Hierarchies or Networks?

Posted by BrainTool
Jul 28, 2021 at 03:28 AM

I’m continuing to love the ideas and references this thread is generating. Thanks All!

I’m hearing general agreement on the primary need for hierarchy - which I define as organizing ‘topics’ (and their notes and pointers) according to a containment relationship (for some notion of containment).

In addition, the ability to link things ‘horizontally’ across hierarchies into a network is generally desired. The new set of bidirectional linking tools (Roam et al) add unnamed ‘related’ relationships to the containment ones. IMO if you look at the information you are organizing as a set of nested topics (as in BrainTool) then a bidirectional link between two topics is the same as tagging each with the others topic hierarchy. (BTW BrainTool is inspired by ‘Topic Maps’. I wrote about them here[1].)

Then @Mdlynam’s ‘context’ and @MadaboutDana’s ‘comparison’ hint at the need to view the whole topic map at different levels of abstraction (eg zoom in and out, or split a view to navigate multiple paths independently).

All this is a long way from where BrainTool is right now, but I do think it is a good candidate for @Simons “collection chamber” (I’m working on the “search on steroids” part).

Thanks for the food for thought!

PS Totally agree that none of this is actually modeling our brains. But maybe it’s moving us along a continuum of increasingly sophisticated ways of getting thoughts and ideas out of our heads. From language, to writing, to the printing press, to telecommunications, to PCs, to the internet, to having all connected information in our pockets.

Once we get those neural implants [2] perfected we’ll be able to kick back in our chairs and annotate our memory palaces by smell if we want to! For now though, most of us are just happy to be able to close out some browser tabs without stressing that we’ll never be able to find them again.

Happy CRIMPing.

[1] https://braintool.org/2021/05/15/Organizing-your-life-with-a-Topic-Manager.html
[2] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/262957/20210716/neuroscience-researchers-use-neural-implant-help-paralyzed-man-talk-being.htm