Publicly accessible version of this post: https://andymatuschak.org/doing-centric/
It’s board game night in a post-COVID world. You and a few friends gather around a table to try out a new game. The thing is: there are a lot of these little cardboard tokens and playing cards and—I’m not even sure… totems?
You pick up the instructions and...
2021-11-01 04:28:15 +0000 UTC View PostI thought I’d try something different for this month’s update—sharing some rough in-progress design work. The tension here is that it takes a huge amount of work to legibly present a design process to others, especially when large swaths of it are unresolved. Good storytelling requires lots of renderings you wouldn’t otherwise have made. Designers who work for agencies or on very large teams at product companies are used to paying this heavy tax, but it doesn’t make sense for me...
2021-10-01 06:02:39 +0000 UTC View PostWhen you read non-fiction, you’re in the driver’s seat. You can skip to the last page and read only the conclusion. You can riffle through the pages, reading only the headings; or you can spend a week reading ten pages with extreme care. You don’t need to focus on just one text: you can compare one book’s ideas to another sitting by its side. Great non-fiction authors exert careful control over their prose, but once a book arrives in your hands, it becomes a tool in your service. You...
2021-08-25 02:44:13 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve previously argued that great tools for thought rarely come from contexts focused on creating tools. They’re usually created in the course of deep creative work in some domain, almost as a byproduct. And they’re usually made by people with significant expertise and investment in those creative problems. Stephen Wolfram created Mathematica to accelerate his original research on cellular automata; Alan Kay created Smalltalk to support PARC’s personal computing experiments; Dan Brick...
2021-06-15 22:34:07 +0000 UTC View PostThe life of an early startup revolves around a desperate search for “product–market fit”—a state in which you’ve found a solution so compelling in some market that the world starts yanking the product out of you faster than you can make it. That’s when the exponential flywheels can start spinning and a startup can start to make good on its rocket-fueled ambitions.
Aspiring inventors of...
2021-05-20 23:10:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Transcript:
Hello everyone, and happy May. I think celebrating is always more fun in video format, so I'm making this impromptu video today to celebrate a couple of exciting pieces of news with you all.
The first is that the Patreon community that you all are a part of, or perhaps you're visiting today, has hit an important milestone. I wanted to share that and some thoughts about what it might mean for crowdfunding research in general.
The second is that I'...
2021-05-05 05:45:36 +0000 UTC View PostI'm terribly sorry for all the duplicate emails: Descript garbled my exports. Still learning about these "content creator" tools… anyway, here's a fixed version!
And a transcript:
Hello everyone, and happy May. I think celebrating is always more fun in video format, so I'm making this impromptu video today to celebrate a couple of exciting pieces of news with you all.
The first is that the Patreon community that you all are a part of, or perhaps you're visiting today, has ...
2021-05-05 05:43:11 +0000 UTC View PostAs an experiment, I've made an audio version of the most recent post, Too easy to be effortless. Is this useful? Would you value consuming the material I write here as a feed in your podcasting app? Email/comment if so!
It does consume some extra time, so it's probably not something I'll do unless it's something you all would find valuable.
(Thanks to 2021-04-06 18:48:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Now that a few Orbit experiments are in flight, I’ve spent much of the last month digging back into data from Quantum Country. I’m struck by a surprising problem: basically everyone remembers basically everything, basically all the time.
How effortless can memory be?
At the limit, we can imagine automatically remembering everything we perceive. We might not want that...
2021-03-26 22:08:46 +0000 UTC View PostThere are some people trying to develop tools for thought, but there isn’t yet a meaningful field around tools for thought. The difference is that a field is about ratcheting: developing a growing shared corpus of general knowledge and methods which allow projects to meaningfully build on each other, across researchers and across years, on and on in an upward cycle. Individuals here and there have contributed powerful insights, certainly, but true success for this field would mean ...
2021-02-25 00:46:16 +0000 UTC View PostOne provocative litany I’ve used to frame my work is: what comes after the book? Is it pictures of pages on screens? Is it videos of lectures? Why are all the answers to this question so boring? Where are the powerful ideas about how people learn, feel, and act?
I’ve been exploring memory systems as one avenue in response. But in my mind, doing something interesting with memory systems means leaving behind spaced repetition systems as we understand them today. The goal isn...
2021-02-03 01:21:50 +0000 UTC View PostHello, all! I'm having a contemplative start to the year, working to shift up some of my systems and plans in response to the reflections in my 2020 wrap-up essay. I hope your 2021 is already offering you many interesting rabbit holes.
Now that Orbit is being used so prominently in How to write good prompts,...
2021-01-13 17:32:42 +0000 UTC View PostNow available publicly if you'd like to link to it externally.
2020 was my second year as an “independent researcher.” It’s certainly not a well-defined job title. I’m grateful for the freedom it entails, but I’ve needed to grope around in the dark for patterns and structures which pre-existing institutions and roles would ordinarily provide. To begin 2021, I’ll share some of wh...
2021-01-04 05:50:04 +0000 UTC View PostAs the year draws to a close, I'm assembling some reflections on being an independent researcher in 2020. One important section centers on patronage as a funding model—and I could use your help to complete it!
Willing to help? Please click here to send me a quick sentence or two about why you're a patron. The form is a...
2020-12-14 18:34:43 +0000 UTC View PostMy past few weeks have been filled with plenty of interesting conversation about the prompt-writing guide and the challenges of formulating knowledge, both in the workshops and in email correspondence.
Amusingly, one of the richest discussions I've been able to observe has been José (aka Artir)'s conversation ...
