging a couple of folks from Taleb twitter, @trishankkarthik @GeorgeJNasr
30/ The tweet started getting views from the Taleb tribe. I presume that's how @otrasenda_AC got to see it. He linked me to @cgershen who had published an article entitled "The World as Evolving Information"
31/ It was exactly what I was looking for.
32/ I messaged the author, and he gave me some more readings. Twitter is amazing!
33/ On interests closer to my academic & biz target, I posted threads on what I learned from papers I've read, tagging authors. I got interactions from authors active in Twitter (eg, hard to find answers, see below) but crickets from authors who were not.
34/ So, what lessons could we extract from this little experiment?
1) Design your feed
2) Better to talk to the inner circle rather than to the central figure (eg, Taleb's twitter must be a mess)
1) Design your feed
2) Better to talk to the inner circle rather than to the central figure (eg, Taleb's twitter must be a mess)
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3) Know the language, culture and key figures of Twitter tribes that self-select to your intended purpose (eg, Taleb twitter and #roamcult presumably self-select those who read widely and weirdly)
Other lessons?
3) Know the language, culture and key figures of Twitter tribes that self-select to your intended purpose (eg, Taleb twitter and #roamcult presumably self-select those who read widely and weirdly)
Other lessons?
36/ I'm aiming for a black belt in both Roam-fu and Twitter-fu. This is how modern science entrepreneurship is done!
/fin
/fin
