(2022-05-19) Lee Knowledge Tools Finite And Infinite

Linus Lee: Knowledge tools, finite and infinite. A big library holds a kind of strange faux-infinity, spanning across hundreds of topics with voices from millions of authors.

there’s so much to learn when you take the ideas from one book as a lens through which to read others. Infinities assembled out of finite building blocks. (cf finite and infinite games)

With enough raw material and creative re-combination, you can conjure an infinity of ideas from something large but finite. It led me to think about what may happen if we designed knowledge tools to evoke the same kind of “infinite library” feeling, by the same mechanism of assembling infinites

Your average note-taking app is quite finite. If you have a thousand notes, you have a thousand notes

Way on the other end of the spectrum is Google, which like the world’s largest and fastest-growing library feels infinite and bottomless.

In between your notes (a finite box) and Google (an interface to infinity) are very large collections, like Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and other crowdsourced knowledge bases.

Even today, in the age of Google, most knowledge tools are extensions of the humble note-taking app. As such, they feel very finite. They contain only and exactly the information you put in.

I think we should try to design more knowledge tools that let you access infinities

what if our notes searched the web for ideas that agreed with us or critiqued us, while we weren’t tending to them?

Our tools should also constantly look for novel connections between our own ideas

I would love to use a workspace into which I can put new ideas, and constantly discover connections between my thoughts and other people’s writings that I wouldn’t have noticed myself. I’ve built some prototypes in the past that demonstrate its potential.

become more of a generative tool. Generative tools are exciting because they contain real infinites that invite endless play and exploration.