💥Designing my attention by building an emergent map of my mind

Abstract

This project was a research project in which I embedded my private writings, questions, writing fragments, notes, and reading wishlist into a semantic space using a language model to create an emergent map of a mind. Such a platform would have many interesting applications, particularly if you shared it with others:

This was fun, but I became distracted by AI research and then the Archive and it fell in my priority list. If you'd like to pick up where I left off, DM me! This document is my stream-of-consciousness Captain's Log.

RETIRED in favor of a new research log in Roam.

Break: off to Australia until mid-January

Amazing Twitter scraper: https://github.com/twintproject/twint

Contact Misha from hier topic modeling opt transport paper

Ways to build document representations:

Complete app ideas:

  1. Ways to test the social hypotheses: I can scrape the Goodreads accounts of my friends! In fact, I can get my whole friendlist.
  2. Chrome extension that lets you build up research lists. Then, you can read about whole topics, grouped together.
  3. Topic pairings. Choose word clouds to combine.
  4. ...

The goal is to reliably and quickly accumulate wisdom.

What I really want is to think about one topic at a time, from many sources (Twitter is a source too, many great thinkers aren't book writers), collect/recombine/internalize my perspectives, and integrate my conclusions into a worldview.

Observation: forgetting is default, write about what you read, articles are great too not just books, great sources accumulate constantly and perfect curriculum generation ahead of time is difficult especially if you consider articles, context switching happens at many granularities, great essays are composed of many great thought fragments, articulating them allows you to test them, great writing requires days of ruminating unless you already have a deep understanding of the topic.

Query: a few words, then find similar docs and generate reading/remembering/writing inboxes. Let these mix together for a week or two and you'll produce excellent ideas and writing.

The best thinkers on many topics have not written books. They communicate through blogs and Twitter.

Keeping abreast of this content and integrating it into durable wisdom is overwhelming.

Solutions: curriculum (books), manually tag (frictionful)

Project it all into semantic space, and only engage with one selection at a time. As you focus on that, your clippings and favorites will accumulate safely in other parts of your mind graph.

Useful platform. A few ideas:

Each dot will either be a Tweet, a book from my Goodreads, an article I clipped into Evernote, or a document I wrote in Notion. In effect my whole knowledge graph will be in here in one ZUI.

MILESTONE: possible use cases

SYNTOPIC READING: focus on one piece at a time. Read about it from all angles.

WRITING: find that writing is an indispensable part of thinking. I also have to ruminate on a subject for several days to do my best writing, especially for a new topic. I make notes of thought fragments, and they're added into a writing inbox automatically.

REMEMBERING: arbitrary subsets of semantic space can be exported to Anki.

IDEATING: one generator is combining ideas. Great combinations are not too similar and not too distant - there's a Goldilocks zone that's most fertile. This corresponds to a range of distances in semantic space.

Pair two complementary topics, like writing and cognition or love and friendship, can also be generative. DOUBLE SYNTOPIC READ-IATING

IDENTIFY BLIND SPOTS: multiple projections can exist: one optimized for laying out your content, one for you and a group of friends, and another for everyone's content. if you identify a gap in your semantic space, you could find recommendations from friends who have read things in that space.

DEEPEN FRIENDSHIPS: with a more complete understanding of where your mind graphs overlap, you can give and receive better recommendations and start more and deeper conversations.

IMPROVE INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY: find people with totally complementary knowledge.

IDENTIFY COLLABORATORS: find people with important overlaps, and connect with them as study buddies, paper reviewers, cofounders, or in relationships.

Emergent organization system of your mind. Platform with many interesting applications.

IDENTITY SHARING: I might even generate an old timey map from this, where place names correspond to dominant topic models from that area, and where mountain ranges correspond to the depth of your writing.

Compared to roam: this is a meta layer over all document apps. anything that roam can do export will work. I'm very careful not to build a note app - I've written a suite of data migration tools instead. All links open in their respective apps, and this app updates seamlessly where possible.

PROBLEMS: documents are often related in a graph, not just semantically - how to create embeddings that represent this? Just concatenate a topic model to a graph representation and project it?

Modules approach? Amazing Marvin style? Teach people to use each one?

