Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

I’m not coming after the basic idea of organized people helping less organized people for a fee. I’m just pointing at the bull in the china shop, namely that most of the variance between individuals is genetic and relatively invulnerable to intervention.

The concept of the Knowledge Graph deserves the classification of bullshit because its allure derives primarily from the false impression that it can mechanistically deliver—or substitute for—the brute, linear willfulness that defines all non-trivial writing.

The deep and urgent sense that we’re all drowning in information and distraction has created a massive market for anything that claims to solve this problem. In this context, it is natural for wildly overstated claims and trendy fashions to proliferate, however divorced from reality they might be.

The problem with the Knowledge Graph ideology is that everything in your mind is already situated in a graph structure. That is precisely the problem. It’s big and complicated, with way too many connections everywhere. There’s no good in replicating that web in digital form.

Software tools and courses can aid intellectual advancement and productivity at certain margins, for some people, but we should be more explicit about what exactly they can help, how they can help, and whom they can help.

A Signalling Theory of PKMThe reason Knowledge Graphs and other PKM memes are so trendy is that, by publicizing one’s overwrought Knowledge Management System, people think they are showing off their big brains. Perhaps for some people, it sincerely feels like intellectual progress to externalize one’s overgrown web of ideas and one’s arcane system ... See more

Everyone is overloaded with information thanks to the digital revolution, so—the PKM people tell us—we need new software and systems to survive and thrive. So far, so good. I agree with this intuition.

The problem is that market demand for solutions is tremendous, while the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable.