ASCIIMATION - Star Wars in ASCII Art

Adler has juxtaposed the ideas of genius and commonplace together, but somehow doesn't notice the ratchet that ties them together to be one and the same tool for making them so productive?!?

Gian-Carlo Rota (1997): Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 1, 1997, Vol. 44, pp. 22-25.

Maybe 'genius' is in the ability to keep going.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/ambient-genius

It's not stated in the piece, but there's a hint of Brian Eno as a lone genius within music, but the piece explicitly explores his own creative practices and collaborations which go toward creating his creativity and genius by way of his path through music.

Example of Brian Eno using ITunes as a digital music zettelkasten. He's got 2,800 pieces of unreleased music which he plays on random shuffle for serendipity, memory, and potential creativity. The experience seems to be a musical one which parallels Luhmann's ideas of serendipity and discovery with the ghost in the machine or the conversation partner he describes in his zettelkasten practice.

Book Source: Eno, Brian. A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. 1st edition. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Section: A Letter to Dave Stewart, p 354

Cross reference quote and further usage/refinement of the word from popular blog post by Kevin Kelly Scenius, or Communal Genius: https://hypothes.is/a/SgYqomnBEe2_Yaf4i1JnCg

Definition of scenius, a portmanteau of scene and genius, meaning roughly the output of combining the ideas of zeitgeist with combinatorial creativity to create sustained output which might be considered genius level work.

Generally it gives more credit to the people and time than is generally seen in other instances which are often frame as lone genius.

My definition may be more complex and nuanced than that of the version coined (?) by Brian Eno.

https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/genius-ofbirds

Lynne Kelly mentioned that there might be some interesting research on birds and memory with respect to songlines-like activity.

The cumulative effect of one's perception of Sturgeon's law may be a driving force underlying imposter syndrome.

While one see's the entirety of their own creation process and realizes that only a small fraction of it is truly useful, it's much harder seeing only the finished product of others. The impression one is left with by availability heuristic is that there are thousands of geniuses in the world with excellent, refined products or ideas while one's own contribution is miniscule in comparison.

Contrast this with Matt Ridley's broad perspective in The Rational Optimist which shows the power of cumulative breeding and evolution of ideas. One person can make their own stone hand axe, but no one person can make their own toaster oven or computer mouse alone.

Link to: - lone genius myth (eg. Einstein's special relativity did not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, there was a long train of work and thought which we don't see the context of)

Forte is fairly good at contextualizing people and proving ethos for what he's about to present. Essentially saying, "these people are the smart, well-known geniuses, so let's imitate them".

Humans are already good at imitating. Are they even better at it or more motivated if the subject of imitation is famous?

See also his sections on Twyla Tharp and Taylor Swift...

link to : - lone genius myth: how can there be a lone genius when the majority of human history is littered with imitation?

Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly

Creating strong and clever connections between disparate areas of knowledge can appear to others to be a flash of genius, in part because they didn't have the prior knowledges nor did they put in the work of collecting, remembering, or juxtaposition.

This method may be one of the primary (only) underpinnings supporting the lone genius myth. This is particularly the case when the underlying ideas were not ones fully developed by the originator. As an example if Einstein had fully developed the ideas of space and time by himself and then put the two together as spacetime, then he's independently built two separate layers, but in reality, he's cleverly juxtaposed two broadly pre-existing ideas and combined them in an intriguing new framing to come up with something new. Because he did this a few times over his life, he's viewed as an even bigger genius, but when we think about what he's done and how, is it really genius or simply an underlying method that may have shaken out anyway by means of statistical thermodynamics of people thinking, reading, communicating, and writing?

Are there other techniques that also masquerade as genius like this, or is this one of the few/only?

Link this to Feynman's mention that his writing is the actual thinking that appears on the pages of his notes. "It's the actual thinking."

This perspective is the same sort of hero worship that has too often been beaten into people (and especially students) over the centuries.

You have to be an absolute genius to be able to create work like that of Francis Bacon, Conrad Gessner, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Carl Linnaeus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Isaac Newton, Umberto Eco, Philip Melanchthon, Erasmus Darwin, Rudolphus Agricola, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Burns right?

Here's the secret: all of them kept extensive notebooks, commonplace books, or zettelkasten-like note collections. Small little pieces aggregated over time allowed them to create great things.

I suspect that if one looks at famous creators/writers throughout history they will discover that some sort of personal knowledge management system at the core of their practice.

"Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.

Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.

It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.

The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.

Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17

Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.

Great example of the overly optimistic rose colored glasses of the venture fund backed tech elite. How do they still get away with such blatant failures? Who hold them socially and financially accountable?

Hot take 🔥

Anecdotally, I've noticed that most "famous" scientists, writers, etc. all kept some sort of significant notebook, commonplace book, zettelkasten, other.

I like the idea of some of the research into education, pedagogy, and technology challenges here.

Given the incredibly common and oft-repeated misconception which is included in the article ("But Zettelkasten was a very personal practice of Nicholas Luhmann, its inventor."), can we please correct the record?