2020-12-09 23:32:53 +0000 UTC View PostI spent November working on a detailed guidebook and style manual for modeling knowledge and writing spaced repetition prompts. The guide will also be the first large public demonstration of Orbit: the text is interleaved with prompts mean to help readers internalize its content.
I'd like to give you early access: click here to read. (please don't share this ...
2020-12-07 18:04:40 +0000 UTC View PostI've been shifting my focus to helping authors learn to write with Orbit. As part of that effort, I'm developing a set of materials to help people develop a personal spaced repetition practice, since I believe that may be a practical prerequisite to using prompts in communication.
If you're interested in learning to internalize complex knowledge using spaced repetition, I'll be running some live workshops on ...
2020-11-20 19:45:39 +0000 UTC View PostGrowing up years ago in the midwest, my perception of a fancy restaurant was awfully simple. Firstly, fancy restaurants have fancy waiters who make you feel uncomfortable for using the wrong utensil. And secondly, fancy restaurants use fancier ingredients: the menu might include ribeye and lobster instead of hamburgers and barbecue. But then I moved to California, and—to make a long story short—a bowl of tapioca made me weep. I learned that great restaurants are rarefied institutions of e...
2020-11-15 04:18:37 +0000 UTC View PostA few weeks ago, I had something to celebrate: Orbit had reached the point that authors could publish texts using it. Normally, when software projects reach a major milestone, there’s something highly visible that “goes live”—something to link others to! But in this instance, it’s a piece of infrastructure that’s “gone live”; now the work is in helping others use it to create something meaningful.
As I’ve worked with authors, I’ve realized something important I shoul...
2020-11-07 06:24:42 +0000 UTC View PostI've been tackling a tough writing challenge: briefly introducing Orbit, explaining how it works, and sketching what it aspires to.
The context is that at least initially, people will first encounter Orbit as a small embedded widget in a web site. There's not much room for explanation there, so the widget has a "learn more" button for people interested in more details. At least initially, I'll treat that page as a general-purpose explainer, linkable in other contexts.
So here's my...
2020-10-07 23:58:57 +0000 UTC View PostSlow, compounding progress is a subtly powerful force. Regular weightlifters might not perceive their progress in every session, but as the weeks go by, they’ll find they can handle loads which would previously have flattened them. Richard Hamming makes a similar observation for intellectual efforts in The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked ... 2020-09-30 18:07:45 +0000 UTC View Post
I’ve been spending a lot of time these last few weeks trying to make Orbit explain itself.
In Quantum Country, the essays themselves are, in part, essays about the mnemonic medium. The first essay spends 1,000+ words introducing, motivating, and elaborating the system; later essays spend hundreds of words. But we don’t want every author who uses Orbit in a book or article to have to write a lengthy introduction to the medium. The system needs to introduce itself—at least in part.<...
2020-09-12 04:07:51 +0000 UTC View Post
If you search Google Scholar for research on spaced repetition systems, you’ll find a sea of papers focused on optimization. They’re tuning algorithms for less forgetting, more stabilization, better scheduling. To be clear, these are worthy aspirations. If we can improve response accuracy even just a couple percentage points, the exponential schedule magnifies our gain, substantially increasing the capacity of our system. But this extreme focus on efficiency misses the highest-order bit: ...
2020-08-20 18:04:15 +0000 UTC View Post
We've now crowdfunded two thirds of a grad student-level grant for research on tools for thought.
2020-08-05 19:30:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Click here to read "Timeful Texts."
How might one create a medium which does the job of a book, but which escapes a book’s shackled sense of time? How might one create timeful texts—texts with affordances extending the authored experience over weeks and months, texts which continue the convers... 2020-07-24 16:39:45 +0000 UTC View Post
(You may have received a duplicate notification for this post: Patreon lost all the images in the last one, so I had to recreate it! Bluh…)
So far, I’ve been using Quantum Country’s design language for Orbit, just to help me focus on all the architectural work I’ve had to do. That was a useful constraint for a while, but Orbit’s almost ready for its first publications, so now it’s time to switch gears: how might Orbit’s visuals reinforce its ideas?
Orbit has two enor...
2020-07-07 16:47:20 +0000 UTC View Post
I've spent lots of time this past year thinking about how to use writing to develop ideas over time. Writing is an important part of my research process; those couple hours each morning are often "where the real thinking happens."
Of course, I also use spaced repetition systems to engage more deeply with ideas. But at least until late last year, the two systems were unpleasantly...
2020-06-10 18:15:35 +0000 UTC View PostAs I’ve mentioned in recent posts here, I’ve spent these last few months building infrastructure which I hope will help me (and others!) explore a wider set of ideas around systems like the mnemonic medium. In some real sense, it feels like I’m building my research lab!
One strange thing about building a system like this is that I have only a hazy picture of what I’m actually building. I build the thing to see, so that I can build the thing, and so on. My conception of the core ...
2020-05-27 18:07:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello, kind patrons! I mentioned in the last post that I was working on a next iteration of the system behind Quantum Country that can be embedded anywhere on the web: blog posts, e-books, Twitter threads, academic papers, etc. Today I hit a milestone I've been working toward for a couple months!
In the video, I've doctored collaborator Michael Nielsen's great 2020-05-06 21:47:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello, kind supporters! Andy here. Now that the final chapter of Quantum Country’s published, we wanted to share what we’re up to next.
First off: an important update to the Patreon. After years of scrappy independent projects, Michael’s decided it’s (perhaps past) time to pursue stable employment. We’ll still be talking about these projects all the time, but they’ll be a side-project for him, rather than a full-time gig. So starting next month, this becomes a solo Patreon. ...
2020-04-17 19:06:52 +0000 UTC View Post