Created: January 27, 2022
Modified: February 25, 2022
Modified: February 25, 2022
vision for my garden
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Why am I doing all of this? If I carve aside hours or days or months to 'fill in' my graph of notes, what am I hoping to get from it?
- Why is my graph special?
- It represents the connections between ideas, which are crucial to understanding the ideas themselves.
- It allows me to define the terms in my private language, making them solid enough to build on.
- It feels productive to write here, because the writings end up linked into a persistent graph, as opposed to just forgotten in an old notes file.
- If I never shared this with anyone, I'd still hope to see some benefits.
- Writing clarifies my thoughts.
- Linking helps me make connections between ideas, and very easily retrieve notes from past obsessions.
- Does publishing this graph bring something new into the world? Who is the audience?
- There aren't a lot of fleshed out 'second brains' on the internet. Even if there are no really novel thoughts here, just having the artifact written down might be interesting to people in ways I don't anticipate.
- I've spent a decade learning about ML/AI/CS topics and understanding how they fit together. Intuitions and connections that now feel obvious to me might be insightful to students.
- I used to get a lot of value from reading Cosma Shalizi's site, which collects his thoughts and intuitions plus extensive references on statistics and statistical philosophy. I could aspire for something like that.
- Metacademy provides a concept graph with references, and dependence between concepts, explicitly intended for learning.
- It would be a project to fill out pages on fundamental ideas in ML. But it might be really rewarding, and dovetail nicely with teaching machine learning.
- How does a digital garden interact with a blog or other 'real' writing that I send to folks to read?
- Many of my notes pages are half-assed notes; works in progress.
- Sharing these may support radical transparency, and have nonzero value. But most of them are not products that I would be proud of showing off. They're not gems that I would suggest to a friend or student as a good use of time. And they're not commitments to a particular worldview. They're setting down things that I could believe, not necessarily what I actually do believe. They may be full of unresolved contradictions. They're the raw material from which to build essays, not the essays themselves.
- A real writing process could involve critical thinking, following up on loose ends, reconciling contradictions, crafting a narrative, and getting feedback from friends and colleagues.
- Throwing out potential models:
- 'gwern' model: the graph is the blog. (also the Shalizi model). A pure Roam blog. I'd flesh out pages as I go. Each page reflects my current state of thought on an issue.
- 'substack' model: Something like Noah Smith. I'd commit to writing regular snippets on various topics. Individual posts might be short or uncertain. The writing represents thoughts evolving. If I have new thoughts on an issue, I write a new post about how my thinking has changed, rather than just updating the encyclopedia entry.
- 'Paul Graham' model: I write and publish polished essays, each of which connects ideas around a central thesis. There is no explicit graph of fragments, at least not a public one.
- My own thoughts:
- I don't want to put too much pressure on my writing. I want to be free to write things that may be wrong, or incomprehensible to others, or too private to share.
- I do want to do some writing on questions that invite feedback or discussion from others.
- If I write well-considered essays, I still want to be able to link them from my Roam graph.
- If I'm writing a proper essay, I may ultimately want to do it outside of Roam, so I get complete control over Latex, formatting, footnotes, etc.
- downside: links to Roam entries might break if I change the titles in Roam. But that just means I shouldn't change titles, since this would be an issue anyway for anyone else linking to my stuff.
- q: what environment do I write in? Ideally something with WYSIWYG markdown and Latex support. This must exist.
- This argues for a site with multiple sections (or just multiple sites). I'd have a 'concepts' or 'graph' or 'thoughts' section that dumps a sanitized version of my Roam graph. And I'd have a 'posts' section that looks more like a traditional blog or PG's list of essays.