Liberating Ideas
Tom Haymes
Learning and Innovation Consultant at IDEASPACES, Author of Learn at Your Own Risk (ATBOSH, 2020), and Discovering Digital Humanity (ATBOSH, 2022)
Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools – with yesterday’s concepts. – Marshall McLuhan
I love books and have since I was a child. Lately, however, I’ve become frustrated by their limitations as I run into roadblocks trying to extract ideas from them. They also limit my ability to make connections between those ideas and those of other writers (including myself). This has led me to scrutinize the utility of the book as a tool and how commerce and emotional attachments impede the free flow of ideas.
While I certainly appreciate the emotional value some of us hold for books, they are at root containers for ideas. Books are subject to deconstruction, and it may be time to liberate those ideas differently than we are used to.
Books are the foundation of any institution of learning. The modern university emerged from physical books. The reason that the British still refer to their education as having “read” at Oxford is because before the printing press, that was the only location those books existed.
Until recently, books were relatively scarce and valuable. My parent’s generation viewed them through a lens of scarcity. This is not the case anymore as I seem to be in a constant battle to economize the number of paper books I store in my house.
Don’t get me wrong. I attach great personal value to my library of books. Perhaps this was something I inherited from my book-loving parents, who probably had 20-30,000 volumes in their house when we cleaned it out.
Books still form valuable connections to my past, both personal and generational. However, that is not an ideational function, it is a talismanic function.
I thought digital books would change my relationship with reading and books, but the design of platforms like Kindle very much mirrors a traditional reading experience (only worse). There is the advantage of portability and no need for physical storage space, but the ideas in them are even more locked than a print book.
Books are containers of ideas. Ideas strategically connect pieces of information. With our traditional conception of the book, the only way these ideas interact is through human brains.
Humans train for years to remember and analyze connections between ideas within books. However, even those of us who have spent a lifetime analyzing writing and ideas are in a constant struggle with what we don’t know. I cannot synthesize ideas I’ve never read.
In college, I developed a system of small Post-it notes to mark interesting passages in books that I was reading or consuming. The system worked reasonably well. I could write limited notes on those posts and could even color code them.
If I knew the book well, the system worked. However, there are always passages that I glossed over when I first read the volume, but suddenly became important in retrospect. I hadn’t marked these. When I tried to retrieve key information, I couldn’t find it, even assuming I knew which book a particular idea was in.
I have wasted countless hours chasing down information and ideas in this way. Initially, I found the highlighting and search functions in a Kindle book were superior to my post-it note method. However, I had to exchange that functionality for the commercial limitations Amazon put on the content. (You don’t own Kindle books, you just rent them.)
As an author, I am far more excited about the prospect of sharing my ideas than I am about making a quick buck. Unfortunately, the iron grip of the publishing industry interferes with the exchange of ideas.
Ideas in books connect to ideas in other books, but this happens through an inefficient process of various citation methods (hence education’s obsession with Strunk & White). Rich citations are very much the exception to the rule. They also interfere with the flow of the narrative when used to excess.?
As an author myself, I am honest about the fact that there are many ideas in my books whose provenance I have long forgotten. My books are collections of ideas, reading, and conversations that stretch back for decades.
Most books also suffer from the limitation of text. Text is a powerful tool, but it provides us with a linear narrative that is hard to break out of. Ideas are rarely linear and as an author, I’ve always struggled to organize my thoughts linearly. This is good discipline, but it also limits what I can express.
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I have the same problem organizing my book collection. When you have hundreds or thousands of books, logically placing them on the shelves is a constant challenge.
I prefer to organize my books by subject, but I see connections between “unrelated” books. For instance, I put my design books with my constructivism books. Constructivism is a design process and vice versa. But there are many more intertwingled ideas that I cannot accommodate on a one-dimensional set of shelves.
A lot of our struggles to comprehend the world comes from an imposed need for informational silos created by the physical existence of books. Capitalism interferes with this as well. In the current publication/copyright model, a book can only be in one place at one time.
This is not an accurate reflection of the ideas in books, however. This visualization by the Open Syllabus Project shows how the intertwingled nature of books connect different academic disciplines by showing us where they’re being used in college syllabi.
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Ideas do not respect disciplinary (or bibliographic) boundaries. When you traverse paradigms, traditional systems of organization no longer make sense.
In the old paradigm, we used books and cataloging systems to provide crude maps to the ideas in them, but in the process of organizing information, these systems siloed the ideas. Generative AI doesn’t need to do that and that has the potential to transform our relationship with the ideas contained in them.
As an experiment, I’ve been scanning and otherwise digitizing key books in my library. I then analyze them by feeding them into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model called Notebook LM.
My goal is to build an idea extraction machine. I want the tools to help me find connections I may miss. This experiment is ongoing.
I want to build a tool to do this visually because this will give me the ability to analyze ideas in completely different ways. That is one of the many ways in which the Knowledge Navigator will change how we see information.
These systems are not replacements for my bookshelf. I will still read for pleasure. I also hope that once we stop flogging learners with books they don’t want to read, perhaps they will read for pleasure as well. We’ve already ruined learning with grades. We’ve done the same thing to casual reading.
The skills learners will need are not dissimilar from the skills we developed as readers, but AI can make those much more approachable. If we digitally adapt our information systems so that generative AI can analyze them, this will make both learning and research easier and more approachable for both formal and informal learners.
To achieve that, we need to free the ideas contained in them. That is a systemic problem, not a technological one. However, the payoffs in both equity and the progress of human ideas will be immense.