WHY?
I can almost reach out and touch it in ma mind's eye.
Posted on July 15, 2024 by Reggie
Has an interest in creating a knowledge tree using graph theory, aiming to visualize the world's knowledge through interconnected nodes and edges. They are focused on quickly expanding their conceptual knowledge without redundant learning. They seek efficient ways to explore both broad and niche topics, preferring visual representations like keyword graphs for topological analysis.
Ive always wanted to create a knowledge tree. What do the world's humans know? Not wikipedia style, graph theory style.
I once said to my physics professor something to the effect of "Look! One guy spent their whole life(decades!) working towards this 1 equation, and we have to learn it in a week...". A life's learning journey follows paths forged by humankind past, hopefully culminating in an additional node on the graph.
Interconnected, dynamic, and constantly evolving.!
Humankind has amassed an astonishing amountof knowledge that we spend 25% of our ~90 year lives just learning the facts. Once we get the "basics" down we can then "specialize" and spend 1/3rd of our lives learning towards a PhD. To increase the knowledge graph's volume, we not only have to keep going deeper, but we must continue interconnecting seemingly disparate branches of knowledge.
The lifetime learner.
The task at hand is how do we go from the center to the edge as quickly as possible, so that we maximize our productive years building knowledge on the frontier. There are institutions and processes in place to systemitize this as a society for the individuals on the academic track. For the majority of skilled labor your knowledge acquisition phase ends after some amount of schooling and then you focus on extracting value with your knowledge. However, at the pace of today, where you left off, without further knowledge expansion, isnt suffecient for the duration of your career.
Modern learning challenges.
As an individual, its hard to keep up to date on the latest and greatest in your field, not to mention the side hustle you want to learn from scratch. Whatever you want to learn, the resources are out there for sure, that isnt really the issue for me. The main issue with all the learning resources is the time investment. All the tutorials, courses, blogs, youtube, is great, but eventually its a lot of overlap, and it spends most the time on (at this point in my learnings) "common" topics. Hopefully the time was worth it when you come across 1 unique idea I havent expanded my knowledge too, yet. NOW, I can use that to go on my next hunt for tutorials, blogs, courses etc. its a slow process to mine for the keywords that expand my conceptual knowledge, but thats the essence of what im doing, mining keywords to expand big picture concepts, and the time heavy instructional material is good for specifics of practical application and filling in that local maximum.
Efficient knowledge expansion.
I dont want to spend most of my time refining what I already know, I want to take my knowledge to the NEXT level, FAST. I want outside of the box material, I want key differentiator materials. It's kind of hard since, I dont know, what i dont know; and the current materials really are 95% same ole topics. I need a way, to broaden my view of the landscape to assess the big picture just enough for me, so that the next most relevant branches of knowledge yet unmined by me, are quickly skimmed for keywords.
Smooth transition through varying scales of granularity.
Outside the common core of ideas in most materials, is both the macro landscape of ideas and niche micro landscape of esoteric details. I need a way, to narrow my view of the landscape to this one aspect, without losing the local macro context. Using long form materials doesnt allow a smooth seamless transition between narrow and wide focus, with quick refocus at a differnt level of granularity. This is why I have no less than 20 tabs open when researching. This is a hard thing to do for anyone, to load up all the sources, skim for keywords, and find relationships between concepts.
Data driven Insights.
Behind the scenes graphs run the world, we only see the pretty user interface over them for simplicity. Information overload is a real thing. Which is why I want a way to vizualize the graph keywords for quick topological analysis, from there I can go somewhere else for curated details. Sometimes I want to learn a lot about a little, sometimes I just want to learn a little about a lot.
[Enter SkillBurst,]
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[Flourish of Trumpets.]