“Think like a librarian,” Milo used to urge us, which might sound less impressive than “Think like a philosopher,” “Think like a psychologist,” or even “Think like a lawyer,” but it did make the point that information wasn’t given, that it had to be actively sought. Once, a student called asking for book titles that might help her with her assigned topic on the pros and cons of marriage. The Library of Congress subject heading “marriage” was too broad to be of much use, and the subheadings in various library catalogs weren’t much better. But remembering James Thurber and E.B. White’s Is Sex Necessary?, I reasoned that there might well be a book on the pros and cons of marriage with an analogous title. Sure enough, Is Marriage Necessary? did turn up as a title in our catalog, and I was able to start the student on her way to a bibliography—nothing special, but our work was full of wonderful, nothing-special moments. Far more impressive was the ingenuity of a colleague who supplied a patron with the names of Korean massage parlors in the Gramercy Park area (yes, someone asked) by combing the Manhattan white pages for names (Oriental Health Spa, Rising Sun Health Club) of likely establishments on and around East Twenty-Third Street. Ours was not to reason why.

In the apprenticeship each of us endured under Milo’s exhausting tutelage before getting anywhere near a telephone, we learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context; put two and three and four sources together, if necessary.

This website offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices. Liberating Structures used routinely make it possible to build the kind of organization that everybody wants. They are designed to include everyone in shaping next steps.

Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

What follows is a list of forums that range from at least interesting to good. I will attempt to contextualize the ones I know well. This post is by no means supposed to be complete and will be updated whenever I find more good forums.

A dynamic concept graph consisting of nodes, each representing an idea, and edges showing the hierarchical structure among them.LLMs generates the hierarchical structure automatically but the structure is editable through our gestures as we see fitattract and repulse in force between nodes reflect the proximity of the ideas they containnodes can be merged, split, grouped to generate new ideasA data landscape where we can navigate on various scales (micro- and macro views).each data entry turns into a landform or structure, with its physical properties (size, color, elevation, .etc) mirroring its attributesapply sort, group, filter on data entries to reshape the landscape and look for patterns

We can construct a thinking space from a space that is already enriched with our patterns of meaning, hence is capable of representing our thoughts in a way that makes sense to us. The space is fluid, ready to learn new things and be molded as we think with them.

An interesting thing to ask is, what type of mindware we can make to externalize thoughts?The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas. — Alan KayWe are certainly not short of tools to do this (think sketches, diagrams, writing) - but can they be faster? More tightly coupled with our thinking processes? The way speech is coupled with internal dialogues?

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.