12/13: better document representations and/or clustering

image

Python modules - POT Python Optimal Transport 0.6.0 documentation — The function solves the Wasserstein barycenter problem when the barycenter measure is constrained to be supported on k atoms. This problem is considered in [1] (Algorithm 2). There are two differences with the following codes: - we do not optimize over the weights - we do not do line search for the locations updates, we use i.e.

https://github.com/IBM/HOTT/blob/master/distances.py

https://github.com/IBM/HOTT/blob/master/hott.py

https://github.com/IBM/HOTT/blob/master/knn_classifier.py

https://github.com/IBM/HOTT/blob/master/main.py

Questions:

  1. what is a topic model, and how do I use it?
  2. can i project topic models down with UMAP?

HOTT paper description outline:

  1. Topic model: a topic is a distribution over a vocabulary
  2. Document reps: distribution over topics.
  3. WMD, but between topics in a doc instead of words in the doc, makes sense.

[method(doc, x, C) for x in X_train.T]

Word compositionality

Sense2vec with spaCy and Gensim · Blog · Explosion — If you were doing text analytics in 2015, you were probably using word2vec. Sense2vec (Trask et. al, 2015) is a new twist on word2vec that lets you learn more interesting, detailed and context-sensitive word vectors. This post motivates the idea, explains our implementation, and comes with an interactive demo that we've found surprisingly addictive.

gensim: topic modelling for humans — We welcome contributions to our documentation via GitHub pull requests, whether it's fixing a typo or authoring an entirely new tutorial or guide. If you're thinking about contributing documentation, please see How to Author Gensim Documentation . If you're new to gensim, we recommend going through all core tutorials in order.

Gensim. Try to detect bigrams and trigrams.

from gensim.models.phrases import Phrases, Phraser

tokenized_train = [t.split() for t in x_train]
phrases = Phrases(tokenized_train)
bigram = Phraser(phrases)

Oooh, I really ought to use sense2vec to preprocess this stuff, not word2vec.

sense2vec reloaded: contextually-keyed word vectors · Blog · Explosion — In 2016 we trained a sense2vec model on the 2015 portion of the Reddit comments corpus, leading to a useful library and one of our most popular demos. That work is now due for an update. In this post, we present a new version and a demo NER project that we trained to usable accuracy in just a few hours.

I really want to do sense2vec → topic modeling → umap.

After that, might try sense2vec → topic modeling → WMD but for topic senses → umap!

For visuals: activation atlas of topic model senses. and make it a ZUI. Whoa, this will be amazing. Then: submit to ACL?

Wow: to generate

spacy pretrain /path/to/data.jsonl en_vectors_web_lg /path/to/output
--batch-size 3000 --max-length 256 --depth 8 --embed-rows 10000
--width 128 --use-vectors -gpu 0

sense2vec: download other parts:

https://github.com/explosion/sense2vec/releases/download/v1.0.0/s2v_reddit_2019_lg.tar.gz.001
https://github.com/explosion/sense2vec/releases/download/v1.0.0/s2v_reddit_2019_lg.tar.gz.002
https://github.com/explosion/sense2vec/releases/download/v1.0.0/s2v_reddit_2019_lg.tar.gz.003

cat s2v_reddit_2019_lg.tar.gz.* > s2v_reddit_2019_lg.tar.gz

OK. My corpus is far too small to generate realistic topics. I need to build a more comprehensive topic model on a very large dataset. Wonder if I could find a pretrained one.

Wrong - I just had number of topics set to 4!

Seems like it's about 20, but my dataset was real noisy. Get more data, run again later.

image

[(0,
  '0.000*"cansing" + 0.000*"code" + 0.000*"jasonm" + 0.000*"anddrawing" + '
  '0.000*"aprivacy" + 0.000*"arcalineahttps" + 0.000*"artificialwomb" + '
  '0.000*"atime" + 0.000*"jamesv" + 0.000*"ibuilthappene"'),
 (1,
  '0.000*"cansing" + 0.000*"code" + 0.000*"jasonm" + 0.000*"anddrawing" + '
  '0.000*"aprivacy" + 0.000*"arcalineahttps" + 0.000*"artificialwomb" + '
  '0.000*"atime" + 0.000*"jamesv" + 0.000*"ibuilthappene"'),
 (2,
  '0.000*"cansing" + 0.000*"code" + 0.000*"jasonm" + 0.000*"anddrawing" + '
  '0.000*"aprivacy" + 0.000*"arcalineahttps" + 0.000*"artificialwomb" + '
  '0.000*"atime" + 0.000*"jamesv" + 0.000*"ibuilthappene"'),
...

