write your autobiography
thought on storing all of our thoughts
I am maintaining eighteen diaries to store my thoughts.
One has good lines from The Republic, An Essay on Understanding Human Mind, The Social Contract and discourses and few others. Second one has complex system ideas form The Web of life, Tao of physics, Quark and the Jaguar, The making of memory. Third is to store my own theories on complex systems. Forth is to store thoughts i get while reading Dune, The Foundation series, Game of Thrones, The Mahabharat, The silent Patient. In forth i write down history, economics, money, trade. Fifth to store hard science ideas that i get while watching lectures or reading The elegant universe. Sixth to……..
AND this segregation is very messy. Sometimes i write in the diary that is nearest, sometimes i am in mood to write in blue one, sometimes i forgot to bring the red diary so i write in a paper(thats how i also have a box full of un-attached pages).
I love writing with pen on paper & having my thoughts in physical books i can hold,
but the problem is…
I cannot search very well in them1.
i have had many thoughts related to “why should one write their autobiography”, and naturally the next thing i want to do is to pull them all out from all of the diaries, but i don’t have any way to search.
In ideal case,
i want ALL of the related thoughts from all of the books to come to me when i am writing on topic x.
I want to be able to say, ‘i was reading about napoleon and got this same idea’, ‘this quote from plato’s republic captures this exact feeling’.
^this is how envision my system woking. & It is not working anywhere closer. I can find only those ideas that are present in MY HEAD at that moment. NOTHING ELSE.
I read how mythos can chain the vulnerabilities and break through systems lot better than any human security engineer alone could. I also want to do that with my thoughts; what if i can chain my similar thoughts from history to complex systems to mahabharat to maths. What is i have gotten the same thought in different form many times.
It would be very nice. Very very nice,
if everything in those 18 diaries is interconnected.
I built Seldon for that.
All of my original ideas are generally 3-4 sentences long. I then read around them, deliberately think on them and write longer substack length articles. I represent individual ideas as nodes, bunch of similar ideas create a graph, and there are different types of edges to represent how exactly two ideas connect. When i add ideas from completely different topics, they cluster around in different graph. My 16 diary system is graph of graphs here.
Traversing through graph to generate articles
This is an hypothesis i am testing. I run different types of traversal algorithms on graph to certain depth and ask LLM to take that sub-graph and write an article using all nodes. All nodes are connected using edges so a second order ideas should naturally form(is the hypothesis). I want to see if different types of traversals generate clearly different types of articles. It is a running experiment, I will write on it after i am done running few iterations.
Today, i gather my individual thoughts and write one article a week. With this system running, i will have traversal articles already written. I will now have not just individual ideas but also cluster of related ideas. I will be able to have this second order thinking done for me to consume, which might in turn enable me to have even longer ideas(which i call third order ideas).
After using this app for a week, it has made me realise that my
eighteen dairies were not enough. I should write lot more.
I saw how much i can create on top of my idea-base. I will have to have all of the raw data in digital format to be able to do that. It is very much like how we could create alpha fold model only because the labelled data was available to us in the format models could consume.
Imagine if we had written down all of our ideas since we were teenagers. We would know exactly what we were thinking at 14, how our thoughts slowly shifted over a year, and what events caused those changes. If we know that a certain thing causes us to feel a specific way, we can actually maneuver our own selves to stay close to it or avoid it entirely. We could literally see how our interests change over the years, with different places and environments. We could map out exactly what makes us think about science, what triggers our thoughts on history, what pushes us toward religion. We would uncover our true inclinations, and so much more.
so you; yes YOU SHOULD collect all your ideas and compile them in digital form right now.
i don’t even want to think about the other problem that what if i loose any of my diary.