(2022-03-10) Lee A GPS For The Mind

Linus Lee: A GPS for the mind. If we want to build better thinking tools, I think it’s important to have a mental model for what thinking is, so that we can design human + tool systems that better accomplish whatever it is.

For thinking about thinking, a good place to start seems like association (associative). Vennevar Bush, in As We May Think, writes:...

This model of thinking as “traversing a graph of ideas” leaves out an important element, though, because most good thinking happens with a goal.

good thinking is effective navigation through the idea maze.

Creative, “divergent” thinking involves our minds going out and exploring our idea mazes to try to find latent explanations – associations or relationships between previously unrelated ideas that may make our worldview more robust. Solution-seeking, “convergent” thinking involves the reverse – searching for explanations and associations in our minds that fit some problem at hand, so that we can decompose new problems into patterns we recognize how to solve.

we should think of “thinking” as a purposeful pathfinding process through this graph, where we wander in search of satisfying latent connections with high explanatory power or aesthetic value.

A good tool for thinking should make the combined human + tool system more effective at hunting for novel explanations within our idea mazes.

there are a few essential components we need in a pathfinding tool

It should tell us what’s around us. When we’re thinking of an idea, we should be able to immediately recall other, related thoughts from our past

AI models that understand natural language (NLP) are opening up powerful new ways for tools to help us explore neighborhoods of interesting ideas

A good tool should also tell us where the well-travelled paths are

Unlike humans, tools powered by modern datasets like Common Crawl and models like GPT-3 can hunt for the well-travelled paths in the idea maze across all of published literature – every open-access book, every paper, every blog, and every Tweet.

With further advances in AI and interface design, we may invent tools that proactively search for interesting explanations amongst known ideas

In the novel Accelerando, Charles Stross imagines a kind of future personal computing device that not only connects you to a global network and helpfully answers questions, but becomes woven into the way the wearer’s brain works at a more fundamental level.

Sometimes, I feel that a part of my work studying and writing about thinking tools is convincing the rest of the world that the space of possibilities in this domain far exceeds the space of possible note-taking tools and productivity workflows.