Meta Mind - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

I think we need a place to talk about this wiki process. Just notes about how it's going, what works, what doesn't, what to build out, what to take out, etc.

Wish List

  • Discussion of this wish list will be below, but here's a place to just list
    • chat function
      • not to harp on this, but we really do need somewhere to process notes on content. FOR EXAMPLE: I took a good 15 min to try to find where we put the child stage stuff... and of course you have a memory, so you would have known that it is still in a "daily notes" page, but surely we need a system to switch things to a category-based page when we have enough content and we will need to find it
      • brings up another important point: I get how this wiki format is better by far than Evernote, but the page format still feels increasingly like I'm going to not like the categories. Because,of course, EVERYTHING relates to EVERYTHING and eventually, for example, the stages of childhood thing will have issues related to language, vision, ego, theory of mind, phase transitions, etc. So what to do? I feel like I'm going to want to map this spatially, to keep track of interrelations (I know this isn't your mode of knowing, but there's something useful in it, I think, especially as the web of connected nodes grows exponentially as you and I download our brains into this).
    • I think we're already getting pretty close to needing to use consistent terms for specific concepts that we write about repeatedly. Most obvious examples: chaos-order-chaos (explore/exploit, novelty/safety, playfulness/piety, constriction/liberation), inhibition processes across levels and systems, ontogeny/phylogeny, selfhood and suffering (is this about suffering necessitates having a self as concept or ... so many other options that I've come across, maybe there's not one concept here or maybe it's super clear to you), nested time scales (I haven't explicitly talked to you yet about this but much of what you've talked to me about also has an important time dimension that might be useful to name)
    • a systematic way to bookmark something we want to get back to, but not in the moment (for example, in Roam, I use the link Read Later for anything I come upon while I'm actually writing. Keeps me in the flow, but insures I don't have a niggling feeling I'll forget to follow up. Here, I want something I can also indicate I will elaborate further, FOR YOU. These are ideas I myself take for granted but you may not, and articulating them explicitly is useful for both you and I)
    • a visual map of the sections and subsections of concepts we write about: if there are no automatic backlinks, do we need to remember to use hyperlinks for main concepts? Will this become unwieldy after a while? Can we have a visualization of each path we take and when it diverges onto another, and so on?

We need a discussion section

  • I have content I can connect to your content, but I also want to comment on your content without editing your contribution. Can we do that in this space? Can we have a quick link button that takes us to a "discussion board"? How are we ever going to split this from our whatsapp and Medium content? This matters because I can tell that each platform has a slightly different emotional tone for us and I kind of love that. So the whatsapp is the most personal, but it swerves to the pure intellectual. The mish mash is perhaps my favourite, and what we do naturally, but that's what triggered my wanting this wiki, so we don't lose the threads of our intellectual discourse
  • This makes me think of all the great intellectual and creative partnerships. I'd like to study more of them, not so much for the content they created, but for their processes. I know this is ridiculously presumptuous and super jumping the gun, but fuck it, that's where my brain goes when I'm inspired. So I have a book on some of these partnerships, and have read several articles, on this idea of the magic in creative duos. Usually we think of these as Lennon and McCartney, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Warhol and Basquiat, Bogie and Bacall, Astaire and Rogers, Plath and Hughes, Simon and Garfunkel, Tolstoy and wife... ok, ok I'll shut up, you get it of course.
    • https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/09/two-is-the-magic-number-a-new-science-of-creativity.html (one example of the many good articles on creative partnerships)
    • I'm not just riffing on this because I'm thinking we're Lennon and McCartney :-). It is DIRECTLY related to intersubjectivity. When you can offload parts of your creative process, or your intellectual effort, or emotional labour, to someone else, you can presumably attend to the other stuff you like/do best. Once you have that process habitualized, I think you tend to internalize that "other" like the voice of your mother that gets internalized by the time you're about 6-8 years old, often conceived as Freud's superego (which takes route after the onset of theory of mind). I wonder if good partnerships allow you to actually transcend all those old patterns that had you stuck listening to your superego... There's a lot more to write about this, but not in this meta section. I'll connect back to the intersubjectivity section, but how do I do that? Do we cut and paste one section into the other that it relates to? Does the wiki automatically connect these sections? I need a more explicit map of how these various parts of the wiki will become interrelated.
    • This connects to my general proclivity to take anything that is understood as an individual process -- "stuff"residing "inside" the individual, be they emotion, cognition, creative inspiration, beliefs -- and imagine them as fundamentally a social process instead. Of course, this connects to our discussion about intersubjectivity. Almost every contribution I made in my academic theoretical work was to take a model that was built for considering the individual, and reconceptualize it as (at least) dyadic (often these are better thought of as group processes, but the difficulty there was always the methodologies in psychology which make the "three body problem" super difficult to empirically analyze). I can give loads of examples, and I actually want to, but don't want to deviate right now (see wish list above for bookmarking thoughts to return to, in some systematic way).

