January, 2022 | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet by TfT Hacker - Exploring Tools for Thought and PKM (Twitter)

Elevator pitch for Tools for Thought

How would you explain Tools for a Thought (TfT) to your friends and family in the most concise way possible?#TfT

P.S. Even with a good explanation, do you find they are interested? pic.twitter.com/0BApmIYgfK
— TfT Hacker - Exploring Tools for Thought and PKM (@TfTHacker) January 3, 2022

Good tools for thought encourage or allow me to:

Easily and quickly capture interesting ideas and their original or related contexts so I can artificially remember more of what I’ve seen, read, and thought.
Link these ideas to related and non-related ideas and contexts.
Dramatically accelerates the creation of new ideas with respect to combinatorial creativity and ideas having sex.
Have a greater ability to focus on bigger ideas by letting me forget some less familiar minutiae. I can think more by remembering less though repeated good ideas filter up to the top and through repeated linking and use are more easily remembered.

Read The Other Invisible Hand (NOEMA)

Economics and evolution are basically in the same business: Both are all about productivity selection, though one has been at it for billions of years longer than the other. Both involve “invisible hand” magic — intricate, unplanned, “self-or...

Folks who have been reading David Wengrow and David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything are sure to appreciate the sentiment here which pulls in the ideas of biology and evolution to expand on their account and makes it a much more big history sort of thesis.

I’m reminded of Kate Raworth’s excellent Donut Economics as a potential remedy.

Raw capitalism mimics the logic of cancer within our body politic.

With tiny arms you POSSE for the reach

Replied to a tweet by Brian Mann (Twitter)

Does the #ToolsForThought community know the history of interstitial journaling?

That is — note taking tools that have “today’s date” as the default blank page?

I can think of several _blogging_ tools that worked like this but aren’t usually thought of as note apps. https://t.co/H4rfm86R5t
— Boris Mann (@bmann) January 7, 2022

I’ve done something similar in paper form as early as the 1990’s and have seen examples in diaries and commonplace books that go back much earlier. TiddlyWiki had a digital capability to to something like this as early as the late 2000s and I’ve used it there as well. As you mention, content management systems like WordPress certainly do this with various archive views, but this is a secondary effect and not done up front as is seen in tools like Roam, Obsidian, et al. I suspect that one might find the ability to do such workflows with early versions of DEVONThink, Tinderbox, or even MediaWiki, though as these are used personally, it’s much harder to provide evidence for their direct use as such.

The real question is what additional value and affordances does this pattern allow? Some of the value is in emptying your head (forgetting) as seen in productivity systems like 43 folders or doing Morning Pages. I suspect that rarely are people revising these tidbits at later times to get additional value from them.

Outside of this, systems like Roam Research may make it easier to create a diary like this with the day’s work, but the real value there is not the date/timeline created, but the way that the system treats each block like its own unit of knowledge and allows cross linking them. In this case, the real precursor goes back at least as far as Konrad Gessner’s Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium (1548), which provides a classic definition of the zettelkasten format, though this obviously is heavily informed by the earlier traditions of excerpting and annotating found in commonplace books, florilegia, etc. stemming from the ideas of rhetoric from the Greeks and Romans.

In oral cultures, precursors of this sort of time ordering can be seen with respect to the ideas of ancestral time, genealogy, and techniques like the songline in Australia, but the implementations will vary and it’s unlikely that one might find a complete one-to-one mapping of these ideas into Western cultures.