On Sensemaking: A fun tour!

Sensemaking is one of my favorite words. It it may also be a favorite word of yours. And I think the last 30 years of my life are revolve around this word. So I'd like to tour you through my brain, take a particular path through my brain to show you what I've collected up about sensemaking in a couple different senses. Under sensemaking, for example, there is a topic called collaborative sensemaking. And all I did was click on it. In the brain, every anytime I click on a thought, every note is called a thought. The thought rotates into the middle. Under collaborative sensemaking, which which is really brings in the social side of sense making because um you can sense make by yourself. Here I have things like collective intelligence. So I'll click down there. Now we have very quickly descended into a well populated part of my brain and I apologize for that. And one of your thoughts has to be well hey these aren't clearly distinct categories. They have a lot of overlap and you're completely right. What I am trying to do and what the brain allows me to do is create that kind of soft interconnectedness where things are visible from like things in a really useful way. So under collective intelligence I've put hive mind uh crowdsource problem solving largecale collective IQ learning communities senius I'll go to senius for a second senior is a coining by Brian eno it's actually a port nonto between genius and the scene so special places have senius uh I think we might have been in a place or two like that and wish we could get back to more of them one of my favorite parts here under sensemaking is a more recent termqi or collective hybrid intelligence. Now collective intelligence is usually meant to be among humans. Hybrid brings in AI and one of the questions right now that we have is how can generative AI augment human collaboration? Uh how can generative AI augment human capabilities in general? And this whole question that's been around for quite a while of technologies can either augment or replace us. How do we how do we land on the side of augment instead of replace? If I go back to the post that is inspiring this tour, um not everything is brightness. We don't always have sensemaking. Sometimes we have dysfunctional group dynamics like group think, a term coined by Irving Janice, psychologist Irving Janice back in the 80s, which is about how groups sometimes can't see outside of themselves. they can't see a different perspective because the group has so much strength in enforcing its belief systems. There are other dysfunctional group dynamics around mobs for example uh there is mob psychology or also herd mentality similar terms not all the same. Then to come back to sensem and go somewhere a little more fun again. There are a series um of devices and plot points in fiction that absolutely are about sensemaking. Uh Palanteer notably the name for Palanteer technologies which is uh companies and products named after Lord of the Rings. Palanteer is a seeing our seeing stones in the Lord of the Rings uh series. Um, the cerebro is a fictional device in the X-Men uh series that Charles Zabri uses. Uh, in Star Trek, we have the triricorer and we also have the hol. So, here is the holo deck as well. And the holc inspired the matrix's construct which is where Morpheus tells Neo that they are just living inside of a simulation. Um, the movie Minority Report uses precogs bathed in a solution with the jacks in the back of their heads in order to prevent crime, to find pre-rime. And there's and then um in the book The Diamond Age, Neil Stevenson's book, The Diamond Age, and here are all of Stevenson's books. uh he invents a young lady's illustrated primmer which is a book that is meant to help a young person grow up to be a great adult. Uh I put this under the solution to the future is a special book realizing that there are a series of books uh like the foundation series from Azimov uh that say the future is a is a special book and that actually bubbles me up to another thought that I wanted to bring you to which is kind of speculative non-fiction. Uh this is we just came out of fiction. So we just came out of a place where writers have full creative leverage to imagine alternate realities and so forth. This is more the world of visions views that people have had. One of the more famous ones is Venivvar Bush's uh article as we may think in the Atlantic in 1945 in which he profiles the memex or memory index. This is back in 1945 where he's thinking in terms of microfilm and a desk that has kind of endless microfilm but can allow you to research whatever you want to look at. This this MX vision inspired um the man computer symbiosis by JCR Licklider, one of the pioneers of inventing the internet. Uh this in turn uh inspired Douglas Engelbart's 1968 mother of all demos where he and a small crew of people at SRRI uh effectively demonstrated things that we take completely for granted right now but were totally novel back then. The idea of windows on screen, overlapping windows, the idea that you could switch between documents. the idea. They invented the mouse with a couple of little potentiometers uh and a and a box of wood rolling around on their table. From the mother of all demos came a whole series of things. So this is under visions that inspired builders of global brains. Uh there's also Ted Nelson and his computer lib uh dream machines who gave us hypertext has been played out in many different ways and goes back to actually annotated uh com talmutic commentaries in the Talmud. I should actually make a link between hybrid text and the Talmud like that. And then also we have uh the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which is the solution to everything is a special book. There we go. Although this hitchhiker's guide in this book is full of errors and mistakes but still it's inspired some people to do some fun things. And then we can go way back to the Diamond Sutra, which was um also an existential project aimed at achieving an embodying a non-discriminatory basis for knowledge or the emancipation from the fundamental ignorance of not knowing how to experience reality as it is. Um this dates back to about 868 AD. Wasn't found until 1900 and then became part of our culture. And it runs parallel to this notion of Indra's net where um and I've got this kind of as an example of Ted Nelson's expression everything is deeply intertwined. In the intervening years a lot of people have tried to create technology that would instantiate these many different things. So we have knowledge graphs which also have personal knowledge graphs or distributed knowledge graphs or enterprise knowledge graphs or if we go back here distributed knowledge repositories, personal knowledge networks. Um all of these are really uh ver different versions of technology trying to create some way of capturing our knowledge and sharing it. And I have to say until the worldwide web and the web is more like linked magazine pages, but until the web, I don't think any of these efforts got very far or or solved things for enough people. U but we're getting to the point now where AI is might actually be the the connective tissue uh that makes this work. Uh, in demoing my brain to you, I regret that I can't show you the moments where I I can't kind of hit undo enough times to get back to the place where I realized I should have a thought called visions that have inspired builders of global brains, a thought I had in 2021, uh, July of 2021. uh and then what happens once I've created some collective uh nexus is that later when I hit something I realize oh wait a minute that needs to get connected there so delqatari's notion of ryomes that's also a vision that has inspired builders of global brains so I will connect delatari their book a thou milborn a thousand plateaus u and then here's some things about ryomes and ryomal connecting and so forth ryomatic learning why we teach. Um, written by Dave Cormier. I don't remember putting this in my brain. He teaches at University of uh, Prince Edward Island. So, I I I'm sorry that I can't rewind to show you the moments of insight because it's those moments of insight that are the fruits of the collaboration between me and this external memory. Now, there are many others. Uh, I get a lot of feedback from other people who use my brain because this, uh, if you go to jerry'sbrain.com, you can browse my brain online for free. And there are many other kinds of payoff from having done this for a while. But, but this is one of the really big ones is having a neighborhood where you can see related, connected, contextual issues and you can see who wrote about them, who explored them. You can ask yourself big questions. you can answer your questions with the best knowledge available uh and you can keep coming back to the same places. One of the things I think we we fail uh on these days is having persistent places that we know we can go back to. Everything is eancent. Everything is a new search, a new query. We don't really have a place where we put things where it stays.