Tools for thought should evolve building blocks

original article by gordon brander: https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/tools-for-thought-should-evolve-building

my highlights:

I’ve been thinking about this paper on designing genetic algorithms (Goldberg, 1998). Genetic algorithms get computers to evolve solutions instead of having to design them ourselves. Since evolution will emerge in any system with mutation, heredity, and selection, we just need a few ingredients. A string of 1s and 0s, some mutation operations, and a fitness function will do the trick. Press play, and watch designs evolve from the bottom-up. Goldberg’s paper is about designing GAs, but the patterns he identifies reveal deep insights about innovation in general

You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life.Life—all life—is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.(Liet Keynes, Dune, Frank Herbert)

Innovation has to outpace takeover, or evolution gets stuck

Genetic algorithms sometimes prematurely converge toward a single solution, and then get stuck. That’s a problem. We don’t want to get stuck in a local maxima. We want continual innovation.

Your tool for thought should evolve building blocks.

What if we saw our notes as building blocks for ideas? What are the qualities we might look for in a buildingblock note? Building blocks encode a useful trait. A building block note encodes an idea. Building blocks are atomic. You want your BB-notes to be as small as possible, but no smaller. This maximizes combinatorial surface area. Building blocks are composable.BB-notes are focused on composition too. Big ideas are composed from smaller ideas, through hyperlinking and transclusion.

Grow the pool of building blocks.

The bigger your pool of atomic notes, the greater the number of possible combinations. Each note expands your adjacent possible. Increase the population size to increase the likelihood of innovation. How might we expand our population of notes? Is there any upper limit? How big is too big?

Introduce mutation. Permanent notes are sort of like DNA. They act as a durable repository for memory across time. What might happen if we introduced mutation to the system? What if we introduced game loops to combine, remix, and rework notes? What other kinds of mutation might we introduce?

Add a selection pressure. Evolution requires mutation, memory, and one more thing —selection.

How might you, yourself, act as a selection pressure on your own notes? Can we introduce game loops to help us manually curate, combine, and prune notes? What other signals might we use to introduce selection?

Expand the diversity of building blocks.

As Goldberg puts it, diversity is a necessary condition of selectorecombinative success. The broader our ecology of notes, the greater the combinatorial possibility. In what ways might we increase the diversity of our notes? How might we connect notes laterally, across topic boundaries?

Build an engine to discover hard building blocks.

These building blocks are probably going to have a high assembly index. What does this mean for note-taking? We want to build game loops that encourage us to compose small ideas into bigger ones, in a recursive loop. The higher the assembly index, the greater the chance you will stumble upon your next big idea. How might we measure the assembly index of a note? Length? Number of links? Depth of links? How might we increase the assembly index of our thoughts?

Accelerate time-to-innovation.

Innovation has to outpace takeover, or evolution gets stuck. Ideas can get ossified too. If ti < t* , then you experience continual inspiration. If ti > t* , you get creative block. What does takeover mean in a note-taking context? Big ideas that you return to over and over? Ideological capture? Restating your priors? Are there progressive taxes on (t* ) that might subsidize or accelerate (ti)? Can we slow time-to-takeover? Should we? Which is the more important variable for provoking steady-state innovation? Can we increase the rate of mutation to accelerate time-to-innovation? How fast is too fast? What if we preferentially resurfaced drafts, or less-connected notes, giving them a chance to become building blocks?