Re: Outlining and Fuzzy Thinking

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 876

Posted by dmason
2000-12-13 16:02:50

There’s no question that hierarchical outliners impose a certain structural model on what one puts into it, and hierarchy alone may be the wrong model.

In other instances hierarchy may be appropriate, as long as it’s insightful. Often we mis-specify hierarchy initially and have to go back and re-work the structure. Given good drag-and-drop tools the mechanics shouldn’t be too tedious, however much also depends on gaining insight and maintaining a sense of flexibility so that one always regards an initial structure as provisional.

Outliners can be top-down or bottom-up tools. Perhaps the latter is more useful in the sense of delineating only the relationships that one is highly confident of and deferring decisions about higher level relationships as long as possible. This way one marinates in the actual data and perhaps the chances of devising an insightful structure are better than in attempting to impose one at the beginning. There could well be an analogy with the task of doing a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture: you don’t have the big picture yet, so you assemble lower-level structures for a while.

- Dave Mason

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