I always thought that Alan Jacobs blogging practice was a method of commonplacing and digital publishing all rolled up into one. Nice to see him lay out some of his thinking and method here.

25:00 Why attend an art history class then when you are so sensitive of images being depicted (decent argument)? 27:00 cancel culture at college campuses (evolution being taught creationist becoming mad example) 29:25 Tension between intellectual discomfort and harm (notion of safe spaces as being a problem). 31:00 Illiberal left as sketching good vs evil and claiming moral superoprity. Here, leftist claim to be inclusive, but in fact, they are exclusive .

for - quote / insight - decreased resiliency due to tight network of elites - From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds Crawford Stanley Holling - 2004 - creative alternatives - liminal spaces - rapid whole system change

quote / insight - decreased resiliency due to tight network of elites - (see quote below) - The front-loop phase is more predictable, - with higher degrees of certainty. - In both the natural and social worlds, - it maximizes production and accumulation. - We have been in that mode since World War II. - The consequence of this is not only an accumulation and concentration of wealth, - but also the emergence of greater vulnerability because of - the increasing number of interconnections that link that wealth, and - those who control it, - in efforts to sustain it. - Little time and few resources are available for alternatives that explore different visions or opportunities. - Emergence and novelty is inhibited. - This growing connectedness leads to increasing rigidity in its goal to retain control, - and the system becomes ever more tightly bound together. - This reduces resilience and the capacity of the system to absorb change, - thus increasing the threat of abrupt change. - We can recognize the need for change but become politically stifled in our capacity to act effectively.

to - quote - we are now in a back-loop of a planetary adaptive cycle - From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds - Crawford Stanley Holling - 2004 - https://hyp.is/FTRDoJFuEe-rsvdKeYjr0g/www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art11/main.html?ref=ageoftransformation.org

comment - These ideas are quite important for those change actors working to emerge creative alternatives - liminal spaces - rapid whole system change

for - quote - we are in a back-loop phase - From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds - Crawford Stanley Holling - 2004 - creative alternatives - liminal spaces - rapid whole system change

comment - This is important for discussion for change actors working in liminal spaces attempting to give birth to creative alternatives

Gemignani, Michael C. Elementary Topology. 2nd ed. Addison-Wesley Series in Mathematics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1971.

Annotations URL<br /> Alternate annotations URL

Comment by chrisaldrich: I personally identify with this since I'm porting my annotations and thoughts to a notebook as part of a process for active thinking, revision, writing, and eventual publication.

polarised identity formation

starting to change

superior people decided based on masculine qualities such as being active

reply to u/RobThomasBouchard at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16v8tfq/starting_a_blog/

The answer is:<br /> D: Start a "blog" where you post your notes as status updates and interlink them a bit. When you've got enough, you organize them into a mini thesis and write a longer article/blog post about it.

Examples: - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22thought%20spaces%22 and - https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book#The_IndieWeb_site_as_a_Commonplace_book

tl;dr: Use your website like a public, online zettelkasten. 🕸️🗃️

Some may not realize it yet, but the shift in technology represented by ChatGPT is just another small evolution in the chain of predictive text with the realms of information theory and corpus linguistics.

Claude Shannon's work along with Warren Weaver's introduction in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), shows some of the predictive structure of written communication. This is potentially better underlined for the non-mathematician in John R. Pierce's book An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961) in which discusses how one can do a basic analysis of written English to discover that "e" is the most prolific letter or to predict which letters are more likely to come after other letters. The mathematical structures have interesting consequences like the fact that crossword puzzles are only possible because of the repetitive nature of the English language or that one can use the editor's notation "TK" (usually meaning facts or date To Come) in writing their papers to make it easy to find missing information prior to publication because the statistical existence of the letter combination T followed by K is exceptionally rare and the only appearances of it in long documents are almost assuredly areas which need to be double checked for data or accuracy.

