Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think the process is just inherently much messier than that, and you need to let go a little bit and say the tool is going to help you make this stew, and then you’ll sleep on it for a few days and then somewhere else, something new will pop out. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. I’m Mark McGranaghan, and I’m here today with my colleague Adam Wiggins. How’s it going, Adam?

00:00:30 - Speaker 2: I’m pretty good, Mark. I just got back from a short trip up to the Baltic Sea, which is a pretty easy train ride from where I live in Berlin.

This is the first real trip I’ve taken since, I guess, pandemic started, so about 667 months. And it was really refreshing, even though it was just a couple of days, and I was reminded of something you said when we, I think it was in our very 2nd episode of the podcast about having good ideas, which is how fresh surroundings refresh your brain creatively. And yeah, I had that there and it was really, was really that came to mind because I was really reminded of how much I, I missed that in this time where travel is not a part of our lives the way it used to be.

00:01:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m always surprised by how powerful that effect is. So today our topic is tools for thought. Now Adam, what does that mean for you?

00:01:21 - Speaker 2: Well, Tools for Though means a lot of things to me, but I think the first place my head goes to is Howard Rheingold’s classic book from, I think it was the 80s, where he details Xerox PARC and many of these visionary folks who are thinking about computing in its early days and what that could do for humans and our creative and productive lives.

But I actually stepped back even a little bit from there because the original tools for thought, I feel like are anything that lets you externalize your thoughts. And so pen and paper, you know, writing, language, uh, is the starting place there, the printing press maybe. Uh, but more in modern times, things like sketchbooks or I don’t know, in a startup office, you’ve got whiteboards in a school, you’ve got chalkboards, Post-it notes are a great tool for thought, in fact, because you can write down these little snippets of information and move them around maybe in a physical space with colleagues.

Um, there’s even something like, I remember at a team summit we had a few years back, might have even been there in the park in Seattle, you wanted to illustrate a point and ended up grabbing a stick and basically drawing a very simple diagram in the dirt, right? So anything that lets you really either make visual or somehow externalize what’s in your mind, I think is, is a type of tool for thought.

And that also includes, I think the cult of the consumption side, which is Um, what I usually call active reading. So a book and a highlighter together, I think is, is a type of tool for thought. The act of highlighting passages that you find impactful or relevant to what you’re trying to learn about makes this learning, this reading process into an active process and a learning one, and that, that becomes a tool for thought as well.

00:03:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’m sure we’ll dive into a lot of different kind of specific instantiations of tools for thought. But another way to think about this is, what is the problem you’re trying to solve here? Two possibilities, one would be, you’re trying to obtain the knowledge that has already been generated by someone else. You’re trying to learn some facts, memorize some figures, maybe uh retain some ideas and different tools for thought can help you with that. Another angle would be, you’re trying to generate new ideas, novel thoughts, and uh a tool might help you accomplish that as well. And I think actually which one you’re trying to do is quite important for which tool you choose.

00:03:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another reference I was looking up in prep for this episode was Andy Matzek’s work, and he’s got a piece called How Do We Develop Transformative Tools for Thought, and his work, his current research track is more on that learning, retaining side of things, these mnemonic devices and so on.

This is a nice article. I’ll I’ll link it to the show notes because he does on the later part of the article, he describes a lot of this history, particularly around the computing tools for thought, Steve Jobs and the bicycle for the Mind. Uh, he talks about that he thinks, quoting Alan Kay, who’s who’s one of the sort of big visionaries in this world, uh, as saying that actually medium for thought in some cases might be a better, better term, but for whatever reason, the, uh, the tools for thought seems to be the, the label that that stock.

So Andy’s work, I think it’s a good example of the how do you how do you get more out of what you’re trying to learn about and then there’s the having ideas or generating new thoughts or generating original ideas, which is obviously the space Muse is trying to plan or at least we’re trying to create a tool that can help the the end user to have better ideas to develop their ideas.

