Hi Thomas,
First of all welcome to the group! I hope you will find the community
around TiddlyWiki inspiring.
Over the past decade (!) --- as a user, tinkerer, fan and avid follower of
the community --- I have found that my thinking and creativity away from
TiddlyWiki are shaped by experience of it and its eco-system. Credit is due
to Jeremy (and many other community members) for creating a culture
characterised by ego-free generosity. It might not be immediately apparent
on the first visit to the homepage that the TiddlyWiki (TW) project *as a
whole* is an example of a very elegant and emergent design. For me the
project as a whole helps my creativity and problem solving processes.
I too am a fan of Zettelkasten and over the years there have been several
other Zettlekasten fans who have made contributions to this Google group.
Jeremy has also noted the influence of Hypercard, an early hypertext /
index card piece of software on his thinking. Lurmann's work appears to me
as also salient in a conversation around communities, information and
systems. His work seems not to attract the attention it deserves in the
English speaking systems thinking / complexity science communities, at
least from my perspective on the edge of such communities in the North West
of England. It has been interesting-- for me--to contrast the culture
within systems thinking groups to TiddlyWiki: maybe more of this later!
The zettelkasten concept is a useful one to bring into the TiddlyVerse.
Another systems oriented thinker to champion the index card was Ross Ashby.
His method or working involved journaling and indexing, his archive is
online [2]. For me Ashby's work and his concept of requisite variety are
also useful resources to draw on when problem solving.
Finding out more about Lurmann and his work then trying to build something
of your own in a community of people building their own thinking and
organising tools is marvellous scaffolding solving a problem. Combine
elements Luhrmann's social systems and Ashby's law of requisite variety and
you'd have a blueprint for solving the most difficult of problems: a
suitably diverse group of people all conscious of the learning system they
are co-creating! Bingo!
The TW community is diverse in many dimensions. Career specialisations,
interests and geographic location. Where as most open source software
projects attract IT professionals categorised by tribes within software or
tech, TW is not. I like to see TW as a metaphorical playground or garden
where ideas fall into place. While trying to learn how to do something in
TW "Ah-Ah! moments" can occur: this reminds me of Synectics [3]
The garden metaphor has been linked to wikis and hypertext for quite some
time. Ward's Wiki, the original wiki, was concerned with the transfer of
knowledge from architecture into software development: the nature of
complex evolving structures and systems, how to manage them, how to design
them collaboratively to make a whole worth more than the sum of its parts.
I think its worth keeping Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language Book and
the (counter) culture in which it emerged and is grounded. TW carries
forward a utopian version of how people and communities use the web and the
electronic hypertext. TW --to me-- comes from the same history of though as
Tim Berners Lee and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, free to use for
all, respect for privacy. Read the TW forum and you will notice these
values running through the community and the software design. TW is an open
garden and with its own Borgesesque Labyrinths.
TW is a zettlekasten and a labyrith, both are useful in problem solving.
I subscribe to the argument that thinking and making (and tool making and
using) are intertwined. Architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa makes this
point in The Thinking Hand [1]. I recently came across the work of Kim
Sterelny [4] who has applied Richard Dawkins concept of the extended
phenotype to culture [5] and the extended mind which leads to a path
towards 4e cognition [6]. It leads me to some new areas where I found
people like E O Wilson and concepts of reductionism and convergence. Taking
these paths is made easier and less intimidating for me because of my
experience with TW. I don't mind that I don't fully understand Richard
Dawkins extended phenotype or reductionism: I'm made a link to them - they
are missing tiddlers. I roughly know how they are tagged and what they are
tagging and I have made a decision not to spend my attention reading up on
them.
Decisions on how to spend your own attention are ones I think people are
increasingly thinking about. We are living in an era where attention has
been commodified (see Zuboff [7], Wu [8]) and the neurological mechanisms
of reward are being uncovered [9] and how they influence human behaviour,
the need to compete and the ability to cooperate. My recent thinking has
taken me towards systematisation and empathy. In part I chose to devote
attention to this area because of TiddlyWiki.
Like many TiddlyWiki fans I have invested attention the AMBIT manual [10].
I became interested in the work of Peter Fonagy and noted that he featured
in Simon Baron Cohen's book on empathy. Without prior knowledge of AMBIT
and seeing Dickon Bevington's videos and writing I don't think I would have
invested attention to Fonagy or Baron Cohen. The decision devote attention
to something comes with a very difficult to calculate opportunity cost. The
short cut is to make the decision on hunch and to have a rough model or map
of new potential cross pollinations. I listened to Peter Fonagy on The Life
Scientific [11] because I somehow remembered a connection to AMBIT and TW!
