Getting Compound Interest on Your Thoughts with Conor White-Sullivan (Ness Labs)

Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Ness Labs interview with Roam Research founder Conor White-Sullivan.

Why it was kept

The passages Kyle kept: why ideas stored as strings of text can’t do the hard work, Mortimer Adler’s syntopical reading, ‘compound interest on your thoughts’, deliberate practice in new territory, Wikipedia’s single source of truth versus a federated wiki, and trust-based moderation.

As Kyle captured it

• Read “Getting compound interest on your thoughts with Conor White-Sullivan” - an interview between Conor White-Sullivan and Ness Labs about Roam Research
  • “Storing ideas as just strings of text doesn’t actually allow you to do any of the more challenging work. Especially if you have a large group of people and no one person’s going to be able to read everything that every single person says, you need a better way to actually see the structure of arguments, or the structure of trade-offs in a decision, or all the competing factors in the decision.
  • The specific thing I found really helpful was Mortimer J. Adler’s “How to Read a Book” books-to-read - where he talks about this idea of syntopical reading. There was a project in the 50’s. It was called the Great Books Series, where this guy, Mortimer Adler, and I think it was Encyclopedia Britannica, they got all the books of western canon and they indexed all the places in Hegel and Kant and John Locke and all of those classic books of western thought, and they indexed all of the different ideas that were being brought up in there.
  • I think that you need to be able to get compound interest on your thoughts. Good ideas come from when ideas have sex: the intersection of different things that you’ve been reading or different things you’ve been seeing. So you can have better ideas faster if you are actually reviewing the old things and you are building up. You’re not throwing away work. Idea Sex Conor White-Sullivan
  • But you can also keep doing the same deliberate practice and keep the same level of intensity if you’re pushing out into new territory and then you’re incorporating those new notes. I would actually say, as you get a more developed Zettelkasten, you get more evergreen notes.
  • Wikipedia **has this idea that it is possible to get to a single source of truth. **Through that slow deliberation, moderation process, there’s a neutral point of view and there’s one thing which just reflects reality, and I think that’s completely bullshit. Roam’s a bit more post-modern in its perspective on how truth works.
  • It’s more similar to a federated Wiki. Ward Cunningham, who invented Wiki, realized that Wikis don’t allow you to deal with original research. So, what we’re more interested in is, if I like some of your thoughts on meta thinking, if I like some of your thoughts how to use Roam efficiently, and you’ve made those thoughts public and you’ve made this reusable, I can just grab them and put them into my workspace. And if somebody trusts me, they can be listening to my workspace, and they can then grab your notes from me.
  • And you don’t need to worry about some slow, deliberate, moderation process. If somebody trusts me, it’s much more like Twitter. When I think about the future of collaborative thinking, I think more about how Visakan Veerasamy uses Twitter of just threads on threads on threads. When he’s making threads, he’s re-tweeting himself, he’s re-tweeting other people, he’s searching through Twitter to find the appropriate tweet for each thread. That’s more what I think about rather than a slow, deliberate system.