Robin Good
@robingood
Robin Good
@robingood
The article argues that LLM-powered wikis solve Vannevar Bush's 1945 maintenance problem but fail to address his more fundamental vision: the "trail"—a personally-voiced, sequenced path through knowledge built by committing to ideas, discovering they're wrong, and revising them.
The distinction matters because synthesis (what wikis do) prevents the frame-revision thinking that produces original writing, while trails require the cognitive pressure that comes from irreversible commitment.
Synthesis itself is the problem: by resolving tension before a writer commits to a position, the system removes the pressure that forces thinking. The distinction matters because it redefines what "better" knowledge systems should actually do—protect unresolved problems rather than solve them.
Tools like Sublime, Glasp, Arena, Cosmos let us put aside “nodes”. None helps surfaces our “trails”.
This may very well be the kind of worldbuilding I’d like to pursue. This is what it looks like.