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Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)

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Re: Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)

#3
I'm working on a system similar to this to satisfy my own needs but can open up to brave alpha users if requested.

I've a concept of boards/themes where you can add structured information like people (to remember contacts in context), bookmarks, thoughts, tasks and even RSS feeds to stay up-to-date on a theme (e.g battery tech). Emails and calendar will be coming soon so that your personal corpus is voluminous and of high enough quality to make a personal GPT actually useful. E.g "who was the CTO I met at the dinner last week".

FWIW I'm already a founder of a company so this isn't intended as a commercial pitch.

Re: Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)

#6

When i read the title i thought the idea may have been to engineer coincidence, which seems like a contradiction, but i wonder if is not impossible.

You can definitely engineer the chance for interesting things to happen by surrounding yourself with interesting people in interesting places, and it's highly recommended imho to do so.

Re: Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)

#7
post #6

When i read the title i thought the idea may have been to engineer coincidence, which seems like a contradiction, but i wonder if is not impossible.

You can definitely engineer the chance for interesting things to happen by surrounding yourself with interesting people in interesting places, and it's highly recommended imho to do so.

that's an interesting and fair point. what about the computability of coincidence?

Re: Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)

#8
post #3

I'm working on a system similar to this to satisfy my own needs but can open up to brave alpha users if requested. I've a concept of boards/themes where you can add structured information like people (to remember contacts in context), bookmarks, thoughts, tasks and even RSS feeds to stay up-to-date on a theme (e.g battery tech). Emails and calendar will be coming soon so that your personal corpus is voluminous and of…

I’d be interested in something like that, where do I sign up?

Re: Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)

#9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely engineer the chance for interesting things to happen by surrounding yourself with interesting people in interesting places, and it's highly recommended imho to do so.

that's an interesting and fair point. what about the computability of coincidence?

"Engineer" was too strong of a word, IMO.

You can increase the odds, so that it is likely to happen more often. You can't engineer an instance of it. You can't compute it. If you could, it wouldn't be coincidence; it would be design!

Re: Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)

#10
post #3

I'm working on a system similar to this to satisfy my own needs but can open up to brave alpha users if requested. I've a concept of boards/themes where you can add structured information like people (to remember contacts in context), bookmarks, thoughts, tasks and even RSS feeds to stay up-to-date on a theme (e.g battery tech). Emails and calendar will be coming soon so that your personal corpus is voluminous and of…

I've been doing something similar based off of what I've been calling "intentionally overspaced repetition". I'm interested as well in how you're going about it.
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