Whelp, looks like coherence score isn't everything. There's a bunch of junk in here. Hmm, they're all zero probas, too.

[]To clean these up: check plaintext of https://www.notion.so/jasonbenn/Jay-G-5901c87500d34106894bf15e50f359a1, clean out any HTML/link junk, then rerun topic modeling and see what else looks weird. James V, too.

Hmm. All these topics are pretty bad. I wonder what's happened. Probably just a ton of noise.

Will need to capture higher LDA coherence before my map makes much sense, unfortunately.

But let's proceed to sense2vec anyway.

Another thing to consider trying: TopMine.

anirudyd/topmine — This is an implementation of the algorithm detailed in: El-Kishky, Ahmed, et al. "Scalable topical phrase mining from text corpora." Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 8.3 (2014): 305-316.APA In order to run the code, simply follow these steps: Put the file on which you want to run topmine in the folder named "input" Open topmine.py and change the variable named "file_name" to point at the correct file in the "input" folder.

Scalable Topical Phrase Mining from Text Corpora — While most topic modeling algorithms model text corpora with unigrams, human interpretation often relies on inherent grouping of terms into phrases. As such, we consider the problem of discovering topical phrases of mixed lengths. Existing work either performs post processing to the inference results of unigram-based topic models, or utilizes complex n-gram-discovery topic models.

Actually, this deserves more research.

Automated Phrase Mining from Massive Text Corpora: https://github.com/shangjingbo1226/AutoPhrase

Research Jiawei Han's publications: he's got an H-Index of 171 and works on graphs and text representations.

Talk to about document representations:

How does UMAP/t-SNE straight on topic models look?

5m: close all tabs.

Compress outstanding questions:

  1. Is T-SNE alone the cause of that beautiful clustering?
  2. Why are my topic models bad? Where are bad topics coming from?
  3. What topics have each of my documents learned? Can that help me make better topics?
  4. How do I learn senses relevant to my dataset?
  5. Should I make a pitch deck first, or prototype the focusing thing? Another idea: write the history of what I've wanted to build, and summarize how it's evolved over time, and what happened to each prototype. Right now, it's helping manage cognitive overload by helping you manage open/closed loops in your brain without having to manage classification.

https://plot.ly/javascript/zoom-events/

https://plot.ly/javascript/lasso-selection/

On right: newest content. For now, just make it last 5 entries.

Nicer hovertemplate in plotly.

Man, huge progress today.

Let's try rescraping a page - why are properties coming through like this? {')qh{': [['Yes']], "rh!'": [['Life']], 'title': [['Wisdom is mostly an aesthetic']]}

OK, they were slugified.

Read vs unread: whether it had any highlights.

12/9-12-12: NeurIPS 2019 main conference

Roadmap:

I want documents from Notion, Evernote, and Goodreads.

Then, I want document embeddings (weighted average BERT reps, tf-idf).

Then, document embeddings to UMAP.

Finally, a web interface to view all this.

Well, it's interesting. Sometimes the document is made of many components (Goodreads books = author + series + book description + 3 highlights), sometimes it's just an entire document.

I think it'd be interesting to store information as closely to its original form as possible - which is different entitites that are related to each other - and then provide APIs that produce documents from these representations. And there can be many APIs for making documents. The Goodreads API set could include various combinations of sources. Notion might include or exclude the title or the backlinks. Anything is possible! All that matters is that document APIs take no arguments, read from the DB, and produce lists of strings.

So the Notion APIs are backwards: store the whole document, return them whole as documents, and let my BERT transformer transform things (or not) to Text. I might delete the whole Text concept now, actually. Well - things that can be embedded need a mixin

Shoot. Notion is tough because documents are really collections of blocks, and it's not obvious when each are updated. So I think my best bet, for now, is just to make each document a list of.

OK, I figured out how to serialize and deserialize Notion API responses to the DB - they're just JSON.

OK. Now my problem is that I would like to save JSON somewhere into the DB. This JSON can become an embeddable document, but because it could become one in multiple ways, it doesn't really make sense to make Embeddable have a JSONField. Also, other entities clearly only have one way to embed things... or do they? Maybe they don't. I'd honestly also prefer to have many embeddings. Honestly, I don't have that much text, and it would be convenient to store it all in a way that's duplicated... hundreds of Evernote notes, hundreds of Notion documents, hundreds of Goodreads books - it's really not that much. I can handle. Pocket content should go to Goodreads if I really want to savor it.

