Most note-taking apps have broken feedback . Step one, you write a note, step two... there is no step two! You cast your note into the abyss of Apple Notes. It will never return to you, unless you go back and deliberately look for it (effort).

Credit: The Nib

The result is blank page anxiety, creative block. You have to expend effort. This is the feeling of broken feedback.

Most of us try to overcome broken feedback through sheer force of will. I know people who sit down every Saturday and triage their notes for the week, manually closing the loop, like Spider Man holding that boat together.

But applying linear effort to a superlinear force is a losing battle. Most of us aren’t superheroes. Our strength will eventually be exhausted.

There is a better way: design your feedback loops. There are already, today, some tools for thought that construct useful feedback systems.

Anki uses balancing feedback to generate memorization . Anki is an app for reviewing flashcards. When you succeed, that flashcard is shown less often. When you fail, the flashcard is shown more often. The result is that you converge toward memorizing the cards.

Zettelkasten uses reinforcing feedback to generate ideas .

The core game mechanic of Zettelkasten is to file your note some place where you would want to stumble over it again. As you rifle through old notes to find this place, you recurse over notes you had forgotten about, sparking new ideas, which you then write down, and have to file, causing you to rifle through again, sparking more ideas... in a cascade of idea generation. Zettelkasten is a feedback system.

(Subconscious, 2021. Knowledge gardening is recursive .)

Of course feedback can also work against you. A misaligned balancing loop might mean your linear effort produces no return at all. A misaligned reinforcing loop will overwhelm your efforts and may even manipulate you!

Social media, for example, constructs reinforcing loops around engagement. The reinforcing feedback loops of likes, reacts, retweets, and algorithmic feeds act like gain-of-function research for viral memes.

I suspect this kind of viral procreation favors small ideas with low information payloads and high contagiousness. Why? The same reason Goldberg’s Building Block Hypothesis selects for short genes. The more compact the meme, the easier to copy. The higher the contagiousness, the more often repeated. R-selected information organisms.

This does seem to be what we see proliferating on social media. Exploitables, snowclones, #relatable content, hot takes, thirst traps, flamebait fishing for dunks, all under ruthless selection pressure to enhance virality.

(Subconscious, 2022. Complex ideas procreate through citation )

The result is often memetic epidemics and audience capture. First we program our feedback loops, then they program us.

Agency is stored in the loops

Agency is not a function of effort or willpower, but a function of the feedback loops you garden around you.

What are the feedback loops around me? What do they generate? What do they converge toward? Do they share my goals? Are my goals my goals, or the goals of the feedback loop? How might I construct my feedback loops to generate agency?

Ask what you want out of your feedback loops and build them accordingly.

For our app, Subconscious, that’s emergent collective intelligence. Generating ideas, insights, and knowledge, from the bottom-up.

Elsewhere in the Noosphere, I recently had the opportunity to join two podcasts.

GreenPill: A Protocol for Thinking Together Kevin Owoki reached out about my article Thinking Together. I told him we had to get Michael Garfield to join. Michael is host of the Santa Fe Institute Podcast, and we have a wide-ranging discussion of social complexity, large-scale sensemaking, and how we can collectively scale our civilizational CPUs.

Lux: The p-zombie theory of consciousness . I join Sam Arbesman and Danny Chrichton to riff on LLMs, philosophical zombies, and Peter Watt’s hard sci-fi cosmic horror masterpiece, Blindsight. Spoiler warning: we delve into the big ideas of this book, so if you haven’t read it, don’t click!

from Effort is evidence of broken feedback loops by Gordon Brander