1/n I want to post a brief thread about "seeing". 🧵

https://twitter.com/georgiedorothea/status/1875992938440008172

2/ Years ago I lived in Cape Town, South Africa for a year. I was a volunteer teacher.

I lived in one of the central suburbs and took a train each day into Salt River, which was the township where the school I worked was located.

1/ You sit down next to someone at a dinner party.

After some small talk, the person effortlessly pivots to deeper talk on topics of personal interest to both of you. They make space for you, say things that are spontaneously funny, + seem curious about your perspective.

--> 2/ perhaps you have the distinct feel that this person sparkles

what you might take for granted about this whole exchange is that most of it is regulated by your body

Personal space, body language, and eye contact

Now consider what happens when you converse with an LLM.

OK friends, time for a thread 🧵

this will be about one of my favorite social science experiments of all time, conducted by Dr J. Kiley Hamlin at Yale, in 2007

in which she used an elegant forced-choice frame to show that BABIES ARE MORE SOCIALLY ATTUNED THAN YOU MIGHT THINK 2/ Her subjects were a group of 6 month and 10 month old babies (each group +/- 2 weeks in age) and her experiment design was this:

Each baby sat in mothers' lap + watched tiny movies, featuring anthropomorphized plush toys -

That's right, googley-eyes smacked on plush shapes.

@quotidiania @the_wilderless Yes - here's a link to his essay.



One of the things that's interesting to me is - he identifies the dysfunctional coping style (melancholy) with narcissism.

melancholy happens, when a person makes their losses ALL ABOUT THEM...sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-l… @quotidiania @the_wilderless 2/ this paragraph right here: (the "melancholic", or, we could say, the "dysfunctional coper", fails, because he is making it all about HIM - which is to say, he falsely assumes that HE can "fix it all" with his intellect or his effort somehow, instead of simply feeling the loss)

The absolute beauty of going for a run in the dark predawn fog, and meeting other runners on the paths

I ♥️ humans

Their crazy accidental fellowships, most of all.

Ok, I log off now, bye y'all, have pleasant day 2/n ok tho I'll stop for a photo

because this is hauntingly beautiful to me.

The lights on the building are there to warn low planes or, more likely, helicopters

They are a 21st century kind of lighthouse

They are, also, the arc of a flock of birds in flight, very apropos

1/n Ok I'll bite.

A thread about the "note taking wars", + why famous s$%-p#$ter Tiag@ F@rte does not have a clue what he is talking about

@obsdmd is a gorgeous, well executed product with a fantastic community behind it. Yay!

♥️🚀 ♥️

... but it is *not* a "roam-like". 2/n block referencing and outlining, as implemented by @RoamResearch, are WAY more than just check-boxes to tick, in some arbitrary feature-comparison list.

They are *core* features of the product.

... CORE features that cannot be tacked on, if they're not in the product-DNA.

1/n I'm beyond thrilled to announce that @RaygunIcecream has asked me to lead one of the books for #RoamBookClub3 along with @beauhaan;

Your team is currently hard at work designing what we believe will be an extraordinary 6 week learning experience for our beloved #roamcult --> 2/n There will be 2 groups working side by side - Beau will lead a discussion of Ahrens' "How to Take Smart Notes" and I'll lead, for returning members, "The Culture Code" by Dan Coyle.

My group will have a limited number of spots. Beau's group will not be size-limited.

Hear me out, what if looking *really carefully* at the past can accomplish more than fantasizing about the future;

I think this year, I am going to focus on new-years RE-solutions, which will entirely be RE-implementing all the solutions I've already used, to make life awesomer. 2/ "I am at the confluence of past and future; melding these streams creatively is what makes life itself feel alive"

... is (I think) a paraphrase of Henri Bergson, of whose work I have not yet read enough...

1/n I love this thread, was just thinking about this myself ...

Kid up, inside, happily opening the presents that I wrapped...

Stepped out, because sunrise was UNBELIEVABLE, a rich purple orange ...

But-->

https://twitter.com/TheRealHoarse/status/1342404500989083649

2/ was MOST amazing was not the palette + the rich hues of the sunlight cascading upwards from beneath the horizon,

No

The most amazing part was taking a moment to see how softly the clouds were scudding across it all.

The seeming delicacy of this, belying the enormous -->

For those not yet part of the [[Zettel]] discussion, one thing I want to emphasize:

The low-floor, high-ceiling, agile, locally-emergent concepts that @beauhaan prototyped, mean you can start doing this on top of any existing note-stack, no matter how it was prev'ly organized. 2/ and furthermore, this leads me to ...

the PERFECT metaphor!!!

(cc @RoamBrain! ... here is another crucial appearance of [[Christopher Alexander]] in my "pantheon of Roaman influencers") -

so ...

What is a Zettel?

