Note to self → I want to investigate this thread more and then talk to Andy Matuschak

1. Am I cutting edge? Dumb? Bit of both?

A thing which I feel like I’m on the cutting edge of, and that doesn’t have a clear name yet/a clear codified skillset, and I oscillate between “I think this is incredibly powerful and underrated” and “maybe I’m literally just stupid and have a learning disability of some kind” is - making visual notes
To orient to a new project I pretty much always make a mega miro board - this is one I’ve been making today for a job I’m going to apply to:
Here are some of the “finalised” visual notes
I think there’s something powerful going on here re:
1. Organising text info (e.g., most of this is from a deep research report about the company) is a form of active learning/participatory learning. You decide what to trim, what to put where, what to merge. You discover hierarchies and simplifying groupings that weren’t in the original text, which organises the information more cleanly in your whole head (the whole “expertise is well-organised knowledge” thing),
2. Condensing stuff into a single viewable visual means you can parse all of it at once, rather than having a long google doc or nested Obsidian notes where there’s a feeling of overwhelm and things hidden away somewhere out of view,
3. A person who knew more about arguments/logic/rhetoric might say something more deep here, but I have a sense that this diagraming is useful for mapping the flow/hierarchy of ideas, finding parent/child relationships, linear relationships etc, again all great for grokking/organising knowledge in your head

2. A name for what I’m doing here?

It feels like there could be some cool term for this that really “legitimises” it in my head as a real skillset
Like, is this memetic fitness engineering, or something? (That doesn’t feel right)
I find that, once I do this in Miro, once I make a crazy cork-board and then iteratively prune and organise it, I end up in a place where I can talk fluently about the topic, without the need for flashcards.
The process of pruning and organising and clarifying makes it slot into my brain, vs at the beginning of the project there’s a feeling of overwhelm and a total lack of understanding of the gestalt of the thing

Hermeneutics?

So maybe this is a form of hermeneutics, of engaging with the hermeneutic circle?
I dump all the context in Miro, I iteratively refine my understanding of different component parts, which feeds into my understanding of the whole. Then, with a better understanding of the whole, I can further reorganise and refine the component parts, deepening my understanding

3. It feels embarrassing

I feel unhinged as I do it, kind of embarrassed.
“If people saw me doing this, if I did this in an office, it’d look like me copy-pasting a Google Doc one sentence at a time into different boxes, then organising them, changing the colours and font sizes, iteratively tidying and condensing”.
It looks like busy work to me, but clearly it leads to profound results…
Or is there a much faster way and I just like doing this because I can half turn my brain off? Perhaps I should be doing the top-down “make predictions about the company, go out and find the answers, iterate” thing, which feels more effortful
Another example, from a job I applied to yesterday. This is the final result (download to zoom in)

4. Feedback - people like it!

I actually got feedback from my manager at my effective altruist biotech startup job re: the value & rarity of this skillset and how I undervalue it
I think I undervalue it because I don’t know what the hell it is
I’ve also tweeted various visual notes about tpot-type stuff over the last 2 years and they always get a lot of engagement for my follower count which I think again points to their value.
Condensing Gendlin’s Focusing to a single view diagram is really useful
But the thing is, they’re not diagrams - I think that’s a key thing that I get that most people here don’t