How do I elegantly access notion-py JSON things? Init into object, add a bunch of accessors? Yeah, probably. Better than passing a bunch of junk around.

Source.objects.all()
Source.objects.instance_of(NotionDocument)
Project.objects.instance_of(ArtProject) | Project.objects.instance_of(ResearchProject)
Project.objects.filter(Q(ArtProject___artist='T. Turner') | Q(ResearchProject___supervisor='T. Turner'))

doc = NotionDocument.objects.get(url=url)
print(doc.to_plaintext())
Embeddable.objects.create(text=text, source=doc)
make_card_html(doc)

I've come real far, but now I need to scrape and store all nested documents in a doc JSON - but not nested pages.

{'id': 'd010fa67-abf5-4cda-9d98-7d1365032145',
 'version': 82,
 'type': 'text',
 'properties': {'title': [['by 2030 most people will be mindless']]},
 'content': ['3f86a76a-5c41-4899-875b-462359bbe00f',
  '506ca819-ade9-4d6f-86f5-f7f978c7be4f',
  'fb7fe0fd-ab2f-49bf-a9ac-456ed1660a10'],
 'created_by': '3c6b94c0-680d-4476-90bd-7b76b5af5fb0',
 'created_time': 1575909060000,
 'last_edited_by': '3c6b94c0-680d-4476-90bd-7b76b5af5fb0',
 'last_edited_time': 1575909300000,
 'parent_id': 'cef7fe8f-39bd-4d6f-a24d-244cb0252f75',
 'parent_table': 'block',
 'alive': True,
 'created_by_table': 'notion_user',
 'created_by_id': '3c6b94c0-680d-4476-90bd-7b76b5af5fb0',
 'last_edited_by_table': 'notion_user',
 'last_edited_by_id': '3c6b94c0-680d-4476-90bd-7b76b5af5fb0'}

^ Example child with "content". If I fetch all this content, what are the types?

Hmm. If I flatten the content, it'll look less like its source, and eventually I'll have to rewrite all this. I won't be able to handle complicated pages with multiple columns, for example.

If I do flatten it, I simplify logic for myself in the next method, but... I'm not reflecting the original structure very well, which is a principle I'd like to stick to if possible.

What's the best way to unfold a tree structure? Build the tree with DFS? Explore each node? Then topo sort to lay them all out.

I want to go to the bathroom, get a bite, and then retry this.

What I do now: unfold and flatten the tree with BFS.

What I want to do: it's a bunch of list trees. Those will be easy to flatten once I have the whole structure.

How to do it: add nodes to visit in DFS order to a list, if I hit a string node insert its content right afterwards and continue, figure out how to build up tree structure after. Maybe pass 1 builds dictionary of content to replace,

fuck yeahhhh!! got it, and did it the right way!!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01066
http://dev.evernote.com/doc/start/python.php
https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/model_selection/grid_search_text_feature_extraction.html#sphx-glr-auto-examples-model-selection-grid-search-text-feature-extraction-py
https://django-polymorphic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/quickstart.html

OK. Free. Now, find a relaxing spot for a couple hours, then catch the last bits of papers, then dinner at 7, then W&B drinks after, then maybe a party or home to program. What a nice night! Caffeine??? Yes.

{'id': '688cf6ee-9753-4555-9cdc-fb8d28a50e08', 'version': 55, 'type': 'text', 'properties': {'title': [['‣', [['p', 'cab1d75a-1e31-4306-8907-f8bd11a9d140']]]]}}

{'id': '30397187-ce48-4cf3-bec6-4ee065fac2e8', 'version': 16, 'type': 'page', 'properties': {'title': [['Copy of '], ['TOP LEVEL PAGE']]}, 'content': ['38b23acb-e304-4252-9915-4613f3defc98']}

Real world problem: there are many types of things. Some don't work.

>>> from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
>>> vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer()
>>> vectorizer.fit_transform(corpus)

image

image

Plotly docs: https://plot.ly/javascript/reference/#scatter-marker-line-colorscale

image

image

Hey, it's not looking half bad!

MILESTONE: working semantic projections + visual explorer

Random intermediate notes...

Systematically generate great ideas.

