Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map.

Check your Pulse #66

A <n>Minimalist</n> illustration by <n>Olivia de Recat</n> for <n>The New Yorker</n>.

Dinner Menu - Branja Miami Restaurant

Different they may seem, search, tags, folders, hyperlinks, and algorithmic recommendations are all really interface ideas trying to address the same fundamental problem: looking for the needle in an information haystack.

I just learned from a colleague and it was confirmed by every student I asked, that 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7X/week (not prescribed). And 5-10% do the same w/Modafinil or Armodafanil; 30-35% of students are on amphetamine. This is serious. Safer options exist

But when designing an interface for finding a note in a small pile of personal notes, or building an app to organize a small team’s working documents, most of the “finding stuff” interface ideas are in play. It’s in these situations where I want to make the argument: prefer interfaces that let the user incrementally move towards the right answer over direct search.

A 2022 billboard in NYC for the <n>Adsum + Timex MK1</n> watch, a collaboration by <n>Timex</n> and <n>Adsum</n>.

<n>Who are you when nobody's watching?</n> by artist <n>SAVAGEwav</n>.

It should tell us what’s around us. When we’re thinking of an idea, we should be able to immediately recall other, related thoughts from our past: have we thought the same before? Have I read something about this? Does anyone I know work on this stuff? Are there any traps – fallacies or obvious but disproven hypotheses – we should avoid? Tags in notes, semantic search, and hyperlink-dense notes are all about making these tools better at telling us which ideas are in the neighborhood of other ideas.

AI models that understand natural language are opening up powerful new ways for tools to help us explore neighborhoods of interesting ideas. Instead of jumping between manually-annotated links in a forest of bullet points, language model-powered thinking tools should let us grab any sentence or idea and ask large swaths of the Internet questions like “What ideas support this claim?” or “Who’s tried this experiment before?”

With better tools, we should be able to map out entire sections of the idea-space, instead of optimistically poking holes in the space of ideas. I think that starts with tools that can ensure we don’t miss great ideas lurking just nearby good ones, just because we didn’t save a note in the right place or know the right person with the right complement of ideas.

Not “computers can complete text prompts, now what?” but “computers can understand language, now what?”

In between your notes (a finite box) and Google (an interface to infinity) are very large collections, like Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and other crowdsourced knowledge bases. These tools contain some definitely finite amount of knowledge, but it’s unrealistic to explore or organize all of it, so mastery involves both curation and creative exploration.

Cosmos — Curate your universe

Promotional graphic for the <n>Cosmos</n> app, a platform for creative inspiration.

No matter how large a personal database you have in Roam Research or Notion, they are boxes of information more than interfaces to infinities. I think we should try to design more knowledge tools that let you access infinities.

A <n>Gucci Art Wall</n> mural in Milan by artist <n>Coco Capitán</n> for the Fall/Winter 2017 collection.

A knowledge base that looked for new connections within itself would be less of a memory system, as notes conventionally are, and become more of a generative tool. Generative tools are exciting because they contain real infinites that invite endless play and exploration.

I’m excited by the prospect of designing knowledge tools that feel infinite, that aren’t just repositories of information but interfaces to access a larger expanse of knowledge and generative worlds. 

I can't believe this needs to be said but being decentralized and/or having a token is not a replacement for building things people want

The correlation

<n>Fig. 113</n>, an illustration by <n>RESET NAIL STUDIO</n>.

The mission of a company worth ~2T dollars is to “organize the world’s information” and yet the web remains poorly organized. 

I'm excited to share a new essay where on why curators are the new Google + why we need boutique search engines:



“Really, we should think of ideas as connections,in our brains and among people. Ideas aren’t self‒contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters…That’s the way breakthrough ideas happen. They don’t come from contemplative geniuses sitting alone in their studies, trying to think new thoughts.”

for most personal computing tasks, I think CUIs are not ideal. This is because conversations are a bad way to keep track of information, and most useful tasks require us to keep information in our working memory.

A quote on work ethics by author <n>Toni Morrison</n>, via <n>The New Yorker</n>.