So yeah, coming back to the digital space, the Tools for Thought book spends time on, for example, the Xerox PARC lab that invented a lot of the modern GUI operating system and other things that we, we sort of take for granted in the modern computing world. There’s also folks like Doug Engelbart and his vision to augment human intellect. There’s people like Alan Kay who invented small talk and object-oriented programming, had this vision for a thing called a DynaBook that I guess you could say physically looked a lot like an iPad looks today, but was more focused on the creative and productive uses of computing. And there’s even stuff like, uh, or folks like Vever Bush, who wrote an essay that people still quote today from the 1940s about this thing called a Memax or this vision he had for a thing called a Memex. And I think one thing you get when people talk about these, uh, the Engelbarts and caves and bushes. They’re often sort of lamenting a future that maybe we were dreaming of in these times that then you look at today’s computing and for all the really impressive technology that we have and all the things that computers and software and the internet can do for us, in some ways, we didn’t really fulfill some of the beautiful vision that these folks had. In fact, I think some of those folks are even in some ways a bit bitter, you know, towards the end of their careers when they see all these startups and whatever, putting all this money into these shiny products that in fact are more kind of entertainment boxes rather than something designed to really elevate the human race.

00:06:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and Andy makes a point in his article that there are good economic reasons why that’s the case or why we would expect that to be the case. Um, essentially because new ideas and tools for thought are sort of public good, so it’s hard to capture economic value when you make innovations in that space. Um, but we still think it’s possible, um, both to have new ideas here and to build a business around it.

00:06:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess if we fast forward a little bit from the Halcyon.

Days of these, these computing visionaries in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, a little bit more to when personal computing became commonplace, maybe the 1990s, and I think what you see is when you, or at least when I think of productivity software really broadly speaking, I tend to think of authoring, what I usually call authoring applications. This is something like you use Illustrator, if you’re a designer or you use Microsoft Word, if you’re a writer, or use Excel if you’re a financial analyst. These are really designed for an end artifact. You’re producing something to be consumed by someone else. When you type into your word processor, it’s because eventually you want to publish that book or publish an article online. I think folks often do use these offering. Tools for the thinking phase. If you’ve ever opened your word processor or programmer, maybe use a text editor or something like that to sketch down some ideas, not what the intention is that’s ever going to be given to someone else, but to get your own, your own head together. Just because that’s the tool, you know how to use, it’s right there, but it’s not really designed for that. In fact, in a way, it’s it’s a poor fit, you just happen to know about it. And I’ve seen some really creative uses, uh, certainly on the, for people that like laying things out visually and spatially kind of like we. We strive for with Muse. We’ve seen, for example, um, we saw someone that did a master’s, did all their master’s thesis research in illustrator, because they wanted to lay out all these papers they were reading and the excerpts they were taking from them and how they all connect together. They wanted on this big spatial canvas. And it turns out that illustrator was the best choice for that at that time. Maybe nowadays people do that with figA somewhat, which I think is great, uh, that people are doing these innovative uses. But that was part of what led to the impetus for us wanting to build a tool for thought that was more something that’s purpose built for enhancing the individual’s or even a group’s thinking. Now in practice, because we’ve seen so few commercial tools for thought, I wonder if that means that either people don’t value that ideation step enough to want to invest in that. So that’s, you know, monetarily, do they want to pay for software, but it’s also just taking the time to learn a piece of software. Uh, or to put your data and your thoughts into a piece of software when that’s not the end place it’s going to be. Um, so I think that’s, that’s certainly a, you know, a risk or an open question for Muse and really anyone else that’s working on a Uh, on a tool for thought.

00:09:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think there’s a commercial piece there where the obviously biggest market is when you’re close to the end product that you’re producing for a business, and you’re producing a presentation, you’re producing a book, there’s obvious economic value that you want to attach to that and there’s a bunch bunch of people who obviously need to do that.