Cell phone manufacturers took advantage of the lower levels of this mathematical predictability to create T9 predictive text in early mobile phone technology. This functionality is still used in current cell phones to help speed up our texting abilities. The difference between then and now is that almost everyone takes the predictive magic for granted.

As anyone with "fat fingers" can attest, your phone doesn't always type out exactly what you mean which can result in autocorrect mistakes (see: DYAC (Damn You AutoCorrect)) of varying levels of frustration or hilarity. This means that when texting, one needs to carefully double check their work before sending their text or social media posts or risk sending their messages to Grand Master Flash instead of Grandma.

The evolution in technology effected by larger amounts of storage, faster processing speeds, and more text to study means that we've gone beyond the level of predicting a single word or two ahead of what you intend to text, but now we're predicting whole sentences and even paragraphs which make sense within a context. ChatGPT means that one can generate whole sections of text which will likely make some sense.

Sadly, as we know from our T9 experience, this massive jump in predictability doesn't mean that ChatGPT or other predictive artificial intelligence tools are "magically" correct! In fact, quite often they're wrong or will predict nonsense, a phenomenon known as AI hallucination. Just as with T9, we need to take even more time and effort to not only spell check the outputs from the machine, but now we may need to check for the appropriateness of style as well as factual substance!

The bigger near-term problem is one of human understanding and human communication. While the machine may appear to magically communicate (often on our behalf if we're publishing it's words under our names), is it relaying actual meaning? Is the other person reading these words understanding what was meant to have been communicated? Do the words create knowledge? Insight?

We need to recall that Claude Shannon specifically carved semantics and meaning out of the picture in the second paragraph of his seminal paper:

Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

So far ChatGPT seems to be accomplishing magic by solving a small part of an engineering problem by being able to explore the adjacent possible. It is far from solving the human semantic problem much less the un-adjacent possibilities (potentially representing wisdom or insight), and we need to take care to be aware of that portion of the unsolved problem. Generative AIs are also just choosing weighted probabilities and spitting out something which is prone to seem possible, but they're not optimizing for which of many potential probabilities is the "best" or the "correct" one. For that, we still need our humanity and faculties for decision making.

Shannon, Claude E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 1948.

Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949.

Pierce, John Robinson. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. Second, Revised. Dover Books on Mathematics. 1961. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, Inc., 1980. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbols-Mathematics/dp/0486240614.

Shannon, Claude Elwood. “The Bandwagon.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 1 (March 1956): 3. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.

We may also need to explore The Bandwagon, an early effect which Shannon noticed and commented upon. Everyone seems to be piling on the AI bandwagon right now...

Indigenous cultures can "see" dark constellations (example: the Australian emu in the sky) which are defined empty spaces which are explicitly visible.

Using this concept, one could think of or use blank index cards in a zettelkasten or even the empty (negative) spaces between cards as "dark ideas" (potential ideas which need to be thought of and filled in).

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/FlqusEN1Ee6XEr_9StPUlA

quote ostensibly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA

• for: quote, quote - Artur Serra, quote - labs, quote - innovation, quote - internet labs
• quote
  • Four billion people are now connected to the same infrastructure, the internet, that we the science and technology community put in place just decades ago.
  • This is creating the conditions for an explosion of open creativity and innovation never seen before.
  • A huge wave of labs of all kinds,
    • living labs,
    • fablabs,
    • social labs,
    • edulabs,
    • innovation spaces and
    • policy labs
    • citizen labs
  • is emerging as the new kind of groups and communities of the digital era.
  • We are moving from the net to the lab.
  • On the 2030 horizon, many of these labs will gather and agree in generating the first universal innovation ecosystems in regions and countries.
  • https://www.ecsite.eu/activities-and-services/news-and-publications/digital-spokes/issue-45
• author: Artur Serra
  • deputy director of I2CQT Foundation
  • research director, Citilab, Catalonia, Spain

We need more scholarship which leaves open thinking spaces for future scholars.

