Conor White-Sullivan on the Village Global Podcast (Erik Torenberg)

Village Global’s podcast with Erik Torenberg and Conor White-Sullivan on Roam Research.

Why it was kept

Kyle’s notes: compound interest on past writing, Twitter as Evernote with a slot machine, single-player before network effects, Engelbart on augmenting intelligence, ‘GitHub for thinking’, affordances, and the books mentioned (Trust Me, I’m Lying; Gödel, Escher, Bach; Reinventing Discovery).

As Kyle captured it

• Listened to Conor White-Sullivan on Village Global podcast with Erik Torenberg about Roam Research
  • “Compound interest on your past writing.”
  • “Twitter is…like Evernote with a slot machine attached.” Visakan Veerasamy
    • https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1040450987754811392?s=20
  • Every bullet point in roam has a unique ID.
  • Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday books-to-read
  • “What ideas are ready to come into the world?”
  • “Algorithms over your previous thoughts to generate new insights.”
  • “If you need Network Effects to get started, then its harder to scale.”
    • So even though there is a big vision around Collective Intelligence, they’ve shifted to focusing on a single-player tool first
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter books-to-read
  • Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielson books-to-read
  • Instead of automating things, you should be enhancing people. “Building tools to augment your intelligence and then use those tools to solve harder problems.” - Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse
  • “GitHub for thinking.”
  • Cunningham’s Law - created by the inventor of the Wiki
  • Tiago Forte has the opinion that the tool doesn’t matter and it’s about the process, but the tools you use have Affordances to the task you’re trying to do (e.g. climbing spurs vs. a ladder and useful to different degrees if you’re trying to pick fruit)
    • Affordances are an object’s properties that show the possible actions users can take with it, thereby suggesting how they may interact with that object. For instance, a button can look as if it needs to be turned or pushed. The characteristics of the button which make it look “turnable” or “pushable” together form its Affordances. The Design of Everyday Things
      • Source:: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/affordances
  • How do you allow people to contribute to the commons and make a living by doing Knowledge Work
  • Our society doesn’t allocate nearly enough research into fundamental research, or the ability to synthesize that research for consumption.
  • When you read a book, articulating it in your own words is much better than just taking notes. And then connecting that to other thoughts you’ve had.