Christopher Alexander was a designer and architect; his thinking, and focus on patterns in particular, were influential in programming; wikis were first invented to facilitate the collaborative creation and modification of ‘patterns’ in the style he described.
Historically, I think LessWrong has done great at collecting antipatterns, and only well at collecting patterns, and somewhat poorly at organizing them all into a common reference work. (Read The Sequences, we used to say, but much of what has happened since then is scattered instead of curated and carefully arranged. My guess is a solid approach to take here is something like “go thru the Sequences, the CFAR material, the library of Scott Alexandria, and so on, pulling out the patterns and trying to arrange them into a pattern language, identifying the connections between them and filling the resulting gaps. If you’re interested in helping with this, comment below or send me a PM.)
I think that a community effort, organized through a wiki, is exactly the way to go here, and I offer my experience with building and hosting wikis[1] to anyone who’s interested in undertaking such a project.
(That is, of course, a matter of technical contribution, which is less important than organizational or content-related contribution—in those departments I don’t know that I have much to contribute. But if technical and/or design support is required, I’m available.)
Examples of wikis and wiki-based projects I’ve built: ReadTheSequences.com, Slate Star Codex Abridged, my personal wiki, another personal wiki (not mine) with rationality-relevant content. (Honorable mention to gwern.net—not exactly a wiki, but many of the features that I helped design and build for it are, I think, appropriate to any project involving anything like “exploration of connected information”.)
One of the things I’m most interested in at the moment—which I have a vague suspicion is easy but might actually be hard—is visualization of the graph structure, of the sort that yEd or Obsidian or so on have. Another thing which seems easier but also is not inherent to wiki software (I think?) is serializing the list of patterns in the biggest-to-smallest way (which, maybe we want some flexibility here, so that we can experiment with multidimensional layouts?).
Linkgraphs obviously have directionality to them, but my guess is that we want the ability to deliberately set the directionality of links, so that when 80 Self-governing Workshops and Offices links up to 41 Work Community it’s stored differently than when it links down to 148 Small Work Groups, or sideways/outwards to Buddhist Economics [example from a randomly selected pattern near the middle of A Pattern Language]. And again some sort of future-proofing might be interesting here; it’s one thing to say “small work groups are part of a self-governing workshop” and another thing to say “small work groups are spatially part of a self-governing workshop”, so an algorithm could easily differentiate between that and temporal containment (like “a pomodoro is temporally part of a workday”).
My experience is that the content is the most important part of a project like this, and that effort spent on advanced features doesn’t begin to yield comparable returns to effort until you’ve got quite a bit of content (in place, not just in principle). (Of course, a bit of advance thinking goes a long way, most importantly in the domain of “ensuring you don’t lock yourself into rigid idiosyncratic setups”; and it is important not to to miss by too much the optimal point of content scale when returns to effort spent on tools and infrastructure become non-trivial.)
Approaching the matter from the other end, such data relationships as you describe (and ways to interact with them) are either supported by most good wiki software, or are fairly straightforwardly buildable given sane setups in this category, or both. (Examples: visualization of graph structure, serialization by metadata.)
With that in mind, I can set something up basically at any time. Have you any further thoughts about where the content for this project would come from?
Have you any further thoughts about where the content for this project would come from?
Yeah; here’s a sketch, from a few different directions:
What: I think the first stage is organizing stuff that already exists and is pretty well-collected: going thru the Sequences, the CFAR handbook, Thinking and Deciding, clearerthinking.org, and so on. I think the second stage casts a broader net, and is something like the process that made The Personal MBA, which is basically a book-length distillation of a ton of business books into their basic concepts; I have a shelf of psychology / self-help books which I think could similarly be distilled into a handful of patterns each. The third stage is something like original research / pushing the frontier forward—finding the holes and filling them, running comparative experiments in areas where we don’t have much data or experience, and so on.
[I describe them as ‘stages’ but I expect them to happen simultaneously, with the stages as my guess of where the bulk of the effort will go when. I also basically don’t expect to run out of content to mine; I’m more worried about running out of a sense that organizing the content is worth doing.]
Who: I expect there to be 1-5 people who put significant effort into this, followed by a long tail of people making minor changes, and am imagining that a basically open setup makes more sense than trying to vet entrants (after all, it’s easy to revert changes).
Meta: I think I’m planning on mostly ‘trying it and seeing what happens, iterating on the fly’, as there are a bunch of unknowns that are pretty cheap to just run into and see how they resolve. [For example, I can imagine a world where there are a bunch of CFAR developers who are quite into this / paid by CFAR to work on it, and another world where it’s all basically ignored by them; can imagine it being useful for people to coordinate on splitting up effort vs. just doing whatever makes sense; can imagine putting a bunch of work in to shepherd this vs. it having a life of its own.]
I think that a community effort, organized through a wiki, is exactly the way to go here, and I offer my experience with building and hosting wikis[1] to anyone who’s interested in undertaking such a project.
(That is, of course, a matter of technical contribution, which is less important than organizational or content-related contribution—in those departments I don’t know that I have much to contribute. But if technical and/or design support is required, I’m available.)
Examples of wikis and wiki-based projects I’ve built: ReadTheSequences.com, Slate Star Codex Abridged, my personal wiki, another personal wiki (not mine) with rationality-relevant content. (Honorable mention to gwern.net—not exactly a wiki, but many of the features that I helped design and build for it are, I think, appropriate to any project involving anything like “exploration of connected information”.)
Yeah let’s do it!
One of the things I’m most interested in at the moment—which I have a vague suspicion is easy but might actually be hard—is visualization of the graph structure, of the sort that yEd or Obsidian or so on have. Another thing which seems easier but also is not inherent to wiki software (I think?) is serializing the list of patterns in the biggest-to-smallest way (which, maybe we want some flexibility here, so that we can experiment with multidimensional layouts?).
Linkgraphs obviously have directionality to them, but my guess is that we want the ability to deliberately set the directionality of links, so that when 80 Self-governing Workshops and Offices links up to 41 Work Community it’s stored differently than when it links down to 148 Small Work Groups, or sideways/outwards to Buddhist Economics [example from a randomly selected pattern near the middle of A Pattern Language]. And again some sort of future-proofing might be interesting here; it’s one thing to say “small work groups are part of a self-governing workshop” and another thing to say “small work groups are spatially part of a self-governing workshop”, so an algorithm could easily differentiate between that and temporal containment (like “a pomodoro is temporally part of a workday”).
My experience is that the content is the most important part of a project like this, and that effort spent on advanced features doesn’t begin to yield comparable returns to effort until you’ve got quite a bit of content (in place, not just in principle). (Of course, a bit of advance thinking goes a long way, most importantly in the domain of “ensuring you don’t lock yourself into rigid idiosyncratic setups”; and it is important not to to miss by too much the optimal point of content scale when returns to effort spent on tools and infrastructure become non-trivial.)
Approaching the matter from the other end, such data relationships as you describe (and ways to interact with them) are either supported by most good wiki software, or are fairly straightforwardly buildable given sane setups in this category, or both. (Examples: visualization of graph structure, serialization by metadata.)
With that in mind, I can set something up basically at any time. Have you any further thoughts about where the content for this project would come from?
Yeah; here’s a sketch, from a few different directions:
What: I think the first stage is organizing stuff that already exists and is pretty well-collected: going thru the Sequences, the CFAR handbook, Thinking and Deciding, clearerthinking.org, and so on. I think the second stage casts a broader net, and is something like the process that made The Personal MBA, which is basically a book-length distillation of a ton of business books into their basic concepts; I have a shelf of psychology / self-help books which I think could similarly be distilled into a handful of patterns each. The third stage is something like original research / pushing the frontier forward—finding the holes and filling them, running comparative experiments in areas where we don’t have much data or experience, and so on.
[I describe them as ‘stages’ but I expect them to happen simultaneously, with the stages as my guess of where the bulk of the effort will go when. I also basically don’t expect to run out of content to mine; I’m more worried about running out of a sense that organizing the content is worth doing.]
Who: I expect there to be 1-5 people who put significant effort into this, followed by a long tail of people making minor changes, and am imagining that a basically open setup makes more sense than trying to vet entrants (after all, it’s easy to revert changes).
Meta: I think I’m planning on mostly ‘trying it and seeing what happens, iterating on the fly’, as there are a bunch of unknowns that are pretty cheap to just run into and see how they resolve. [For example, I can imagine a world where there are a bunch of CFAR developers who are quite into this / paid by CFAR to work on it, and another world where it’s all basically ignored by them; can imagine it being useful for people to coordinate on splitting up effort vs. just doing whatever makes sense; can imagine putting a bunch of work in to shepherd this vs. it having a life of its own.]
https://patterns.obormot.net/