In several threads over the last few weeks I saw references pop up about personal knowledge management tools — you might have heard keywords like Second Brain, Roam(cult), Obsidian, Zettelkasten, Digital Gardens, etc. It's great to see a lot of people familiar with these here and I'm not surprised about that. But in what way do you see a connection to FoC? Tools for thought is practically what I've been working on for a long time now, and as my work shifted from the programming aspects of that more to the general knowledge management aspects, I was under the assumption that this is not the right forum to discuss this (and that's fine — there are other great places to do that). It seems to come up here a lot though, and perhaps that's just my selective perception, so I'm looking forward to hear what people think about this.

My perception here is that discussion around the current apps and services that typically call themselves personal knowledge management tools aren’t really the center of interest here. I think many are looking at the fields and work from knowledge representation, expert systems, intelligence augmentation, logical reasoning, complex systems, networks, and others and seeing their immense potential and importance for the future of coding. Knowledge representation has a long history going as far back as mathematics itself. We really haven’t scratched the surface in terms of the actual tools available, but can see that the wealth of possibilities in that area is almost unlimited.

I was going to start a discussion on this exact topic this week, wondering how people feel about patterns of tools of thought / PKM being shared here since they seem to have so much overlap with FoC notions - visual layouts, open data structures (enables things like transclusion), chaining behaviors, storage models, more - I've seen many of the people on this forum also post on PKM on twitter, so I'm sure there's latent interest. It feels borderline as a full community discussion - this thread alone might get relocated over to #random - but I wonder if there should be a #thought-tools or #knowledge-management channel so we can freely explore frontiers of knowledge tools & concepts that aren't necessarily coding-based. cc @Ivan Reese

i think that a lot of the cognitive load of programming comes from bad ux on the information management side of how we interact with codebases—and most of what i’d like to do with computers could be achieved with a “sufficiently smart” PKM, eg “show me all the websites i’ve visited when looking for an ice cream maker organized by review score and favorite reviews”

I agree with @Orion Reed that there's considerable overlap between these tools and what we're all trying to do. For example, there are certain kinds of questions that are hard to answer with most programming environments that become quiet easy if the data is handled differently. For example, queries by analogy or complex integrative queries as seen here (using my Clojure wrapper for WikiData):

Tools for thought is the single greatest shared area of interest according to our survey earlier this year, so I wouldn't regard it as borderline. I do think there's getting to be enough discussion about it that it might be worth trying a #tools-for-thought channel — not because it isn't on-topic enough for #C5T9GPWFL (or whatever we rename it), but because it's worth collecting all that knowledge and enthusiasm together in one place.

Gerry Sussman makes the case that the legacy of computer is that as a medium for clearer thinking which is what we want from tools for thought https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1593862391299700?thread_ts=1593794600.262800&channel=C5T9GPWFL&message_ts=1593862391.299700

👍 for #tools-for-thought channel, that seems like a great idea

@Ivan Reese Tools for thought is such a profound idea I just gotta give a shoutout to the term mediums of/for thought. Alan Kay argued that “the term ‘tool’ implies a certain narrowness. A more powerful aim is to develop a new medium for thought.” and I believe Bret Victor seems to also use medium as the more denotational term. Another used by Alan, Bret, and others is new representations. I feel like ‘representations’ are the concrete language of the medium, ‘tools’ are like applied representations (i.e. Illustrator is kinda like an applied but restricted tool for bezier curves and vector geometry with extra bits). The idea of a medium being computational and dynamic seems to demand a higher bar when evaluating future projects. I think you can argue that Illustrator is a tool for thought more easily than a medium for thought, as the medium would map to the domain-space of vector geometry itself. Not suggesting a name change, just a thought worth mentioning.

@Orion Reed That's a very enticing framing. I'll fold that in to my proposal.

My own project (https://github.com/khinsen/leibniz) in the FoC space (where I take the c to mean computing rather than coding) is all about integrating formal and informal knowledge. For now I am at the single page document stage, but I am aiming at putting formal code into digital gardens.