Tag: casey newton

On Note-Taking Apps

Google Keep. Microsoft OneNote. Roam. Obsidian. Notion. Readwise.

There are other apps with whom I’ve had, so to speak, even shorter relationships, but the ones above are the ones that I have really and truly tried to use on an extensive basis. Google Keep, as with so many other things Google, is excellent in some ways, but utterly hopeless in others. You’ll never guess what their latest enhancement is, for example. OneNote was very promising, but Microsoft went through a bit of a phase where they had a OneNote app for Windows, and a separate one for Office365, and it just got too confusing for words. Roam was too expensive at 15USD per month, and Obsidian had too steep a learning curve for me. And if you want to talk about steep learning curves, you should try out Notion. Gah.

The latest one that I’m trying out is Readwise, and well, it’s going… ok, I guess. And we all know what that really means, don’t we?

Long story short, none of these have really worked out for me. And that, I suspect, is the case for most of you reading this. There will be some who are true converts and zealots of any one of these, and I envy you. I really do, good for you, really! But whichever one of these you’re selling, I’m not really on the market. And no, that other new new one ain’t for me either, whichever one it is.

And that’s why this article in The Verge really resonated with me:

Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place on your computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage, and the text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of alt-tabbing between these and other apps, our ability to build knowledge and draw connections is permanently challenged by what might be our ultimately futile efforts to multitask.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian

As always, do go through the whole thing. It is full of fascinating snippets, including the somewhat surprising, somewhat entirely predictable finding that the average time we spend on a single screen before shifting our attention elsewhere was 2.5 minutes. If that seems too long for you, you’re right. That was in 2004. Today’s stats? 47 seconds.

The author of the article goes on to hope (as do some of us, while others are repulsed by the thought) that AI will help us make sense of all of these links that we have been squirrelling away for years. I’m on Team Maybe about this myself. But I really do agree with this bit:

In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying.
The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian

And that is, in a way, comforting and reassuring. I haven’t failed all these awesome note-taking apps, and they haven’t failed me either. In each of these cases, it just wasn’t meant to be.

The article refers to the works of Andy Matuschak (Google him if you don’t know who he is), who says that the ultimate goal is to think effectively (amen!), and that all of us should really be thinking about two questions.

  1. What practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?
  2. How can I shepherd my attention effectively?

Don’t look to me for the answer to the second of these questions, I have no idea. If you know the answer, help a guy out, will ya? But I do have my own personal answer regarding the first of these questions.

I read a lot. Not as much as some others that I know, and I wish I read more, but I do think I read more than the average person. Some of what I read I find interesting enough to talk about with some people whose opinions I truly value. Some of these conversations end up being friendly arguments, where they challenge my view, and I challenge theirs. Then I have a cup of coffee and think about some of these arguments.

Then I write about it. And after I write about it, I send a draft of what I’ve written to them. Then, if I’m really lucky, we have another argument about the draft I’ve sent them. I think more about this second argument, and refine the draft.

How I would like to tell you that this is how every single post on EFE gets written.

The reality is that all of what I’ve described above happens for maybe one post every month. Those posts, and those arguments stay with me then for a very long time. But the vast majority of the posts you read over here are me reading something, finding it interesting enough to write about it, and well, I write it and you read it.

When the whole process described above works the way it should – that is utopia.

But between living in utopia and not writing about it at all lies a happy medium. Happy not because it is perfect, but because it is attainable. It involves at least one of all those things happening – me reading about something and then writing about it.

So my favorite note-taking app?

It happens to be a blog called EFE. The posts over here are me taking notes on something I’ve read – and that, more than anything else, helps me remember stuff better.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again.

Write.

Write and put it out in the public domain for all to read. Best way to remember something, anything and most everything.

And if you can figure out a way for me to do achieve my utopian process for all the posts that I write, please do tell!

The Three Article Problem

I’ve been mulling over three separate columns/posts/interviews over the past few days. Today’s post was supposed to be me reflecting on my thoughts about all of them together, but as it turns out, I have more questions than I do thoughts.

Worse (or if you think like I do, better) I don’t even have a framework to go through these questions in my own head. That is to say, I do not have a mental model that helps me think about which questions to ask first, and which later, and why.

So this is not me copping out from writing today’s post. This is me asking all of you for help. What framework should I be using to think about these three pieces of content together?

All three posts revolve around technology, and two are about the Chinese tech crackdown. Two are about innovation in tech and America. And one of the three is, obviously, the intersection set.

The first is a write-up from Noah Smith’s Substack (which you should read, and if you can afford it, pay for. Note that I am well over my budget for subscribing to content for this year, so I don’t. But based on what I have read of his free posts, I have no hesitation in recommending it to you.)

In other words, the crackdown on China’s internet industry seems to be part of the country’s emerging national industrial policy. Instead of simply letting local governments throw resources at whatever they think will produce rapid growth (the strategy in the 90s and early 00s), China’s top leaders are now trying to direct the country’s industrial mix toward what they think will serve the nation as a whole.
And what do they think will serve the nation as a whole? My guess is: Power. Geopolitical and military power for the People’s Republic of China, relative to its rival nations.
If you’re going to fight a cold war or a hot war against the U.S. or Japan or India or whoever, you need a bunch of military hardware. That means you need materials, engines, fuel, engineering and design, and so on. You also need chips to run that hardware, because military tech is increasingly software-driven. And of course you need firmware as well. You’ll also need surveillance capability, for keeping an eye on your opponents, for any attempts you make to destabilize them, and for maintaining social control in case they try to destabilize you.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-is-china-smashing-its-tech-industry

As always, read the whole thing. But in particular, read his excerpts from Dan Wang’s letters from 2019 and 2020. It goes without saying that you should subscribe to Dan Wang’s annual letters (here are past EFE posts that mention Dan Wang). As Noah Smith says, China is optimizing for power, and is willing to pay for it by sacrificing, at least in part, the “consumer internet”.

