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Tools for Better Thinking

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Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#51

Post by ImprobableTruth »

gexla wrote: post #40
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roam is closed-beta and a proprietary format.

I get that. But I'm also skeptical of any product / service which attempts to bolt on Roam-like features. Note taking apps have been around for a long time, and now all of a sudden it's a hot new thing to add bio-directional links? The developers talked about starting out not knowing what they would end up with but that they would know when they saw it. That process took them two years (?) of exploration and developm…

Hell, even if they had straight up invented backlinks I wouldn't be willing to deal with an application that costs $15 per month and gives me absolutely no control over my data. The possibility that an outage could cause me to lose work alone prevents me from ever giving it a shot.

And the idea that even though the copycats deliver to me the superior product, I should still give what amounts to charity to Roam because they designed a nice interface just strikes me as absurd. I don't see the point in being overly concerned about supporting new research since we already have a mechanism for that: patents. If Roam truly believes their work is revolutionary, they should have just applied for a patent.

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#52

Post by cercatrova »

I like the concept, I see many sites like these. However, who actually uses these in a day to day situation? It feels like these thinking models need to be internalized in more than just a superficial way to get any real use out of them, and I wonder if a book or course wouldn't integrate better with one's mind.

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#53

Post by shahbaby »

I've found that the most underrated problem solving tool is simply typing out my thought process.

I used to be the type who asked a lot of questions until I realized that formulating the question was often more important than getting the answer.

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#54

Post by cjsawyer »

shahbaby wrote: post #53

I've found that the most underrated problem solving tool is simply typing out my thought process. I used to be the type who asked a lot of questions until I realized that formulating the question was often more important than getting the answer.

You can’t answer the question until it exits!

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#55

Post by khimaros »

localhost wrote: post #48

This is a really nice presentation of these ideas. However, I think that the Decision Matrix idea is too complicated: specifically the part where he advocates adding a weighting to each factor being considered to arrive at a numerical score. At Microsoft, some of us use a system that I like to call the "Abolade decision making framework." It's the same idea, but instead of assigning weights to factors, we simply rank…

Is there somewhere I could read further about the Abolade framework? I can't seem to find any good resources from a quick web search.

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#56

Post by rukuu001 »

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #10

does anyone know a simple app that allows hyperlinking within notes? I want to create a roam-style knowledge base, but most tools are too heavy for my purposes. I prefer to keep things cross-compatible and future proof with .txt or .rtf, but to my knowledge, neither allow hyperlinking to documents

Hate to be that guy but... org-mode :)

I use it as an outliner, to link to documents (using org-roam), and liberally sprinkle TODOs among the notes, which the agenda picks up.

Took a while to get comfortable with it, but it's totally worth it.

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#57

Post by typicalbender »

shahbaby wrote: post #53

I've found that the most underrated problem solving tool is simply typing out my thought process. I used to be the type who asked a lot of questions until I realized that formulating the question was often more important than getting the answer.

It's amazing how much a technique like rubber ducking[1] helps to work through issues. The number of times I've felt like I have no idea how to solve a problem until the moment after I ask someone else is incredible. I think the act of thinking how to explain the problem to someone else really helps trigger the problem solving side of the brain. That and the number of times taking a 10 minute walk has been more productive than hours of debugging time is frankly mind boggling.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#59

Post by tonyarkles »

diggan wrote: post #7

Lovely idea and presentation! Will come very handy at times. Something I feel like is missing: Statecharts. Very powerful to be able to reason about state changes without having to deal with the explosion of states that state machines often ends up with. Sometimes also called hierarchical state machines.

I just started digging deep into this for a project this week and I am already in love.

Highly recommend this book: https://www.state-machine.com/doc/PSiCC2_Excerpts.pdf

Re: Tools for Better Thinking

#60

Post by localhost »

khimaros wrote: post #55
localhost wrote: post #48

This is a really nice presentation of these ideas. However, I think that the Decision Matrix idea is too complicated: specifically the part where he advocates adding a weighting to each factor being considered to arrive at a numerical score. At Microsoft, some of us use a system that I like to call the "Abolade decision making framework." It's the same idea, but instead of assigning weights to factors, we simply rank…

Is there somewhere I could read further about the Abolade framework? I can't seem to find any good resources from a quick web search.

I don’t think there’s anything public about this. Not that there is anything particularly secret about this at all. It’s very straightforward and I’ve described its salient points above.
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