This social knowledge system is different from those that a few groups are trying to develop, at least those I know (Roam, Notion, Wikipedia?). There are a few differentiators:
They start from the perspective of a knowledge system, second brain, designed for one individual; then they build out and ADD other minds to the same system. It's assumed that the mechanics and structure of an individual "second brain" work the same as those for a "collective consciousness"
This additive pile-on isn't going to work. We need to start from the premise of a whole system that will have interacting parts. NOT from the perspective of that individual part, that just gets replicated a bunch of times and we hope for something to "emerge" that magically holds in place the individual parts
Seems that everyone is focused on speed of the tech, how to track "edits", privacy, how to give credit to original thinker, how to keep track of multiple changes and go back to past iterations, etc. But these seem like simple problems to me (or at least they are technical, and solvable now). The hard problem for me seems to be how to move collective intelligence towards coherency and consensual "aha's." Real discovery will need to be (a) recognized by the community, (b) quickly iterated upon (tweakable), (c) irreducible to one individual (both in terms of it being impossible to track the true author (if the system is working right and there have been many, many interactions that give rise to novelty in nolinear ways), and in terms of tracking the genesis and development of the idea itself (sometimes creativity really is emergent and if the individuals in a creative collective accept the profundity in that, it may be impossible to follow the points back easily to point to the causal thought or input that flipped the system). That's a good thing... unless you have a collective culture that does not feel the divinity in this phase transition.
To be continued...
The ultimate goal of this social zettelkasten should not be the proliferation of nodes, but the cultivation of better, and ever-improving, connections by which I mean:
more connections (think number of synapses)
thicker connections (i.e., used more and more frequently; they are increasingly relevant to a wide range of problems; a few select pathways provide the foundations for self-organizing solutions across a broad array of domains)
faster connections (the related nodes on a pathway arise more and more quickly as problems are recognized as like kinds earlier)
Points 1-3, that is more, thicker, and faster connections, should give rise to novelty. That's the golden grail.
REALLY important: That novelty should not be trivial. A bunch should be said about what is nontrivial but for now, it doesn't increase noise and randomness in the world or in one's head, but rather works towards coherence, and least some temporal coherence
As per Darwin's Dangerous Ideas, we don't "believe in" or accurately describe much of what happens in science or any other human-constructed cognitive domain as "progress" per se; but it seems like we need a term for a reaching out for something that is more true, more real, more accurate... whatever the measure of "more" might be
temporal coherence isn't perfect, and it comes from the identity literature so can be super confusing given that's not what I'm talking about (i.e., identity isn't relevant at all)
But it is kind of attractive in that it means making meaning and finding relevant truths from our past, piecing those together in a way that is logical, explains more "data" and phenomenology that is being experienced in the present and, importantly, provides some beacon that if followed, suggests important, new, potentially shattering and emergent novel solutions/understandings/worldviews.
Need to go back to first principles to imagine correctly and have some hope for success. These first principles are pulled from at least five places: (1) theories/data that address the co-creation of the self in ontogeny (developmental psychology) and phylogeny (evolutionary science) separately, (2) theories/data addressing recapitulation between these levels (see also: ontogeny recapitulates phylogenyontogeny-phylogeny), (3) complexity science and its explication of processes of change and stability, emergence, phase transitions, and novelty (see also: then identify the core elements of successful/effective duos)to explain how the "I" emerges from the "we", (4) Buddhist or Tao philosophy and insights illuminating (yet not resolving) the tension between experiencing the self/individual vs the "we"/us/collective (however small that intersubjectivity unit, it is simply >1) as the fundamental unit of experience, knowing, living (and suffering) (see also: Tao Te Ching), (5) art or art-based experiences (both the making of and experiencing it) as an exercise of defamiliarization which primes the explore-mode. (see also: https://twitter.com/bryankam/status/1385143914458460161?s=20)
Note: IG is increasingly convinced that a coherent, detailed mapping of the key schools of philosophy as they relate to these questions and upcoming modeling needs to be articulated. It's important not only because these philosophical traditions are the underpinnings of change models of the mind and self; but because they led these changes (not just documented and analyzed them afterwards).
Note#2: The second half of this is hard to read because it has references to "block references" (i.e., zettels and other "blocks" of texts in my own Roam database. I need to clean a bunch of it up or just paste in the blocks that I reference in my own system here. I have some more written on the systems thinking and processes that might be interesting to dive deeper into... but I need to talk first to make sure it's relevant to put in MM.