For what? I want to be wise. For what? I want to be sure I'm spending my life well!

Worldview idea: collect facts, anecdotes, make it easy to build opinions that have more or less support from facts/anecdotes

Support building idea on top of a collection of fragments, and building other, even competing ideas on top of similar fragments. Should be able to see underlying fragments too.

Graph-based approximate NN search, implemented in Rust with Python bindings:

granne/granne — granne ( graph-based retrieval of approximate nearest neighbors) is a Rust library for ANN-search based on Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs and is used in Cliqz Search. For some background and motivation behind granne, please read Indexing Billions of Text Vectors. Note: granne is still under active development.

12/6: executable writing system brainstorm

My long-term goals: improve wisdom. To that end, I want a reading and writing queue, and a writing system. I would feel good with this morning if I get that done.

Hmm. A few branches:

  1. Try the system out! Write out some thought fragments from the 💝 The Art of Loving.
  2. Smoother interface for querying related content while writing.
  3. Goodreads integration.
  4. UMAP everything.
  5. Backlinks.
  6. Export into Anki more smoothly.
  7. Task processor. (Spark?!) Make everything could happen more quickly and reliably.

Names: overview effect (astronauts, LSD, monks reaching nirvana), wisdom system, worldview

12/5: ship templates for Anki

Features wishlist: scrape Goodreads lists & quotes, the Twitter Idea Stream, the Kindle highlights Idea Stream (extract with this?).

What do I want? In my free time, I want confidence that I am spending my time well, and growing wiser. To that end, I'd like a process that works with me.

Major obstacle now: Anki is no fun. Make those templates work.

Next obstacle: making writing a habit. Where do I write my book notes? In bed? No, it should be more serious than that. Maybe in the morning, before my shower? But then I won't be thinking about work. Perhaps that's OK on days where I'm doing straightforward things.

For now, let's just get that Anki feature working, then test it on myself and with Taylor.

Bonus goal: export into Anki automatically.

Start: 3:48pm.

Hmm. I currently open a lot of loops and don't really close them.

What should I do with potential learning materials that I don't need right now? Could add them to learning docs.

12/2/19: Anki templates!

Improve the Anki experience a bit.

11/30/19: Backlinks

Goal 1: backlinks between Worldview notes.

Goal 2: backlinks into People notes!!

First of all: can I detect links? If not, fork this program, or edit it directly. Use this URL: https://www.notion.so/jasonbenn/Status-is-zero-sum-but-we-can-invent-many-status-hierarchies-36c730c458dd4355837fe747baa2991f

Nice! Found the link ID buried in the blocks with the right caret character!

Backlinks should always be text. Can I write these into another note? Text is better because it doesn't create elements in the sidebar dropdowns. It also is easier to incorporate into sentences.

This would be a nontrivial amount of work...

11/28-11/30/19: Similarity suggestions!

Holy COW I can't believe how much better cosine similarity is than a simple dot product (for NLP - image interpretability research uses dot products). Cosine similarity normalizes their lengths, right?

These suggestions are just so awesome.

Graph embeddings.

How do you surface unique things?

You could probably quantify how unique it is.

Larger context.

What do I think of "see everything all the time"?

I want supporting data, opposing data, extensions of the idea, opposing viewpoint, trends that inform it. Without filtering, all the other information would be overwhelming.

Large shaded area of everything this article touches on.

Theories of the amount of notes I want to see:

  1. See everything all the time: Andy, David. Presentation/design problem. ?: Not convinced this is helpful. ?: How would it feel? Overwhelming?
  2. See everything, except the obviously irrelevant stuff.
  1. See only the relevant stuff. +: Helps you write the note best. Especially if forced to reconcile opposing connections. You might gloss them over if you were focusing on superfluous, weak connections. +: Similar to Cal Newport's/Ryan Holiday's blitz-blogging strategies. They bring the notes.

    • -: miss some especially creative connections.

      +: that's what Anki is for.

Tweet: I'm glad you guys are digging into this, because it's the path I feel most uncertain about.

What is thought? Read Wikipedia summaries of great books on thought. Cicero, etc. Philosophy of thought?