Autobibliographie annotée (2018-2022) <br /> by Arthur Perret on 2023-02-20 (accessed:: 2023-02-24 11:30:20)

Perret looks back at several years of blogposts and comments on his growth over the intervening years. This sort of practice and providing indicators of best posts is an interesting means of digital gardening.

One of the benefits of journaling on an index card is that the small space is much less intimidating than a large blank sheet, particularly when one isn't in the mood but feels like they ought to write. This is similar to the idea that many people find that microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr) are much easier to maintain than a long form blog.

One might have considered some of this part of his (Roland Barthes') fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten) as a journal/diary or what some might today consider a private microblog of thoughts and observations.

| physics/mathematics | Classical Physics | Quantum Mechanics |<br /> |---|---|---|<br /> | State Space | fields satisfying equations of laws<br>- the state is given by a point in the space | vector in a complex vector space with a Hermitian inner product (wavefunctions) |<br /> | Observables | functions of fields<br>- usually differential equations with real-valued solutions | self-adjoint linear operators on the state space<br>- some confusion may result when operators don't commute; there are usually no simple (real-valued) numerical solutions |

Richard Carter uses his writing journal practice to "think out loud" to himself. Often, laying out extended arguments helps people to refine and reshape their thinking as they're better able to see potential holes or missing pieces of arguments. It's the same sort of mechanism which is at work in rubber duck debugging of computer code: by explaining a process one is more easily able to see the missing pieces, errors, or problems with the process at hand.

Carter's separate note taking and writing journal practice being used as a thought space or writing workshop of sorts is very similar to the process seen in my preliminary studies of Henry David Thoreau's work in which he kept commonplace books and separate (writing) journals which show evidence of his trying ideas on for size and working them before committing them to his published works.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/18/1139783203/what-makes-songs-swing-physicists-unravel-jazz-mystery

Spaces in both language, text, and music help to create the texture of what is being communicated (and/or not).

Link to Edward Tufte's latest book in section entitled "Spacing enhances complex meaning, encourages slow, thoughtful reading":

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #meta 2023-01-19 (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2023 11:32:19</time>)</cite></small>

Link to Indigenous astronomy example of negative spaces (like the Great Emu)

https://web.archive.org/web/20161201164608/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6286/adam-phillips-the-art-of-nonfiction-no-7-adam-phillips

Another example to link to: https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w

Susan Hrach (author of Minding Bodies) recently tweeted about the need for instructors to have "spatial proficiency" and I think Robert is demonstrating that here. It's not enough to have a create learning space, we need to know how to navigate it with our bodies.

Don't underestimate this. There are plenty of classrooms where it's theoretically possible to move the furniture around, but practically time consuming.

Also note that there's space in the room to move things! That's not always the case

This is really interesting. An active learning space might help students work in the ways that experts in the discipline work. That's an angle on ALCs I haven't heard before.

Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, classifies creativity in three ways: interpolation, extrapolation, and "true invention". He defines the first two traditionally, but gives a more vague description of the third. What exactly is "true invention"?

How can one invent without any catalyst at all? How can one invent outside of a problem's solution space? outside of the adjacent possible? Does this truly exist? Or doesn't it based on definition.

Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.

Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.

How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

Our surroundings can have a profound effect on our thinking.

Want to read: Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 2 (2007): 174–86, https://doi.org/10.1086/519146.

This is a whole different area than "thought spaces" but somehow relevant all the same.

cross reference this with Annie Murphy Paul's thinking with built spaces

Did Forte find this source on his own or borrow from Annie Murphy Paul? Likely the later given his reliance on other small bits which overlap.

-Chuck Grimmett

While algorithmic feeds and "artificial intelligences" might control large swaths of what we see in our passive acquisition modes, we can and certainly should spend more of our time in active search modes which don't employ these tools or methods.

How might we better blend our passive and active modes of search and discovery while still having and maintaining the value of serendipity in our workflows?

