Thoughts on Context and Conversation for Ideas

How to browse, ingest content, and then reproduce something useful is something I find myself pondering an enormous amount. There is certainly the mindless browsing–like activity, and on the other side of the spectrum there is the focused note-taking and research involved in answering a specific question.

But there exists a massive spectrum in between—a spectrum that includes many forms of knowledge-building that are not easily explained except in retrospect, when you can connect the dots of what you were ingesting.

This semi-tacit approach—reading a bit of a book, following certain Twitter topics, watching particular YouTube videos, asking questions on Reddit, then reviewing code on GitHub—appears at first glance to fall into the bracket of mindless browsing. But there is a qualitative difference. Once you examine it, you usually find multiple through-lines: perhaps material on deep-learning techniques, combined with a video on metal fatigue, sprinkled with ideas about manufacturing challenges, learning curves, and cost decreases.

It looks like a big jumble—and in part it may be—but in my experience there are ideas, notions, and new creations embedded in this mental latent space of interests.

The Power of Conversation

Right now, the best means of exploring that latent space that I’ve found is conversation. In conversation, with an equally interested partner, one can flow from topic to topic. At a certain point, ideas bubble up—still nascent, still requiring much work, but the spark is there. You can connect two or three different threads. You have a new solution to a problem, a new paper to read, a new article, a new tool to build. And what enabled it was the exploratory give-and-take of conversation.

My intuition tells me there is something here—unexplored and not yet captured by our current tools. And it is not something that can be managed through heavy structure, like an elaborate note-taking system. It emerges from conversation without prior demarcation or imposed organisation.

The Missing Tool

If a tool could serve as this partner—a sort of computational conversational buddy—constantly connecting and remixing ideas in the background, surfacing concepts that feel hidden yet familiar, then you would have something rather powerful.

Something that accelerates the pace at which ideas form, and increases the rate at which new ideas are discovered. We shouldn’t all have to wait for the most opportune conversation. For many, the wait may be too long—and the gaps between opportunities far too infrequent.