Build argument mapping dataset! Classify as supporting/opposing.

https://paperswithcode.com/task/link-prediction
https://paperswithcode.com/area/graphs/representation-learning
https://paperswithcode.com/paper/interacte-improving-convolution-based
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.00219.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.12287v3.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.04239v1.pdf
https://github.com/Sujit-O/pykg2vec

Potential datasets for finding opposing viewpoint directions: argument mapping, rumor classification research, RumourEval, rumour stance prediction and rumour verification,

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thoughts-thinking
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thoughts-thinking/201811/improving-critical-thinking-through-argument-mapping
https://paperswithcode.com/task/relation-extraction
https://paperswithcode.com/task/citation-intent-classification
https://paperswithcode.com/task/text-categorization
https://paperswithcode.com/task/document-classification
https://paperswithcode.com/task/topic-models
https://paperswithcode.com/task/textual-analogy-parsing
https://paperswithcode.com/task/entity-linking
https://paperswithcode.com/task/relation-classification
https://paperswithcode.com/task/opinion-mining
https://paperswithcode.com/task/argument-mining
https://paperswithcode.com/task/relational-reasoning
https://paperswithcode.com/task/joint-entity-and-relation-extraction
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.07221v1.pdf
https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S19-2147.pdf

Getting doc
SIMILAR TO: If I am the boldest version of myself, what would I be doing with my life?
similarity range: 0.975 - 0.850
-------------------
similarity: 0.975
# Worldview > An autonomous & highly satisfying career archetype: independent research aimed at influencing big companies
-------------------
similarity: 0.975
# Questions > What is my best work self?
-------------------
similarity: 0.975
# Processes > Ideas: recording & sharing
-------------------
similarity: 0.975
# Processes > Prioritizing
-------------------
similarity: 0.973
# Processes > Staying focused

MILESTONE: BERT-powered semantic similarity

11/26/19: Andy's tweet, knowledge categories, Idea Stream, valid goals

Most relevant tweet of all time, responded:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1199378287555829760

Question: when and how do I translate a thought into Twitter to get feedback from the hivemind? Do I create a boolean field? Do I write a program to automatically post them to Twitter sometimes?

Buster Benson has been building and revising his worldview incrementally since 2012! I love how he classifies them by strength and how they might be falsified.

Codex Vitae — A belief is a personal perspective constructed out of pieces of information and experiences that we have. Beliefs are influenced by many. The believe can be a perspective on anything from "what is the best burrito in SF?" to "how did the universe begin and how will it end?"

People must also be Strongly Connected (2+ references in my journal) to land in Anki.

What about Ideas? Is that worth elevating to a concept I think about repeatedly? I imagine flipping through my ideas deck would be really fun and inspiring. Putting them in Anki gives me more confidence that I won't forget them... otherwise building all these different processes to check various parts of my Notion would be too hard/I'd get lost.

The Idea Stream:

Make connection similarity a tuneable parameter: how similar does content have to be for it to be suggested. Could stimulate creativity.

Valid possible goals:

Possible pain points:

Beautifully designed landing page, I know exactly what it does and why I'd want it:

Cocoon · A private space for the most important people in your life. — Lightweight Feedback Replying to an update in Cocoon is as easy as tapping on it. Quickly comment or leave your unique mark with a heart on anything you see in Cocoon. Questions to Add Color From time to time, the narrator will pose a question like "What was the highlight of your weekend?"

11/22/19: streams of highlights like Gmail

Core parts of my system:

  1. mapping from content to representation in my DB.
  2. exporting Notion to Anki. Make this more user-friendly? I would like this to happen more often. Ideally from a web interface.

Let's get the ml-box online more reliably, so that we can do 1. Move keyboard, find a mouse, get the projector hooked up. Gah. That sounds annoying. How bout: make random vectors, save those instead lol.

Work on 1.

Definitely should not feel like chores, like email. Or even FB notifs.

Should feel more like Instagram. They're rewards! And maybe they fade after a week or so. Or they come up again, later, randomly, so you don't have to worry about connecting them when they come up.

An Edges app.

Solves the problem of worrying about where to put stuff as you find it.

Roam also solves this problem: you just drop a note.

But: "the more I use Roam, the less organized I feel." (Taylor).

You promise yourself you'll organize everything, but you never do.

I wonder if revisiting them periodically with Anki would change this? Seems unlikely.

Roam's problem: enables too many connections, doesn't force you to prioritize or actually think about them. Also doesn't make you evaluate quality of source or quality of connection.

Stream of highlights since you last checked.

For each, suggest similar opinions. Hotkeys can either establish links or you can write something about that link. Can send to either Thought doc or Anki flashcard (suggest the deck!).

