Connected to this are Andy Matuschak’s comments about contextual backlinks bootstrapping new concepts before explicit definitions come into play.

Easily updated pages: don’t worry about precisely naming something at first. Let the meaning emerge over time and easily change it (propagating through all references).

Cognitive Overhead (aka Cognitive Load): often the task of specifying formalism is extraneous to the primary task, or is just plain annoying to do.

The basic intuition is described well by the Shipman & Marshall paper: users enter information in a mostly informal fashion, and then formalize only later in the task when appropriate formalisms become clear and also (more) immediately useful.

It’s important to notice something about these examples of synthesis representations: they go quite a bit further than simply grouping or associating things (though that is an important start). They have some kind of formal semantic structure (otherwise known as formality) that specifies what entities exist, and what kinds of relations exist between the entities. This formal structure isn’t just for show: it’s what enables the kind of synthesis that really powers significant knowledge work! Formal structures unlock powerful forms of reasoning like conceptual combination, analogy, and causal reasoning.

Systems which display backlinks to a node permit a new behavior: you can define a new node extensionally (rather than intensionally) by simply linking to it from many other nodes—even before it has any content.