When we look at note-taking apps as a tool for collective sense-making, an additional consideration to make is what I'll call Multiple-Mind Friction.
When I use @RoamResearch individually, it molds itself around my personal preferences and style of thinking. It becomes a second brain insofar as it becomes a reflection of *my* brain and thought patterns, externalized into text. (Goes for any note-taking app you use, of course)
But when I use Roam or something else with others, we face the same friction as when joining a verbal discussion: we need to find common ground in terms of communication patterns.
But because in Roam or other apps it's text, this friction becomes visible – we feel out verbal discussion culture much quicker and more intuitively than we do with written words.
In addition, "full" access to my personal Roam graph with half-formed thoughts etc. can be disorienting – you need to make sense of what's going on first. Peeking into another persons brain is entering a different world.
(Sidenote: this is why I'm sceptical/curious how NeuraLink etc. are going to solve Brain-to-brain comms beyond "talking". To go from brainwaves to text seems super realistic, but shared *understanding*? Not sure how that would be possible)
And thus even if we figure out efficient systems for sharing atomic pieces of information and keeping them updated for everyone: the friction between aligning thought/communication patterns, Multiple-Mind Friction, will remain.
We'll either converge on broad standards, a new form of "thought grammar" if you will. Or we'll continue dealing with the friction of interpreting the representation of other's thoughts, just instead of verbally we'll do it with text.

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More from @cortexfutura

30 Jul
5 Things I learned about PKM from my PhD

Working on my PhD over the last four years has been the hardest thing I've ever done. It has also taught me a lot about note-taking and personal knowledge management.

Here are five big things I learned 🧵
#1: You can't read everything

Whatever you're interested in, there are more books and articles written about than you could ever read in a lifetime. So don't try to read everything.

Instead:
- read the best things
- read them deeply
- skim a wider selection and compare
#2: Good note-taking requires effort

Reading deeply and comparing widely takes time and effort. No matter how fancy your tool or efficient your system is, there is no way around this.

Accept this, make time for it, and invest the effort. You'll be glad you did.
Read 8 tweets
30 Jul
Develop Strong Criteria for Input Triage

"How in the world. You need less Twitter in your life."
I had just shared two very different tweets with a close friend of mine, covering the wide range between software startup valuations and American domestic politics. Image
"My timeline is crazy this morning" I told him when sharing, and the quote above was his reaction. He was right.
I had, again, discarded my guard rails of attention design and failed at input triage.
You need to develop strong criteria for Input Triage
If you don't, the moment you open any channel of input – be it Twitter, Instagram, Slack, or Email you'll be swamped by things that are low-level enraging and distracting.
Read 10 tweets
28 Jul
Collective sense-making happens in the discussion around creating a communal artifact. If we want to have or build #toolsforthought that make collective sense-making easier, faster, better, we need to tie these together.
Collective sense-making happens in the comments of GoogleDocs or over coffee. Having access to atomic thoughts of others is *super* valuable, but it's in the *collective synthesis* that we actually crystalize common understanding.
Of course, you can also understand collective sense-making as an emergent process resulting from better information for the individual and better ways to integrate that information individually.

In the end, it's prob a spectrum and we'll see where the tools position themselves.
Read 5 tweets
28 Jul
I don't know why, but for some reason YT keeps recommending me "Americans reviewing Germany" videos. It's a hidden genre where Americans basically discuss what they experience as differences between the US and Germany. This time: playgrounds!
Naturally, Germany has a national ISO-like standard for playgrounds, DIN EN 1176:

hst-spielgeraete.de/en-1176-en-117…
I really like this comment below the video, paraphrased by a TÜV Engineer:

"A playground can and should to a degree be dangerous, kids need to be able to hurt themselves to understand that their actions have real world consequences and to train their decision making abilities. /
Read 4 tweets
9 Jul
Ambient impression from teaching @RoamResearch to individuals and teams in large corps: One problem Roam has is that contrary to other software, "dog fooding" (using the thing you make) creates more problems than it solves.
Even in workshops where only people _interested_ in learning Roam are present, i.e. people open to new things, the constant refrain is: "I see the power, but it's still way too hard to learn, UX is shit, no way my colleagues will be on board".
I teach absolute beginners how to use Roam every day, and even for me it's sometimes hard to see just how difficult it is to get up to speed.
For a team that does all its work in Roam, I bet it's almost impossible to keep touch with that difficulty.
Read 10 tweets
8 Jul
Sadly, Constraints Are Real

For the last 15 years I've ignored one fundamental truth: real constraints exist.
Distorting reality in this way has had its benefits – I would not be writing here if it hadn't. But failing to acknowledge the reality of some constraints has set me up for continuous self-doubt and anxiety purely of my own making.
Most social constraints are fake, but physical constraints are real.

Looking at the real constraints hurts, but it hurts less than a groundhog day of disappointments.
Read 12 tweets

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