Great inbox processing software: gmail. Superhuman.

Zoomable UI?

Oh snap, Zapier supports webhooks! That covers: Twitter, Evernote, Pocket.

I can export manually from: MarginNote, Otter, Kindle.

requests.get("http://157.245.238.241:8909", input_data)
print(input_data)
return 0

Perhaps the ideal process is to just immediately suggest the connection as you're reading it. After all, that is when you have the context about that thing.

Examples of great explanations of tools for thought:

MercuryOS — Mercury is a reimaging of the operating system as a fluid modeless experience drive by human intent.

Capstone, a tablet for thinking — Capstone is an experimental tool for creative professionals to develop their ideas. It explores questions about digital information curation; how creative people come up with good ideas; and what we at Ink & Switch think the future of power-user computing interfaces could look like.

Knowledge platforms:

Trustory: so, so bad. So many uninformed opinions. No credibility whatsoever. I disagree with literally every opinion in their programming community. This is where Quora shines: subject matter experts respond to questions, and questions and answers are heavily moderated and cleaned up.

Allsides: presenting opposing viewpoints. How does it feel to read both at the same time? Confusing - don't know where to click. Nudges me towards center when sometimes facts really do support one side or another. It's pure opinion, but it should be more fact.

Debate is often framed by the phrasing of the question. Case in point: RationalWiki, which purports to offer objective, rational analysis of issues and individuals in the world of politics, business, and media, but which in reality has turned into a Marxist/leftist extremist dunkfest where they shit on anyone to the right of Bernie.

These are all trying to mix the opinions of others. I just want to collect my opinions and make sense of them all, and support/refute them as appropriate.

11/20/19: NLP research areas

Flashcards should have multiple priority (abstraction?) levels, and when you're not prioritizing a deck, it should only show you the highest-level cards. You should be able to shift your focus.

Research interests

Collaborative filtering

You could prime it with hints

Goal features

When I stake out an opinion on ML, relevant papers I've saved surface. I can toss papers into my system and know they'll come later when I'm most curious about them. (Scrape abstracts?)

Understands the relationship between papers and people (entity resolution).

Goal tonight: get Goodreads into my DB.

11/17/19: design ideas: notes app + similarity

Design!

SF Symbols

Material design icons

image

image

11/15/19: embeddings for everything, interested people

Observation: it's really exciting to hear a great idea and put it into my system. I have confidence that I'll think about it more, even if I don't have time right now. I don't have to be preoccupied with forgetting it. I think this system enables me to search more widely for ideas, in the same way that Anki enabled wider learning.

Everything gets

Quick experiment in polymorphism: can I quickly grab all highlights? Can I quickly GROUP_BY/average on source?

What is next? What is the next goal that excites me?

Having a DB full of Goodreads highlights. For now, just have highlights have nullable FKs to Book or NotionDoc.

Next

  1. Get Goodread shelves read/to-read into the same space as writing
  2. Basic queries: read/unread books like this opinion, opinions like this opinion
  3. Write up my vision, early learnings and circulate to get feedback. Tommy feels like he has "no thoughts", wants to have more. Danny works best by talking before writing, buys books even if he's not sure if he'll read them, and reads lots of snippets. Patrick C buys thousands of books, reads 5 pages at a time at random. Taylor decides what to read next by being inspired by random quotes from his reading list. Armand has 3 progressively more specific to-read lists on Goodreads. Kanjun listens to audiobooks while running. Allie listens to audiobooks during 5 minute commutes. Taylor thinks little snippets lower friction of running. Tiger, James, Tina will think it's cool, maybe have feedback on the approach.

    • Theme: nobody wants to read whole books.

      What if you could zoom to a popular quote, then progressively highlight?

      What if you summarized books at varying levels of granularity until you get to your quote? Chapter/section/page/paragraph summaries, up to your chosen quote, then progressively zooming out again afterwards. Zoom in and out on the content.

      Danny wants to have a conversation with e.g. Patrick about the quote. That makes me think of this - oh cool, that's related to this that you haven't heard... Eventually: Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen may have feedback. Melody Dye, NLP scientist at Netflix. Also working on NLP for sequence similarity, also doesn't know how to handle long sequences or structure. She's ingesting scripts, tagging them into genres.

11/14/19: exploring Goodreads API

Pipeline: will need to train, then save UMAP.