That makes sense, in the sense that I understand the argument.

The second is an excellent column in the Economist, from its business section. Schumpeter is a column worth reading almost always, but this edition in particular was really thought-provoking. The column starts off by comparing how China and the United States of America are dealing with the influence of “big” technology firms.

As the column says, when it comes to the following:

  1. The speed with which China has dealt with the problem
  2. The scope of its tech crackdown
  3. The harshness of the punishments (fines is just one part of the Chinese government’s arsenal)

… China has America beat hollow. As Noah Smith argues, China is optimizing for power, and has done so for ages. As he mentions elsewhere in his essay, “in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash”. Well, they have.

But the concluding paragraph of the Schumpeter column is worth savoring in full, and over multiple mugs of coffee:

But autarky carries its own risks. Already, Chinese tech darlings are cancelling plans to issue shares in America, derailing a gravy train that allowed Chinese firms listed there to reach a market value of nearly $2trn. The techlash also risks stifling the animal spirits that make China a hotbed of innovation. Ironically, at just the moment China is applying water torture to its tech giants, both it and America are seeing a flurry of digital competition, as incumbents invade each other’s turf and are taken on by new challengers. It is a time for encouragement, not crackdowns. Instead of tearing down the tech giants, American trustbusters should strengthen what has always served the country best: free markets, rule of law and due process. That is the one lesson America can teach China. It is the most important lesson of all.

https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/24/china-offers-a-masterclass-in-how-to-humble-big-tech-right

This makes sense, in the sense that I understand the argument being made. Given what little I understand of economics and how the world works, I am in complete agreement with the idea being espoused.

The third is an interview of Mark Zuckerberg by Casey Newton of the Verge.

It is a difficult interview to read, and it is also a great argument for why we should all read more science fiction (note that the title of today’s post is a little bit meta, and that in more ways than one). Read books by Neal Stephenson. Listen to his conversation with Tyler Cowen. Read these essays by Matthew Ball.

Towards the end of the interview, Casey Newton asks Mark Zuckerberg about the role of the government, and the importance of public spaces, in the metaverse. Don’t worry right now if the concept of the metaverse seems a little abstract. Twenty years ago, driverless cars and small devices that could stream for you all of the world’s content (ever produced) also seemed a little abstract. Techno-optimism is great, I heavily recommend it to you.

Here is Mark Zuckerberg’s answer:

I certainly think that there should be public spaces. I think that’s important for having healthy communities and a healthy sphere. And I think that those spaces range from things that are government-built or administered, to nonprofits, which I guess are technically private, but are operating in the public interest without a profit goal. So you think about things like Wikipedia, which I think is really like a public good, even though it’s run by a nonprofit, not a government.
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot is: there are a set of big technology problems today that, it’s almost like 50 years ago the government, I guess I’m talking about the US government here specifically, would have invested a ton in building out these things. But now in this country, that’s not quite how it’s working. Instead, you have a number of Big Tech companies or big companies that are investing in building out this infrastructure. And I don’t know, maybe that’s the right way for it to work. When 5G is rolled out, it’s tough for a startup to really go fund the tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure to go do that. So, you have Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile do it, and that’s pretty good, I guess.
But there are a bunch of big technology problems, [like] defining augmented and virtual reality in this overall metaverse vision. I think that that’s going to be a problem that is going to require tens of billions of dollars of research, but should unlock hundreds of billions of dollars of value or more. I think that there are things like self-driving cars, which seems like it’s turning out to be pretty close to AI-complete; needing to almost solve a lot of different aspects of AI to really fully solve that. So that’s just a massive problem in terms of investment. And some of the aspects around space exploration. Disease research is still one that our government does a lot in.
But I do wonder, especially when we look at China, for example, which does invest a lot directly in these spaces, how that is kind of setting this up to go over time. But look, in the absence of that, yeah, I do think having public spaces is a healthy part of communities. And you’re going to have creators and developers with all different motivations, even on the mobile internet and internet today, you have a lot of people who are interested in doing public-good work. Even if they’re not directly funded by the government to do that. And I think that certainly, you’re going to have a lot of that here as well.
But yeah, I do think that there is this long-term question where, as a society, we should want a very large amount of capital and our most talented technical people working on these futuristic problems, to lead and innovate in these spaces. And I think that there probably is a little bit more of a balance of space, where some of this could come from government, but I think startups and the open-source community and the creator economy is going to fill in a huge amount of this as well.

https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview

I think he’s saying that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and god knows I’m sympathetic to that argument. But who decides where in the middle? Who determines the breadth of this spectrum, governments or businesses? With what objective, over what time horizon, and with what opportunity costs?

At the moment, and that as a consequence of having written all of this out, this is where I find myself:

China is optimizing for power, and is willing to give up on innovation in the consumer internet space. America is optimizing for innovation in the consumer internet space, and is willing to cede power to big tech in terms of shaping up what society looks like in the near future.

Have I framed this correctly? If yes, what are the potential ramifications in China, the US and the rest of the world? What ought to be the follow-up questions? Why? Who else should I be following and reading to learn more about these issues?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, and would appreciate the help.

Thank you!