Consider the loss of library stacks in our research workflows? We've lost some of the serendipity of seeing the book titles on the shelf that are adjacent to the one we're looking for. What about the books just above and below it? How do we replicate that sort of serendipity into our digital world?

How do we help prevent the shiny object syndrome? How can stay on task rather than move onto the next pretty thing or topic presented to us by an algorithmic feed so that we can accomplish the task we set out to do? Certainly bookmarking a thing or a topic for later follow up can be useful so we don't go too far afield, but what other methods might we use? How can we optimize our random walks through life and a sea of information to tie disparate parts of everything together? Do we need to only rely on doing it as a broader species? Can smaller subgroups accomplish this if carefully planned or is exploring the problem space only possible at mass scale? And even then we may be under shooting the goal by an order of magnitude (or ten)?

Oded Shenkar's three step process for effective problem solving using imitation: - Step 1. Specify your problem and identify an analogous problem that has been successfully solved. - Step 2. Analyze why the solution was successful. - Step 3. Identify how your problem and circumstances differ from the example problem and figure out how to best and most appropriately adapt the original solution to the new context.

The last step may be the most difficult.

The IndieWeb broadly uses the idea of imitation to work on and solve a variety of different web design problems. By focusing on imitation they dramatically decrease the work and effort involved in building a website. The work involved in creating new innovative solutions even in their space has been much harder, but there, they imitate others in breaking the problems down into the smallest constituent parts and getting things working there.

Link this to the idea of "leading by example".

Link to "reinventing the wheel" -- the difficulty of innovation can be more clearly seen in the process of people reinventing the wheel for themselves when they might have simply imitated a more refined idea. Searching the state space of potential solutions can be an arduous task.

Link to "paving cow paths", which is a part of formalizing or crystalizing pre-tested solutions.

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, September 25). RT @aechitty1: The new Durham policy on face coverings is at: Https://dur.ac.uk/resources/coronavirus/Facecoveringpolicy.pdf It brings to 21 the number of UK universities making… [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1446127476573282313

https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/theory/wholeness/

Ideas fill their spaces.

When writing it can be daunting to see a long blank screen and feel like you've got to fill it up with ideas de novo.

From the other perspective if you're starting with a smaller space like a Twitter input box or index card you may find that you write too much and require the ability to edit things down to fit the sparse space.

I do quite like the small space provided by Hypothes.is which has the ability to expand and scroll as you write so that it has the Goldilocks feel of not too small, not too big, but "just right".

Micro.blog has a feature that starts with a box that can grow with the content. Once going past 280 characters it also adds an optional input box to give the post a title if one wants it to be an article rather than a simple note.

Link to idea of Occamy from the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that can grow or shrink to fit the available space: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Occamy

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

Project notes can be kept in folders either inside or outside of the zettelkasten itself, but they technically shouldn't be a permanent part of it. Perhaps it's better to think of them as a workbench or play space for ideas as they're forming into a finished piece of writing. Once the piece is done, the play space has served its purpose and can be cleaned up.

Similar statements have been made by others:

I could quote Luhmann on this as well, who thought that "without writing one cannot think," But there is nothing peculiarly "Luhmannian" about this idea. Isaac Asimov is said to have said "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers." And, to give one other example, E. B. White (of "Strunk and White" fame) claimed that "writing is one way to go about thinking." In other words, writing is thinking. And since I do almost all my significant writing in ConnectedText these days, it might be called my "writing environment."—Manfred Kuehn

I think this was Luhmann's full quote:

Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.

(Translation) You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way.

Luhmann’s “you” or "one" in his quote is obviously only a Western cultural referent which erases the existence of oral based cultures which have other ways to do their sophisticated thinking. His ignorant framing on the topic shouldn’t be a shared one. Oral cultures managed to do their thinking through speech and memory.

underscores are better than dashes for representing spaces

Several things to notice here:

• learning in public
• posting knowledge on a personal website as a means of sharing that knowledge with a broader public
• specifically not hiding the work of reading in notebooks which are unlikely to be read by others.

