(2021-11-22) Brander Knowledge Gardening Is Recursive

Gordon Brander: Knowledge gardening is recursive. One my core design goals for Subconscious app is to grow ideas from the bottom-up

I think of this kind of process as knowledge gardening. You collect and plant idea seeds, return periodically to water and prune. (cf Wiki Gardening)

Knowledge gardening is one kind of system for generating self-organizing ideas.

Here’s the thing: the feedback loops of most note-taking apps are broken, or non-existent.

what broken feedback loops feel like. Everything is feed-forward. There are no opportunities in the interface to stumble back over your notes, to recurse back over them. You’re continually adding energy to the system, but none of it is returning back.

I recurse over scratch notes, revise them, add to them, refactor them, and combine them with other ideas to form new ideas

Zettelkasten is an old and surprisingly effective paper system for idea gardening

The core game mechanic of Zettelkasten is to file your note some place where you would want to stumble over it again. As you rifle through old notes to find this place, you recurse over notes you had forgotten about

Notational Velocity as a feedback system

Notational Velocity was a tiny note-taking tool built around a single idea: search or create.

Typing would live-searched through your notes. Hitting enter would create a new note

Gardening feedback loops is tricky. They are invisible, unless you know how to look for them. They’re spread over time, not space. Microscopic interactions can generate outsized effects. Yet, by learning to see, make, and break feedback loops, we can garden our own cybernetic systems, and generate agency.