Roam Research White Paper

Roam’s founding white paper on networked thought, with Kyle’s own reactions woven through it.

Why it was kept

This one is annotated. Kyle’s notes push the paper’s argument into his own terms: including part of one line of thought in another pollutes the whole system in a filing-cabinet tool; in Notion the question of whose opinion goes on top is usually answered ‘your own’; Twitter is an outpouring of the best and worst of what people create; and premium content on Substack is a curated slice of someone’s graph. It also carries the tweet he went looking for about a friend with a public-health PhD — This was the conversation I… (tweet).

As Kyle captured it

• Read the Roam Research white paper
  • “We are experiencing an unprecedented explosion of knowledge. Every day, 2700 books are published in the United States alone, 6850 scientific papers are authored, more than 2 million blog posts go live, and 294 billion emails fly back and forth. The amount of total data produced with every rotation of the Earth would fill a stack of books stretching to the moon and back.”
  • “To access the information, the user must remember where they stored the file, what they tagged it with, or use a search function to locate it.”
  • Unlike the brain, the file cabinet approach makes it difficult or impossible to remix or reuse the same piece of information.** Each time a change is made to any given file, it has to be tracked down and updated in every location in which it exists.** This leads to redundancy, with a cluttering of near-identical ideas, and significant work any time a system-wide change is required.
  • The network is dynamic, so updates and revisions are populated across the entire graph simultaneously. ==Individual nodes or branches within the network can be forked as required, allowing a new pathway to deviate without changing the original meaning.==
  • If I have to ruin thought process 1 by including part of it in thought process 2 then I’ve polluted the entire system and it no longer works as a network
  • Often, [arguments] will be supported by links to external articles, where they are conclusions reached by larger arguments based on combining other premises. Unfortunately, the structure of the argument is only implied by the prose. Rarely are the relationships between arguments and pieces of evidence explicitly laid out, except perhaps in the notes of the author investigating the claims.
  • The investment of time and effort required to become a specialist quickly runs into a point of diminishing returns. By contrast, accumulating a ‘talent stack’ of dilettante-level knowledge or skills can unlock insights and opportunities that have not been capitalised on by experts with a narrower focus. #generalist Jack of all trades, master of none
  • “Highly specialised knowledge remains essential for opening new frontiers. However, an interdisciplinary approach is often required to solve the increasingly complex problems faced by scientists, technologists, and policymakers.”
    • Reminds me of the tweet that I can’t find of the guy who was texting with his friend who is a PhD in Public Health and didn’t see COVID-19 as a big threat and someone responded that experts can’t always step back and see the big picture the way inter-disciplinary thinkers can
    • Found it: https://twitter.com/mattmireles/status/1246855694612959232?s=20
  • While the individual use case for Roam stands on its own merits, the ultimate goal is to create a platform for collaborative research and learning. Current protocols are bound by the assumption of necessary consensus. The flexibility of a curated knowledge graph allows for a more pluralistic approach, with the ability to weight conflicting opinions and separate signal from noise without resorting to either autocracy or democracy. #Collaboration
    • In a file cabinet system like Notion, how do you decide whose opinion goes on top? It’s usually your own.
  • Navigating a vast sea of information creates massive redundancy. Most people labour away at problems that have already been solved a million times over. Those who tackle unsolved problems often do so in silos, unaware of each other’s existence. All the pieces of any given puzzle may be present, but no one individual or group holds them all. The wheel is reinvented over and over again, in endless forums and comments sections and web pages and books that burst into existence and fade just as quickly to obscurity.
    • Twitter is an outpouring of the best people have created (and the worst)
  • The goal of Roam is to enable systematic curation and collaboration on a large scale. Users will be able to selectively share parts of their graphs publicly, or with circles of peers and colleagues. In turn, they will be able to follow the work of persons they trust, whether they be domain experts or enthusiastic amateurs. Those looking to acquire specific knowledge can turn immediately to trusted sources, and set alerts to receive updates about new pieces of information pertaining to an area of interest.
  • Almost every medium today presents knowledge as though it were the last word; assuming both a necessary consensus and an uncomposable page. Wikipedia is one of the great wonders of the Internet age, but it makes both of these mistakes. There can only be one article on any subject for any given language, and the only connection between pages is through links, with no article “built” off another.
  • By way of contrast, consider GitHub: Libraries are built on other libraries, and functions are built from other functions. Developers build tools that others can build upon to build ever more impressive tools. Most of the modern web is built on Open Source technologies, which would not have been possible if programmers followed the old protocols for intellectual collaboration.
    • What is premium content from thought leaders like David Perell curated on platforms like Substack other than the enterprise version of their generally open-source thoughts on Twitter?