If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this building, it’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail. This turns out to explain why it's so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when they’re literally the best in the world in their field.
I think related to this idea of constrictive mediatypes and layouts is the notion of premeditated workflows verses totally in the control of the user workflows. So typically with software, you have workflows that are designed by a product manager, and they write that into the software, and that's that. So you can imagine, for world building, you ha... See more
This is what mental models are: ideas from diverse fields that can aid your life. In this sense, improving vocabulary is a meta mental model. It’s a way of finding and organising new mental models.
So I advocate reading books in cluster – the author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period – but you really get into a person’s mind if you re-read everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months, and then watch them on YouTube, and just try to think about and write out notes, “What am I ... See more
By using hundreds of written notes as training data, we can configure a model to learn to be the note-taker, to internalize their thought patterns, to adopt their writing style and interests, to approximate their mannerisms and responses. After several months of disciplined note-taking, the aligned model becomes powerful enough to accurately extrap... See more