The Zettel is the "small green stone in the Alhambra"

1/n thoughts on Zetteling

If you treat your brain as a programmable computer, you will vastly unappreciate all the things it can do (many of which are the things that make life, life)

But if you ignore its algorithmic capacities, you will miss out on some splendid superpowers. 2/n ... the above observation, which is, itself, a kind of [[Zettel]], arose out of discussions with other @RoamResearch Book Club members,

in which we were reflecting on the lessons of Soenke' Ahren's remarkable book "How to Take Smart Notes", in a series of weekly meetups.

"Semantic Gold Mines"

one of my favorite tricks in @RoamResearch is to make a short language-snippet into a link, and then examine it across the hundreds of texts, experiences, + sources that show up as unlinked ref's

here are two:

[[could have]]

[[might be]] ...

any others? @RoamResearch 2/ "Semantic Gold Mines"

I just found another one I really love: [[ready to]]

... it marks the end of periods of preparation, the beginnings of new things. It subtly illuminates turning points reached, big and small.

The moments I was [[ready to]] jump in the water + swim.

1/ Today is my first day of trying to really hone-down a "prediction-based workflow" and so far I'm really loving it.

The basic premise: at 8PM last night I gave myself fifteen minutes to run an imaginary preview of today, highlighting tasks and challenges I thought I'd face. 2/ Key - I also wrote all this down, to keep myself accountable

One way to conceptualize this is with the "managing self-creative self" split.

I was giving my "manager" fifteen minutes to "coach the team" last night. White board, chalk arrows the whole deal.

The Dance Theater or Harlem is absolutely incredible.

... the mix of fluidity, precision, and soul energy is 🔥

Jump to the 7:38 mark in this vid, to go straight to the dancing

(I'm told this video is viewable for only a week - thanks @alphamom ... )

at 12:59.

This is so inspiring.

it's like watching the universe itself unfold

music is from the soundtrack to Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk"

haunting, so much it practically aches with beauty

my favorite thing I've seen in a while

OK quick @RoamResearch experiment with new, stabilized block-embeds and "attribute tables".

If you want to keep the attribute table columns in a particular order, this is how... (read on)

Usually the ordering moves the "most recently edited" entry to the far right column. 2/ This is a problem if you "need" the columns to be in a certain order (see below pic) because you can't edit them without reshuffling.

HOWEVER if you just put a block embed in the place you want, you can edit into that block embed with no change to table order

NOTE, though ->

1. Huzzah and Hurrah! attn @RoamResearch fans and #roamcult

@dvargas92495 has written jScript that restores value to
"attribute tables" - a partially developed feature that seemed promising - but had a flaw, rendering it hard-to-use.

That flaw seems to have been fixed --> 2. You can now use "Attribute Tables" to bring up auto-populating, SORTABLE tables, based on lines of metadata - equally-indented series of "attributes" (defined by syntax "foo double-colon", like this - "foo::").

What can you do with this?

Start with a simple habit-tracker.

OK, people get ready, I'm going to assay a lightning-summary of @RobertHaisfield 's webinar on further unlocking the powers of {{query}}ing in @RoamResearch .

Here are a few of the key things that I gleaned.

1. Querying allows you to have "conversations with your past self." 2. To make those conversations optimally useful, you will want to learn to be artful about what hashtags you choose, and also how you arrange those hashtags.

3. One heuristic to use as you make these decisions is, "under what conditions will future-me want to find this?"

Here's an interesting paradox, courtesy of David Whyte:

The deeper your commitment to the principles in your life, the more fluid life starts to feel.

True commitment often doesn't mean rigidity, it's more likely to result in flow and movement.

Commitment is liberating. More brilliance from David Whyte on generosity in relationship

Learning to be generous with yourself ... for some of us, that's the hard part.

1/ Ok, surreal.

I am doing some garden work and a *star shaped ice cube* (pictured, center) falls out of the sky.

I look up (I'm beneath a tree) and see a black crow(?) fly away.

Pretty sure crow collected it from somewhere, + then dropped it. It's only partially melted. 2/ well, you know...

As a fan of Carl Jung, oracular wisdom, divination, synchronicity, etc., I HAVE to see what its symbolism might portend.

Of these, the ace of pentacles seems to 'fit' ...

as @thejessicadore once explained, the "gift from the sky" is an "Ace of" metaphor.

Rest in Power.

Chadwick talking about the responsibility that an artist has, when they are speaking to the hopes and beliefs of a community.

https://twitter.com/DavidDTSS/status/1299546534032412672

2/ wow

https://twitter.com/FallonTonight/status/969071212197396480?s=19

I had to completely stop writing "to-do"s for a while, before realizing how completely awful I was at it.

What I now appreciate: every commitment has to fit into the broader scope of my intentions, with a care equal to a craftsman fitting a single tile into an epic mosaic. 2/ This is a very Alexandrian idea (Christopher, of course) - and it raises an underexplored question -

Why aren't we applying Alexandrian design principles to the imaginary structures that we create in time, as well as space?

cc: @RoamBrain , @ppawlettjackson , @codexeditor