on: digital gardening

https://t.co/zTOkjICQHO

A few thoughts follow below. Let's begin with a few of the more important principles, plus a few miscellanea that don't really belong later in the essay. Some of this is repeated later in the essay.

• The purpose of the site is to help me think well1. This purpose is in opposition to many widely-used norms in online writing. I suspect that the possibl

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So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

I don’t write simply to find things out, although curiosity is my primary motivator, as I find I want to read something which hasn’t been written—“...I realised that I wanted to read about them what I myself knew. More than this—what only I knew. Deprived of this possibility, I decided to write about them. Hence this book.”⁠⁠1⁠ There are many benef... See more

Most traditional learning journeys are structured in a very specific, deliberate manner, often designed to progress in terms of complexity. Self-directed learners may want to learn according to what provokes our curiosity instead, and that may mean starting from the middle and proceeding to pick out material in order of interest instead of what is ... See more

One goal of these hyper-personalised gardens is deep contextualisation . The overwhelming lesson of the Web 2.0 social media age is that dumping millions of people together into decontextualised social spaces is a shit show. Devoid of any established social norms and abstracted from our specific cultural identities, we end up in awkward, aggravatin... See more