Connecting the Unconnectable

I spend all my free time writing notes so you don’t have to.

All I ever wanted was to be wise.

My parents like to joke that I was “born forty” because, from a young age, I was always more interested in talking (and talking, and talking) to the grown-ups about whatever cool thing I had just learned than I was playing with kids my own age.

Whether it was talking about physics, architecture, or the (useless) cardboard wind tunnel I made; frankly, I just wouldn’t shut up.

It didn’t take much consideration for me to decide to study engineering at University, but it took four years for me to realise that whilst I liked knowing about engineering, I didn’t actually enjoy doing it. And though I did well, helping to build a cool decentralised autopilot in the process, I didn’t think I would ever be the best at it.

Sure enough, in my career thus far, I have never held a technical candle to the through-and-through engineers, but what I continued to find was that I have always been able to hold my own when it comes to knowing stuff — a broad, sweeping array of stuff. And — perhaps because of my upbringing, training, experience — I think I have a pretty good nose for what’s true, what’s not and (most importantly) what actually works in the real world.

What I found was that whilst scientists might know more science, and archaeologists might know more archaeology, it’s rare to find a scientist with such a fascination for Norman-Arab-Byzantine architecture; nor do you often dig up an archaeologist who’s big into non-ergodic Markov chains.

So while it took some time, I realised that what really, intrinsically motivates me is just knowing stuff, and as such, I wanted to find ways to… know more stuff.

“We Are Already a Cyborg”

Elon Musk said “We are already a cyborg because we are so well integrated with our phones and our computers. The phone is almost like an extension of yourself.” We already outsource so much of our thinking and knowledge to our phones and computers — only, most of us do it incredibly ineffectively.

What if there existed far better ways to supplement your brain?

I’m not talking “I know Kung Fu” sci-fi — just apps that are well-tuned to the problem of memory and learning.

There are two main tools that I use:

Obsidian

Think back to a book you read several years ago; maybe one you really enjoyed. If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately be aware of how little of it you can still remember. It may have shaped your life, your worldview, your intuitions — but it’s hard not to feel like all those hours reading were just wasted time.

When I stumbled upon Roam, a novel note-taking app that allows you to link ideas together bi-directionally, my wallet nearly flew out of my pocket. It didn’t just take notes, it made actual connections! The big but, however, is that Roam is proprietary.

If I was going to create a second brain, it would need to last.

Obsidian is what came to the rescue — it’s free, open-source, offline and powered by simple markdown files that will never be lost to someone else’s cloud servers. It’s similar to Roam in that it allows you to create bi-directional links between ideas — that is, each page of notes knows where it has been referenced.

But the real killer app is the Graph View; it’s this that gamifies note-taking and gets you hooked on creating more and more connections. It’s this Graph View and linking that transforms a dull set of notes into a living thing that resembles the brain itself in its organisation.

So this was the outsourced, cold-storage, “second brain” component of cyborgification. But what about upgrading my original brain?

Anki

That’s where Anki comes in. I originally heard about it from Dominic Cummings, who was very apt when he said it “makes remembering things a choice.” By using a unique combination of flashcards and a spaced repetition algorithm that adapts to how well you are learning each card, it makes memorising new information spookily simple.

Ever sceptical, I decided to test it by attempting to memorise the birth- and death dates of a dozen Classical philosophers and thinkers. If Anki could help me memorise that, I thought, surely it could help me memorise anything?

So it proved.

Anki is a great way to learn things that you don’t think will stick in your head any other way. What’s more, you can organise your flashcards into decks related to particular topics, then sync it all to your phone so you can make the most of the odd 5 minutes here and there while you’re boiling the kettle. It’s a no-brainer.

Skin in the Brain

So using Obsidian and Anki was the first way I supercharged my brain, but there was still something missing: a forcing function; something to keep me going and correct my mistakes.

The final component was to create a tool that could make a virtuous circle of learning — providing motivation, feedback and reward in one fell swoop.

That tool is Logical Thread. The point of Logical Thread is to share interesting ideas, and show the (often unlikely) connections between them, hopefully helping people stumble across cool things they might not have heard of.

However, the point of it for me is:

1) It encourages me to keep working

A bit like how Obsidian gamifies notetaking by getting you hooked on nurturing your notes graph, Twitter obviously gets you hooked on growing your number of followers and engagements.

Twitter is literally designed to give you that dopamine hit — so why not use that hit for your own ends?

By doing so, I make myself far more likely to keep building up both my first and second brains.

2) It forces me to be precise

Lots of people talk about how the best way to understand something is to write about it. By writing threads which branch out over many different topics, it forces me to revisit, flesh out and really understand every one of them.

And, of course, the ideas and opinions that I share get subjected to scrutiny from the Twitter masses— often people who are real specialists in whatever subject I am discussing at my very surface level of expertise.

Mind you, just reading things or trying to talk to “experts” is far from any guarantee of knowledge. Real knowledge is earned through experience with skin in the game — you have to test your ideas in real life, because most ideas fail miserably.

So I certainly try to live by my ideas and the things I’ve learned. Compared to most people, including the tech people I work with in London, I lead a reasonably unusual life. I have no TV; I don’t buy takeaways; I insist on producing and not consuming. In January 2020, when I first heard about Covid-19, knowing about exponential growth and the (non-naive) precautionary principle lead me to unilaterally self-isolate (much to my previous boss’ consternation). I was wearing masks soon after.

All of these things bucked the trend — and they are all examples of me trying to practice what I preach.

In terms of skin in the game, though, while Logical Thread can help me check my facts, it can’t “teach me a lesson”.

3) It attracts interesting people

Ultimately, the best thing that can come out of this project is to meet some great people. By presenting a broad scope, I hope that Logical Thread will attract a broad range of people who are interested in discovering and discussing fascinating and varied ideas.

As an aside, this was also the motivation behind what became Fat Tony’s Antifragile Bar (my original codename for it was Spicy Lips — @sebs_tweets’ name was much better).

So What’s Next?

In a sense, the idea of Logical Thread is to help people create their own, personal Wikipedias, filled with their own ideas and experience; a way for people to find all the old thoughts they lost down the back of the sofa. So, aside from laying down the approach that has worked for me in articles like this, that’s what I’m going to work on providing next.

You can follow my progress on Twitter, and hopefully I can show you some interesting new ideas and concepts along the way!