West Country Bylines. ‘Covid-19: 2 Months since “Freedom Day”, but Where Are We Now?’, 1 October 2021. https://westcountrybylines.co.uk/covid-19-2-months-since-freedom-day-but-where-are-we-now/.

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).

I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.

Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.

Good terminology- space of flows, denoting the necessity of (carbon intensive) travel to move from one place to another. Seen from the 19th century, even the average car-driving citizen of the 20th century is elite. A 100 hp car, which is now almost an average power rating of most internal combustion engines, is the power equivalent to the 19th century analog of maintaining 100 horses.

The elites move in a world of their own. Embedded within the deteriorating spaces all around them, their privileged and exclusive spaces are like self-constructed lotus blossoms floating on a sea of muck, which their lifestyles have disproportionately helped create in the first place. The geographic juxtapostion of these two spaces is stark, as illustrated in images such as those of Cape Town’s elite neighborhoods nextdoor to crowded townships. Wealth and privilege live side by side poverty.

This is an important observation that can be used to develop a transformative strategy. There is a culturally-constructed, positive, psychological affect associated with being in these spaces. How can these be deconstructed?

https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

Or more powerful, in a read, write, remix, and edit space.

Somewhat related to:

The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb 2011-06-23 at OSBridge2011 having lunch with Ward, Tantek exclaimed

https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki#Inspiration

What sort of spaces do newsletters create based upon their modes of delivery? What makes them "safer" for marginalized groups? Is there a mitigation of algorithmic speed and reach that helps? Is it a more tacit building of community and conversation? How can these benefits be built into an IndieWeb space?

How can a platform provide "reach" while simultaneously creating negative feedback for trolls and bad actors?

You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way. —Niklas Luhmann

(Source of the original??)

This is interesting, but is also ignorant of oral traditions which had means of addressing it.

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?

this is the general pattern for commonplace books and zettelkasten

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in control and surrender, architecture and gardening – Snakes and Ladders (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 09:49:29</time>)</cite></small>

Alan Jacobs seems to be delving into the area of thought spaces provided by blogs and blogging.

In my view, they come out of a cultural tradition of commonplace books becoming digital and more social in the the modern era. Jacobs is obviously aware of the idea of Zettelkasten, but possibly hasn't come across the Sonke Ahrens' book on smart notes or the conceptualization of the "digital garden" stemming from Mike Caulfield's work.

He's also acquainted with Robin Sloane, though it's unclear if he's aware of the idea of Stock and Flow.

Some interesting thoughts about thinking and writing in public.

One of the better "simple" discussions of dual spaces I've seen:

If you have a vector space, any vector space, you can define linear functions on that space. The set of all those functions is the dual space of the vector space. The important point here is that it doesn't matter what this original vector space is. You have a vector space V, you have a corresponding dual V∗.

OK, now you have linear functions. Now if you add two linear functions, you get again a linear function. Also if you multiply a linear function with a factor, you get again a linear function. Indeed, you can check that linear functions fulfill all the vector space axioms this way. Or in short, the dual space is a vector space in its own right.

But if V∗ is a vector space, then it comes with everything a vector space comes with. But as we have seen in the beginning, one thing every vector space comes with is a dual space, the space of all linear functions on it. Therefore also the dual space V∗ has a corresponding dual space, V∗∗, which is called double dual space (because "dual space of the dual space" is a bit long).

