Coming soon: follow-up tour with @JoelChan86, where he showed me his tested workflow for using Roam for synthesis. Highly impactful on my own workflow.
The purpose of his workflow is clear, it works in @RoamResearch or other PKM apps, & has room for stylistic differences
Basically: organize around your questions. Read sources (context) in support of those questions, note down your observations, combine observations into claims, and combine claims to work through your answers to the questions. Everything is connected logically to its precedents.
So it's actually quite simple to implement. Connect your questions to your answers. Connect your answers to how you came to those answers. It's not rocket science, and requires only knowledge of linked page and block references.
This allows you to question your decisions. For example, with GuidedTrack's onboarding, we've pivoted a few times. His approach would allow me to find the initial reasoning for the decision and what supported it to see how I would update my beliefs in response to new evidence.
I actually ended up finding that I implicitly follow many of the principles of his approach (albeit with a different implementation). After the tour, we talked for 20ish minutes and I showed him my ~equivalent approaches. I'll upload footage of that as well as a separate vid.
I'll be formalizing and adjusting my own approach in response to his brilliant workflow.
While you're waiting: our first tour together (and my first Roam tour!) linked below. We were in the same cohort of initial Roam users, right about a year ago.
Just did a @RoamResearch tour with @beauhaan looking at his Zettelkasten. He uses block refs in a highly effective way that I genuinely have not considered before, so his database is VERY navigationally friendly when he’s trying to reuse his notes. I’m really excited to share it
Usually these tours are cool but don’t show me anything I’m too surprised by. This one was surprising! His style works w/ different mental models than mine, which are more query than structured navigation driven. His tour adds something novel to effective Roam usage discussion.
If you want to prepare yourself before I release Beau’s tour by watching other, more page-ref based implementations of a Zettlekasten for comparison, I recommend the following two tours:
Some of you may be aware that @obsdmd now has aliases. I've been using this for language learning! I have a Spanish journal, and using aliases, I can collect unlinked references to conjugations of verbs, rather than just exact text matches. I'm building up my own SpanishDict!
If there's enough interest, I may make a video describing my approach and share some markdown files I use as templates for things like verbs. I'm also using this vault to host my notes about various grammatical conventions for quick reference.
In case the concept of aliases is unclear, notice how the page title is "estar" but the unlinked references include times when I've said "estoy."
Interesting thread, but I disagree with taking Don’t Repeat Yourself to an extreme. I want to be able to speak fluidly without notes about the subjects in my notes. Part of what lets me do that is rewriting ideas with different wordings.
There was a period of time where I tried to use block or page refs literally any time I thought I had written about something before, but I ultimately realized that this amounts to rereading my notes rather than explaining myself in new ways, so it was hindering my recall.
I'll add that in addition to recall, it's helpful for creativity. If I first write down my new thought or way of explaining it, and then I pull up what I've written before, that gives me more diverse ideas and phrasings to compare and synthesize.
On the left, a graph of an export of my public Roam. On the right, a graph of my MD file based website, written in Obsidian. While I didn't copy/paste content between the two, I discuss roughly the same topics. What does this tell you about how I'm writing in each medium?
Alternative behavioral design question: What is it about the design and limitations of each app that might encourage these differences in hypertext writing style?
Other interesting thing: my public Roam has 40,370 words, whereas my public MD file based website has 36,031 words. I wouldn't be able to tell there was that much of a disparity from looking at the graphs!
Just to make this easier for #roamcult people who are hearing a lot about Algorithms of Thought and have no idea what people are talking about...
They’re essentially thinking workflows you standardize for yourself to reliably produce an outcome.
For example, I have a page in @RoamResearch for questions I like to ask new prospects. An algorithm of thought might be a repeatable process for coming up with the right questions for that specific prospect.
Alt example, I keep “lenses” for myself. Series of questions related to a concept allowing me to apply it to a new context. Lenses of failure states, feedback loops, expectations, etc.
I wonder what a social media or personal knowledge management app would look like if it had *excellent* user-oriented newsfeed management built in. Given an endless stream of information, how can we give the user the most control over what takes up their attention?
Newsfeeds are essentially a jumping off point for exploratory browsing. More in QT thread on that. People browse information without a goal and sometimes new goals arise. Essentially, scrolling through your newsfeed can give you new goals when you had none.
A key question also would be: what are the effective responses to each block of content in a newsfeed? Most social media has functions for liking, commenting, and saving for later. What else? I would love to see newsfeed management around content I saved for later.