Niklas Luhmann positively DID NOT invent the concept of the Zettelkasten. It grew out of the commonplace book tradition in Western culture going back to Aristotle---if not earlier. In Germany it was practiced and morphed with the idea of the waste book or sudelbücher, which was popularized by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg or even re-arrangeable slips of paper used by countless others. From there it morphed again when index cards (whose invention has been attributed to Carl Linnaeus) were able to be mass manufactured in the early 1900s. A number of well-known users who predate Luhmann along with some general history and references can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten.

I suspect that most of the fallacy of Luhmann as the inventor stems from the majority of the early writing about Zettelkasten as a subject appears in German and hasn't been generally translated into English. What little is written about them in English has primarily focused on Luhmann and his output, so the presumption is made that he was the originator of the idea---a falsehood that has been repeated far and wide. This falsehood is also easier to believe because our culture is generally enamored with the mythology of the "lone genius" that managed Herculean feats of output. (We are also historically heavily prone to erase the work and efforts of research assistants, laboratory members, students, amanuenses, secretaries, friends, family, etc. which have traditionally helped writers and researchers in their output.)

Anyone glancing at the commonplace tradition will realize that similar voluminous outputs were to be easily found among their practitioners as well, especially after their re-popularization by Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon in the emergence of humanism in the 1500s. The benefit of this is that there is now a much richer area of research to be done with respect to these tools and the educational enterprise. One need not search very far to discover that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's output could potentially be attributed to their commonplace books, which were subsequently published. It was a widely accepted enough technique that it was taught to them at Harvard University when they attended. Apparently we're now all attempting to reinvent the wheel because there's a German buzzword that is somehow linguistically hiding our collective intellectual heritage. Maybe we should put these notes into our digital Zettelkasten (née commonplace books) and let them distill a bit?

syndication link: https://browninterviews.org/suddenly-you-realize-that-your-house-is-not-equipped-with-a-water-hose-or-even-emergency-exit-we-are-not-prepared-for-e-learning-at-such-a-large-scale-brown-interviews-dr-jingjing-lin/#comment-637

For what I expect to be a coming description of Jonathan Edwards' commonplace book, I'm surprised that the page doesn't use the word or even florilegium.

Everhard here makes in one breath a common error I'm coming to notice. While it might be true that Edwards had some organizational genius, I think it's disingenuous to attribute his output to his intellectual genius. More and more I'm seeing that throughout history those who were thought of as intellectual geniuses really relied on the organization structures of their commonplace books (or similar devices). By writing, thinking, and producing in a commonplace tradition they were able to do far more, think more clearly, and accomplish more.

This can be linked with the idea also espoused in Robert Greene's Mastery which seems to have some of the similar flavor.

It's rarely ever the case (my cognitive bias statement), that anything springs fully formed from the mind.

Generally there's an infrastructure, a system, a method by which ideas or physical things are aggregated, accumulated, and edited into existence.

When seeing them well done, they appear magical because we don't see the work or the process. We will often call them genius, when in reality, they're the result of long hard work.

Take the Pyramids of Giza. They look large and magesterial---and likely moreso in their non-degraded form. But is it so mystical how they may have been built if we were to see the structure and scaffolding that likely went into constructing them?

I'm reminded of the research implied by Arthur Conan Doyle's writing about Sherlock Holmes. We hear about the time and effort spent studying the smallest things, but we don't see it, instead we see the mythical application of it at the "right" times to solve cases in spectacular fashion.

No one focuses on the time spent studying and learning and instead we mythologize the effects at the other end.

Another example of this is the fêting of Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem, while simultaneously ignoring the decades of work he poured into studying and solving it not to mention the work of thousands before him to help give him a platform on which to see things differently.

This will depend on a very specific and narrow definition of fitness--perhaps one from a very individualistic and libertarian perspective.

There is fitness at the level of the gene, the organ, the individual, and the group, and even possibly larger groupings above that.

What if, by starving out and leaving "uneducated" people like Srinivasa Ramanujan, for example, who surely was marginalized for his time, society is left without them? While on an individual level Ramanujan may have been less fit on some levels as G.H. Hardy and may have otherwise dwindled and disappeared, Hardy adopted him and made both mathematicians better while also making dramatic strides for mankind.

From a statistical mechanics perspective, within some reasonable limits, we should be focusing on improving ourselves as well as the larger group(s) because the end results for humanity and life in general may be dramatically improved. (Though what we mean by improved here may be called into question from a definitional perspective.)

Compare this with [Malcolm Gladwell]]'s argument in My Little Hundred Million.

On a nationalistic level within human politics, Republicans should be less reticent to help out marginalized Americans because it may be from this pool of potential that we may find life saving improvements or even protection from other polities (ie, in our competition or threats from countries like China, Iran, North Korea). Consider how different things may have been had the U.S. not taken in Jewish or other foreign nationals like Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, etc. in the early to mid-1900s.? Now consider, which life changing geniuses we may be preventing reaching their potential by our current immigration policies? our current educational policies?