So we have the dual space, but we also want to know what sort of functions are in that double dual space. Well, such a function takes a vector from V∗, that is, a linear function on V, and maps that to a scalar (that is, to a member of the field the vector space is based on). Now, if you have a linear function on V, you already know a way to get a scalar from that: Just apply it to a vector from V. Indeed, it is not hard to show that if you just choose an arbitrary fixed element v∈V, then the function Fv:ϕ↦ϕ(v) indeed is a linear function on V∗, and thus a member of the double dual V∗∗. That way we have not only identified certain members of V∗∗ but in addition a natural mapping from V to V∗∗, namely F:v↦Fv. It is not hard to prove that this mapping is linear and injective, so that the functions in V∗∗ corresponding to vectors in V form a subspace of V∗∗. Indeed, if V is finite dimensional, it's even all of V∗∗. That's easy to see if you know that dim(V∗)=dimV and therefore dim(V∗∗)=dimV∗=dimV. On the other hand, since F is injective, dim(F(V))=dim(V). However for finite dimensional vector spaces, the only subspace of the same dimension as the full space is the full space itself. However if V is infinite dimensional, V∗∗ is larger than V. In other words, there are functions in V∗∗ which are not of the form Fv with v∈V.

Note that since V∗∗again is a vector space, it also has a dual space, which again has a dual space, and so on. So in principle you have an infinite series of duals (although only for infinite vector spaces they are all different).

Note to self: Look at [[Steven Roman]]'s book [[The Umbral Calculus]] to follow up on having a more intuitive idea of what a dual space is and how it's useful

Dual spaces also appear in geometry as the natural setting for certain objects. For example, a differentiable function f:M→R where M is a smooth manifold is an object that produces, for any point p∈M and tangent vector v∈TpM, a number, the directional derivative, in a linear way. In other words, ==a differentiable function defines an element of the dual to the tangent space (the cotangent space) at each point of the manifold.==

A more intuitive description of why dual spaces are useful or interesting.

There are a number of bloggers who have to some extent, specifically used their blogs for this purpose though. I've documented several at https://boffosocko.com/tag/thought-spaces/

One needs to re-read and reprocess things from time to time. This is a part of the combinatorial creativity that having notes is for.

This is reminiscent of the CAA addage: "If you read something and then don't tell anyone about it, you may as well not have read it in the first place."

a stark statement to make about one's website

This is much better than simply building a brand or a platform.

This idea is far from new and is roughly what Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was doing with the science portions of his Waste Books in the late 1700's where he was running experiments, noting wins, losses, and making progress using the scientific method.

This looks fascinating. I'm not so much interested in the coding/programming part as I am the actual "working in public" portions as they relate to writing, thinking, blogging in the open and sharing that as part of my own learning and growth as well as for sharing that with a broader personal learning network. I'm curious what lessons might be learned within this frame or how educators and journalists might benefit from it.

Smart Cities Dive. ‘Few Mayors Expect to Keep COVID-Inspired Changes to Public Spaces, Survey Finds’. Accessed 17 April 2021. https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/few-mayors-expect-to-keep-covid-inspired-changes-to-public-spaces-survey-f/597582/?mc_cid=1c26278a4e&mc_eid=d5b42264a8.

Rough translation via Google Translate ^^

This is a good description about how working in public can be beneficial to oneself, even if no one else is looking.

Planetizen - Urban Planning News, Jobs, and Education. ‘Arts Performances Take to the Streets’. Accessed 6 March 2021. https://www.planetizen.com/news/2020/12/111501-arts-performances-take-streets.

I personally identify with this since I'm porting my annotations and thoughts to a notebook as part of a process for active thinking, revision, writing, and eventual publication.

I might suggest that this is moving in the right direction, but I would posit that annotation is only the beginning of the process of working with/conversing with texts.

What happens after the annotation? Can students revisit them easily? Search for them? Can they move their annotations around? Connect them in new and interesting ways?

These practices may require more flexibility with their Hypothes.is data to reuse and remix it.

Technology is providing us with the ability to build the most amazing commonplace books, thought spaces, and thinking machines, but somehow we're ignoring the power they have.

A fantastic example of the value of networked thought based solely on the ability of everyone's commonplace books to talk to each other.

This concept here is an interesting one of being "meta".

They also turned their reading into writing, because commonplacing made them into authors. It forced them to write their own books; and by doing so they developed a still sharper sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. The authorial self took shape in the common man’s commonplace book, not merely in the works of great writers. It belonged to the general tendency that Stephen Greenblatt has called “Renaissance self-fashioning.”