Most important next thing

I want to see things I've already read - Goodreads read and unread - show up in the map.

11/13/19: Bert → UMAP

I've got a solution - what's the problem?

I forget everything I read, and they mostly don't impact what I believe.

I want a tool to help me understand how all my knowledge fits together.

Main app: put everything into massive DB, documents in S3, compress them with BERT, map them with UMAP.

Uses: reading recommendations, explore the fog of war, find writing you should link, etc. Queryable. Cosine similarity happens via procedure.

MVP:

MILESTONE: BERT & UMAP projections

name ideas: going with text-mapper for codename

thaw (thought, defrost, make knowledge warm)

blend

knit

tapestry

mend

patch

cobble

compose

similarity

text-mapper

All reading is broken. I read things and barely remember a single fact a week later. The only fix is to explain or talk about the things you read, but most content isn't like that.

Solution is have all read and written content mapped, such that similar content is next to each other.

Next project: connection suggestions!

Notion-to-text program: for any Notion page, convert all contents to one string.

DB: sqlite. Load everything, do similarity search in memory. Will be a while before I have many thousands of documents and their vectors won't fit in memory.

Should also work for Notion ←→ Notion connections. Can either pass raw text or a Notion link.

Goal: to build an insight machine: that means integrating content that I've saved and written.

No access

Ben recommends GPU ML algorithms, and newspaper3k for parsing.

Worldview metrics (add to a dashboard!)

  1. The number of ideas made presentable
  2. The number of new ideas added
  3. Target: 3 per day

Maybe these should go to separate decks?

MILESTONE: dashboard for my writing funnel

Improving my UMAP projection

11/12/19: text extractors/classifiers

idea: the distant future?

Inputs:

Record more conversations with Otter.

Evernote collects my readings and highlights.

Classifiers:

A program identifies the information worth saving, and/or its type - is it about a person, an idea or opinion, a great question, or a joke for my journal? Fact v opinion v experience classifier.

Another program suggests which Notion content it should be merged into. Language model activations of each new piece of content · language model activations (in DB) of each worldview and/or great question. No similarities? Great - prompt to create a new note.

Attention:

Things to think about more are included into Anki: open questions, my friends and acquaintances.

Content to read is suggested based on opinions that need fleshing out.

Outcomes:

High trajectory: the next time we have a conversation, there's a good chance I've internalized your insights and further developed them

Sample efficiency: nothing worthwhile is forgotten

11/11/19: Notion → Anki

11/10/19: Evernote memex, backlinker, Anki

v1?

Evernote is my memex. Its sole purpose is as a repository for all my inputs worth saving: web browsing, Kindle, Newsblur, Pocket, my notebooks, saved Facebook posts, Otter, MarginNote.
Anki is how I program my brain. This is how I prioritize my relationships, cultivate my worldview, and learn.
Unresolved questions.
Other content inputs/outputs should be deleted.

Done

Are there other great streams/sources of information that aren't Anki? Suggestions based on your writing?

11/9/19: Anki MVPs

Main goals:

Opinions as note titles is a breakthrough. Forces me to defend it, articulate it, explain it.

Related notes from Evernote could be inserted at the bottom of notes. Test the MVP. Implementation would copy content from Notion into Evernote, then use the Evernote suggestion API, which can take any number of notes.

Implications: to get content to appear in my reading list, it has to first be motivated by an opinion.

Related notes from Notion as well.

Outstanding questions:

  1. Where do I source further reading from? Book list? Could my "reading list" be me Evernote clipping book blurbs/Goodreads summaries? One problem is that Evernote tends to suggest longer content over shorter content.
  2. When? This is a night activity, perhaps my default one, and it can motivate my reading and conversations. This could also be the way I collect and update thoughts after conversations, which is very satisfying. Eventually, I wish to record my whole day, use a NN to label the facts/interesting thoughts from the transcript, and simply review a queue of those at the end of a day and integrate them into my worldview.
  3. What's the endgame? Permanent high status, which helps me surround myself with the world's most brilliant and interesting people which will help me achieve any goal. It will also help me raise the aspirations of others and teach them how to do so. I also just want to be right about the world - to understand it and make genuine insights. It's probably never been possible to have so complex and interconnected a worldview before - I could be at the front lines of thought technology development, and demonstrate what it's capable of.

Compare representations to find the direction.