I saw the value of investing time in learning more about his work.
A method for developing creativity and general problem solving has to
account for opportunity costs and sunk costs. I have sunk costs in the
TiddlyVerse, and have learned about sunk costs in the best possible way:
spending way to much time solving problems and learning how TiddlyWiki
works! (The TiddlyVerse is also a great context to learn and experience
wicked problems.)
All of the above was in my working memory before lockdown! The pandemic has
sent my information seeking addiction (yes information is addictive -- [12]
[13]) into the Twitter feeds of public health specialists. I ended up
buying a book by Anthony Costello [14] -- The Social Edge [15]. He talks
about the role sympathy group (the smallest meaningful group outside the
family) in innovation. Small, decentralised, communities of learning ...
its the same underlying ethos and principals which runs though TiddlyWiki
and its community.
The pandemic has presented us with a big problem to solve. It's has brought
the nature of complex systems, non-linear effects and unpredictable events
into the core of everyones life and thier bodies. Add to this the black
lives matter protests and the evaluation of the slave trade. These are
complex human-made social systems interacting with nature. How do we
approach solving problems and issues arising for us as individuals,
families, neighbours communities like the TiddlyWiki project? What can we
learn? Where do we devote our attention? What do we do when we need to
re-charge our batteries?
Robert Lustig says, "If you don't know what the problem is you can't solve
it". The joy of art or any type of creative activity is that there doesn't
have to be a problem. The amazing thing is that pursuing this activity
somehow helps to find the problem. TiddlyWiki offers a systemisation
scaffold. Everything is a tiddler, the problem is a tiddler, what is the
problem is tagging, what links to it, what the missing links might be
tagged as. TW is a thinking technology part of that is the language - it
gets out of the way of everyday (unlike technologies like The Brain).
What has this to do with problem solving? Why have I spent time and
attention here? Is the above any use to anyone?
What's the conclusion? I don't know, but i think the labyrinth I am
following draws from the people and ideas of people mentioned in this post.
>From Robert Lustic: Dopamine down-regulates serotonin, serotonin is needed
for empathy. TW is instantly rewarding but leads to long term happiness!
>From Baron-Cohen: systematisation skills are related to empathy. TW is all
about organising information, tagging and linking, but this takes place in
a community high in empathy.
Back to Ashby. apply requisite variety to empathy and systematisation in a
social system in social / technical systems and problems may dissolve.
Alex
------
[1]
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Thinking+Hand%3A+Existential+and+Embodied+Wisdom+in+Architecture-p-9780470779293
[2] http://www.rossashby.info/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synectics
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Sterelny
[5]
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198735410.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198735410-e-41
[6]
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198735410.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198735410
[7]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
[8]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/26/the-attention-merchants-tim-wu-review
[9]
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/531013/the-hacking-of-the-american-mind-by-robert-h-lustig-md-msl/
[10] https://manuals.annafreud.org/ambit/
[11] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dpj2
[12] https://thetechnoskeptic.com/podcast-26-adam-gazzaley/
[13] https://thetechnoskeptic.com/podcast-27-robert-lustig/
[14] https://twitter.com/globalhlthtwit
[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64pdEWYLZow
Wholes and parts
Luhmann
Zettelkasten
Ashby
Alex
On Sunday, 14 June 2020 23:05:23 UTC+1, Thomas Teepe wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm Thomas - 48, background in maths, longtime zettelkasten and
> note-taking aficionado. I'm new to this group.
>
> For many years I'm tinkering with something like "Computer Aided Problem
> Solving" - how can computers support problem solving processes in human
> thinking?
> Over the years I've experimented with mind mapping software, note-taking
> software and with paper-based zettelkasten methods. (I have a background in
> maths, where paper and whiteboard work seems still highly relevant.)
>
> In recent weeks I've worked with TW, which is a great substrate for
> zettelkasten-based problem solving.
> You can find the demo wiki here:
> http://thomasteepe-archiv.de/
> I would be thrilled if there were points of interest to you, and I would
> love to get feedback.
>
> Kind regards from Stuttgart, Germany
>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/bb10700e-9331-444c-828d-6d305a281128o%40googlegroups.com.