Book

  • I think one product of our work that could possibly end up a book because it's almost written in my head could be on creative collectives, with a focus on creative duos book idea
    • it can start with a review of many creative duos throughout history
    • then identify the core elements of successful/effective duos
      • these could start with abstract/conceptual theories around intersubjectivity within and between individuals
      • then could develop novel insights by combining evolutionary theory, developmental science, neuroscience, and dynamic/complexity models of insight/innovation
    • then we could move towards our own diagnostic system (based on combining the best of other ones) to find the most promising dyadic fits for personal projects (rather than what those diagnostic tools are usually used for: corporate group processes and hirings around that... with no empirical basis, btw); This is particularly cool because it fits what many need right now: for those that want to leave corporate crap -- and their hierarchies -- and are forging their own path, many miss the collaborations. Thinking about a post-academic, post-corporate creative production world, this would be a nice fit.
    • I love this because how-to books, productivity gurus/blogs and so on are constantly talking about individual productivity, systems to improve those, views of the genius as singular and how to optimize for that, etc.
    • some talk about Brain Eno's scenius, and of course the characteristics of creative scenes are related
    • but few books/arguments/approaches to creative output urge us to find our creative partner(s). Even for one singular project, guiding people to making good decisions and following effective processes could be so useful and genuinely novel contribution to creativity, craft, and productivity

General reaction to above

  • We have a lot of chat and maybe that is ok, like having lots of temporary notes we scribble down anywhere before "processing."
  • Systematic way of tracking things to return to is a great idea (though I try to do this in readwise and never remember to check the tags -- could be a project for today).
  • Visual links are nice, but I have a (weak) preference to stay manual, because it forces us to traverse more often. One problem with normal note-taking systems is you're usually writing at the "end" of the notebook and rarely flipping through. Here I could see us working on "edge" pages and never revisiting earlier stuff, unless it requires a bit of maintenance. This doesn't mean I'm opposed to any automation at all but I'm bit wary of doing that stuff too early.
  • I want to experiment with editing each other since I trust git's history. I am very happy for you to change my text.
  • Volleys could be as simple as using ## for header separators and alternating adding to one page, then processing elsewhere. We'll likely just have to try things.

Experiments to try

  • Agree overall structure/bullet points, write paragraphs separately, combine later
  • Divide argument up by paragraphs, alternate who writes them
  • Divide paragraphs by sentence, alternate who writes them

Readwise todo tags

OK as mentioned above I had a look at these, basically I use one for "todo" and one for "zk." There are 7 things in todo (I tag things like book or movie recommendations just to note). And 16 things in zk (I tag things I should think through in the zettelkasten). I probably just need to come up with a habit of doing this.

So I think we should just agree conventions for future tags (or we can each make up our own) and then I will have a look at pulling those into somewhere. They should be lightweight. I can always change them ALL later in a find-replace in like about 10 seconds. So I think just start using whatever you want and we'll work it out later.

See 2021-01-25, when we discussed some of the above.