I think that a major part of improving the issue of abuse and providing consent is building in notifications so that website owners will at least be aware that their site is being marked up, highlighted, annotated, and commented on in other locations or by other platforms. Then the site owner at least has the knowledge of what's happening and can then be potentially provided with information and tools to allow/disallow such interactions, particularly if they can block individual bad actors, but still support positive additions, thought, and communication. Ideally this blocking wouldn't occur site wide, which many may be tempted to do now as a knee-jerk reaction to recent events, but would be fine grained enough to filter out the worst offenders.

Toward the end of notifications to site owners, it would be great if any annotating activity would trigger trackbacks, pingbacks, or the relatively newer and better webmention protocol of the WW3C out of the http://IndieWebCamp.com movement. Then site owners would at least have notifications about what is happening on their site that might otherwise be invisible to them.

Perhaps there's a way to further implement filters or tools (a la Akismet on platforms like WordPress) that allow site users to mark materials as spam, abusive, or other so that they are then potentially moved from "public" facing to "private" so that the original highlighter can still see their notes, but that the platform isn't allowing the person's own website to act as a platform to give reach to bad actors.

Further some site owners might appreciate graded filters (G, PG, PG-13, R, X) so that users or even parents can filter what they're willing to see. Consider also annotations on narrative forms that might be posted as spoilers--how can these be guarded against? (Possibly with CSS and a spoiler tag?) Options can be built into the platform itself as well as allowing server-side options for truly hard cases.

My coding skills are rustier than I wish they were, but I'm available to help/consult if needed.

I’ve spent some time thinking about this type of blocking in the past and written about a potential solution. Kevin Marks had created a script to help prevent this type of abuse as well; his solution and some additional variants are freely available. — {cja}

It's rarely ever about the "lone genius".

Our open letter to Genius and Marc. https://hypothes.is/blog/a-letter-to-marc-andreessen-and-rap-genius/

According to Hume, genius is another type of knowing (though he still calls genius a way by which to know the 'rules').

In spring of 2017, Genius announced a pivot back to music video. While you can still create an account, you can no longer get access to the plug in to use it on sites where it is not supported.

I wonder whether Marc would still write this the same way today, in a world where web annotation is finally a W3C standard and Hypothesis looks much more like the future of web annotation than Genius...

The ideas of "capturing" and "packaging" knowledge suggests a mindset based on monetizing rather than empowering knowledge makers. The new metaphor of zebra not unicorn startup business models suggests "profitable businesses that solve real, meaningful problems and in the process repair existing social systems" might serve us all better than Genius' "pivot" to media.

Y'know, I don't take this as so much of a slam. Like the note I made on Blair, the genius is the guy with little skill and low expectations who manages to pull of something half-decent, or even great, out of nowhere. It's surprisingly uplifting from a guy who just explained all the ways you can mess up proper eloquence.

This is kind of a wander, but I wonder if you can run this backwards? Like, if you're looking for genius, don't look at the masterful orator, look for the girl who has lacking mechanical skill but still pulls it off. It won't be top-tier work, but she's able to demonstrate a natural attention to the universe's current of Eloquence.

Here we are good and much better than, say, Genius:

When you post User Content to the Service or otherwise submit it to us, you hereby grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Genius an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), create derivative works of, distribute and otherwise fully exploit all Intellectual Property Rights in and to such User Content for purposes of providing, operating and promoting the Service or otherwise conducting the business of Genius.

I'm fascinated by this point.

This was/is one of the critiques of (Rap) Genius as well: hip as its authoritative voice was, it nonetheless moved toward the encyclopedia. Though the company has since pivoted to allow more individual commentary than encyclopedic exposition--I don't think they've quite worked this out in the UI yet--the original site, and the part I think that is still most compelling was the Wikipedia for rap lyrics.

But from a pedagogical perspective, that expository mode of analysis was really only one, and perhaps not even the most important, use of collaborative annotation. For my part, I allowed teachers to duplicate texts and create their own versions, instructing their students to annotate however thy wanted them to: authoritatively, discursively, inquisitively, with GIFs.

Funny how frequently this terms comes up, when talking about Genius. The difference between annotation platforms is significantly a matter of usage. Usage of Genius has a lot to do with snarky comments made by “the smart kid at the back of the class”. My perception of Hypothesis is that it’s much more oriented towards diversifying voices. But that has less to do with technical features of the platform than with the community adopting it.

Same experience, even in the Genius guidelines. The tool’s affordances (and name) revolve around snark. In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with that. We need spaces for people to have fun, even if it’s at the expense of others. But the startup is based on a very specific idea of what constitutes useful commentary. That idea is closer to pedantry, snark, intellectual bullying, and animated gifs than on respectful exchange.

It's a good sign that both hypothes.is' and genius' annotators work perfectly well together on the same page. Props to both dev teams!

Yes, and I do mean genius!

This is pretty interesting and all very vague. Why couldn't the crowd-sourced version of the lyrics be included? If it is then this product isn't all that different from lots of other media productions, though it is cool that it's inside Spotify.

Education websites.

test2

Here's how Andreessen himself explained the investment, annotated on (Rap) Genius. After this investment, Genius pivoted slowly from annotating lyrics to, like hypothes.is, annotating the web.