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Luca Dellanna Profile picture
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1 Nov, 10 tweets, 4 min read
One year ago today, the first Roam Book was published.

One year later:
- many roam books
- roam newsletters
- a dedicated website: roam-books.com

A thread on what they are and what they can become

First of all, what's a Roam Book (or rBook for short)?

It's a book published in @roamresearch format. This enables it to become much more than a book.

Some examples on the homepage of roam-books.com or in the quoted tweet.

I created the rBook format in November 2020 with the publishing of the first rBook, "Ergodicity" (gum.co/ergodicity/ann…), and then followed it with a second rBook, "This is Management"
gum.co/roambook/anniv…
Why are rBooks such a big deal?
- they allow in-line editing and non-linear exploration
- they allow the writer to push new content
- they seamlessly connect and integrate with your notes
→ reading becomes an active and compounding experience
They're not just a new book format. They enable books to become editable interconnected building blocks of knowledge.

They are at the intersection of non-linear exploration (e.g., wiki), compounding content (e.g., newsletter) and integrated note-taking.
I also collaborated with other authors, such as TiagoForte, to help them bring their existing eBook into rBook format.

Since then, new rBooks followed (roam-books.com/list-of-roam-b…).

As I got more questions, I published a course & template for writing rBooks: Luca-dellanna.com/writing-roam-b…
To be clear, rBooks are not strictly superior to traditional books and eBooks. For example, they are not suitable for books that you read once and then forget, nor for readers who read for entertainment.

However…
However, for those who read and re-read books taking notes and connecting content, rBooks are a game-changer.
As more and more rBook are published, they can connect with each other (if the reader imports them in the same graph, aka database).

This last property makes me bullish on the format. Again – not for all books, but for some kind of books.
If you haven't tried a Roam Book yet, here is a great place to start: the first rBook ever gum.co/ergodicity/ann…

(to celebrate the anniversary, there's a 33% time-limited discount using this thread's direct links to the rBooks)

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More from @DellAnnaLuca

Luca Dellanna Profile picture
26 Oct
Imagine you were an alien. On your planet, there aren’t schools. From your spaceship, you spend some time observing one of ours.

What would you guess schools are for?

(a thread on education)
I bet that education wouldn’t be the first of your hypotheses. After all, schools deliver much better on other metrics.

For example,

2/N
Did you ever notice that most degrees are of the same length regardless of the complexity of the underlying field, and that some subjects are obsolete, as if their purpose was to employ teachers rather than teach useful skills?

3/N
Read 11 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
25 Oct
15h software debugging for 1.5T of metal on public roads is an extraordinary feat, only a genius or a psychopath could achieve that
I imagine the logic, “in 15h we couldn’t find any problem, this must mean our testing process is good enough and the software is ready for public beta”
“But there’s no alternative!”

There is: pay drivers specifically trained for testing autonomous vehicles. Like almost everyone else in the industry is doing.
Read 4 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
18 Oct
I hope it's a deception, but I fear it's a misconception.
The latter is more dangerous.

It reminds me of a critical article I read a few years ago, that explains a lot of economic policies.

(thread)

This article has an interesting thesis: the false belief that prices have an allocative function but merely a redistributive one explains most of the economic BS heard over the past decades.

An example in the next tweet 👇

(🇮🇹 source: Noisefromamerika.org/articolo/perch…)
One implication of the false belief above is that taxes and minimal wages don't affect the price of labor and thus employment. Under such false belief, of course taxes and minimal wages are a no brainer! 🤦‍♂️
Read 5 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
16 Oct
Controls are so lax, *and expected to be so lax*, that any punishment of such behavior will be a trolley problem of punishing some “genuinely unaware of managed trades” or inciting trading by controllers.

The less clarity and focus on Core Values, the more trolley problems later
Almost all “enforcement trolley problems” are downstream a lack of clarity in boundaries and/or low frequency of a violation to be caught

We want frequent controls to ensure the likelihood that large violations are malicious, thus more moral to prosecute.
Instead, allowing the risk of large violations by “genuinely honest but distracted” people (or who interpreted a grey area differently) makes it harder morally to prosecute violations: a vicious circle (less prosecution → less common knowledge of rules → more violations).
Read 4 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
21 Sep
A good exercise is to imagine optimizing information flows in your organization not for passively accepted requests but for actively accepted ones.

(passively accepted: when someone making a request isn’t made aware that, in fact, he won’t get what he asked within specs)
A very common example: a top manager asks all supervisors to communicate change X to their teams. Supervisors know they can’t do X or can’t communicate X as desired (because of some valid reason the top manager might not be aware of) but silently sit in the meeting until the end
Interestingly, the above will be seen as a trust violation by the managers (“you didn’t do what you promised”) but probably not by the supervisors (“you asked me something I couldn’t do [because of a lack of resources / problem Y / etc]”).
Read 4 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
20 Sep
As I continue in the discussion below, 80/20 is not just about “getting more for your buck” but also minimizing impact of negative variance.

Let me make two examples.
Imagine that, while working on a work project of yours, you need to make an extra work trip.

If you’re working on your biggest client (the 20% that brings the 80%), no big deal: the project is still well worth it.

Not true for an extra work trip on a bad client.
Moreover, you’re more likely to know the opportunities and risks of working with your best client than with your worst ones

Even if the engagements with both have the same face profitability, the one with your best client has more upside and less downside

Same for known friends
Read 4 tweets

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