This fits into my broader developing thesis about thinking and writing as a means of evolving thought.

Intéressant de penser à l'aménagement physique lors d'une pandémie qui pousse les apprenants hors des lieux physiques conçus pour l'apprentissage et vers un aménagement physique de l'espace familial.

There's surely a link between this and the idea of thought spaces in the blogosphere or the idea of a commonplace book/digital garden/wiki.

This also sounds very closely related to the idea of rubber duck debugging.

feels like he's talking about thought spaces here...

How could the two be merged to remove all the duplication pieces? Could there be a note/status update/Twitter-like stream for the small tidbits, then a place where further aggregation continues, and finally a finalized article that crystallizes and analyzes the thing that gets output as part of an article stream?

Then everything is in one place and much more easily searched and referenced. I find that having things in as few places as possible is very helpful and prevents the "where did I put that idea?" problem.

Wait?! What?!! There's a telegram group for this? Let me in!

(just found details here: https://nesslabs.com/digital-gardeners)

Some of the ideas here mirror many of those I've been looking at in having an online personal wiki where I do my collecting, annotating, and active thinking.

Aaron, to change the famous quote, "It's not the number of characters (140 or 280), but the content of your character that define you." I far prefer reading your links, analysis, and even thought leadership here to people I've never met on twitter with thousands of followers.

I like the idea of a blog without a publish button. I do roughly the same thing with lots of drafts unpublished that I let aggregate content over time. The difference is that mine aren't immediately out in public for other's benefit. Though I do wonder how many might read them, comment on them, or potentially come back to read them later in a more finished form.

I love the general idea of where he's going here and definitively want something exactly like this.

The closest thing I've been able to find in near-finished form is having a public TiddlyWiki with some IndieWeb features. Naturally there's a lot I would change, but for the near term a mixture of a blog and a wiki is what more of us need.

I love the recontextualization of the swale that he proposes here to fit into the extended metaphor of the garden and the stream.

I'm reminded here of the broad idea that many bloggers write about sooner or later of their website being a "thought space" or place to contemplate out in the open. More often than not, even if they don't have an audience to interact with, their writings become a way of thinking out loud, clarifying things for themselves, self-evolving, or putting themselves out there for potential public reactions (good, bad, or indifferent).

While writing things out loud to no audience can be helpful and useful on an individual level, it's often even more helpful to have some sort of productive and constructive feedback. While a handful of likes or positive seeming responses can be useful, I always prefer the ones that make me think more broadly, deeply, or force me to consider other pieces I hadn't envisioned before. To me this is the real value of these open and often very public thought spaces.

For those interested in the general idea, I've been bookmarking/tagging things around the idea of thought spaces I've read on my own website. Hopefully this collection helps others better understand the spectrum of these ideas for themselves.

With respect to the vulnerability piece, I'm reminded of an episode of <cite>The Human Current</cite> I listened to a few weeks back. There was an excellent section that touched on building up trust with students or even a class when it comes to providing feedback and criticism. Having a bank of trust makes it easier to give feedback as well as to receive it. Here's a link to the audio portion and a copy of the relevant text.

Trying out ideas in public, for/with small networks, in a distinctive way brings compound rewards for you.

This is definitely a restatement of the idea of blogging as a thought space, but done perhaps in a broader context. Tom's experiments with Discord for creating and documenting online conversations also becomes a method of networked thinking that allows these discussions to aggregate and reach wider audiences.

For many, social media took over their "streams" of thoughts and ideas to the point that they forgot to sit, reflect, and write something longer (polished or not).

Personal websites used for yourself first is a powerful idea for collecting, thinking, and creating.

Getting away from "branding" is a great idea. Too many personal sites are used for this dreadful thing. I'd much rather see the edge ideas and what they flower into.

The idea of a thought space hiding in here....