00:09:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that’s most notable when you, when you try to sell software to professionals, if you say one of the best pitches you can offer is this will make you look really good to your client. You will close more deals or you will impress your boss or you will get that big, that big deal that you’re trying to do and so presentation software or really good, you know, financial modeling or, you know, the word processor, that’s, that’s the value there is, is really clear to people. If you say this will make your ideas better or make your decisions better for some reason that that’s a less poignant sales pitch, I think.

00:10:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I keep coming back to this idea that there’s an incomplete understanding of the creative process.

We’ve long advocated for this. 3-step process where you’re 1, gathering raw materials, 2, actively reading, processing, ruminating, brainstorming on those materials, and then 3, offering an end product.

I think a lot of people think of the creative process as 1 and 3, because there’s obvious, you know, physical content that you’re dealing with in each of those cases that you have to pull in some raw materials like site in your paper, and you have to produce a paper at the end to send to the publisher, but you can kind of get away without doing the middle stuff without, you know, thinking. Um, or you can just do it all in your head, but the premise with Muse is that there’s a very powerful and important second step there that with the right tooling support can give you even more power as a thinker.

00:10:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one place that Tools for Thought has come back into the current conversation is the product Rome Research, who’s been getting a lot of traction among people who I think like to think deeply, particularly built around a daily journaling practice, which I think is a really A good way to get your thoughts out in a free form way. Uh, one of the things I remember them complaining about, if that’s the right way to put it, is being trapped in this category of note taking. Note taking is an interesting category because it seems to span a lot of things. You’ve got a classic like Evernote. Which in theory should be kind of a tool for thought. It’s supposed to be sort of a second brain. You put stuff into it, you can find it later. But the reality is it doesn’t necessarily help you find connections. I think it sort of failed to deliver on that promise. It’s maybe more of a knowledge base or knowledge store.

I use Dropbox for that, for example, and I think that’s true for a lot of notes apps, things we’ve talked about here before, something like a bear, for example. It’s a really nice way to quickly capture a thought, you know, on your smartphone and then you have access to it later, but it’s not really a place to do a lot of deep ideation. I don’t know, maybe you sketched down a few, few thoughts you have in bullet point form, but it’s not a good place for really freeform ideation and maybe that’s a place where Rome is helping change.

Things a little bit.

Uh, I also see this tool for thought, uh, sometimes applied to some other hot new products which include notion, which is more of a team wiki team brain kind of thing, but I think it can fit with that as well. FIMA, as previously mentioned, sometimes people use it as this kind of visual canvas, even something like Air Table, which is a spreadsheet, but often again, people use it in these team contexts to capture knowledge, uh, and to basically find shared understanding on the team. It’s not in. there’s no end artifact for the client. Uh, it’s more internal to what the team’s own sense of understanding of problem space.

00:12:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now what’s interesting to me is why are tools like this useful tools for thought.

I think some people would say it’s because for example, you can capture and store all this information and you can form explicit links between them and everything is organized and searchable, and I think there’s something to that.

There’s certainly um value.

In that use case, but I believe that most of the creative work the mind does, especially around generating new ideas, is not done in your thinking mind. It’s basically not done consciously.

You have this massively parallel process running in your background, including when you’re sleeping, that’s generating new ideas, forming, forming new connections, and you basically can’t think your way, can’t put 1 ft in front of the other to get to new ideas like that. You have to just kind of let it go wild and hope, hope it comes up with something.

And the way you feed that process is you ruminate over a lot of interesting intellectual material.

So the reason I think these apps are useful for two of thought is twofold. One is people like to use them. They just like to spend time writing notes in Rome and kind of regardless of where those notes end up or if you ever read them again, just the process of writing and thinking as you’re writing. Generates a lot of fodder for this process in your, in your sleeping mind. And number 2, increasingly these tools support multimedia, and I, I’ve long said creative thinking never takes uh just one medium, it’s never just text or just images and tools like Figma, it’s very easy to make a canvas where you have images and text and vector graphics and so on, all in one place. I think that’s important because that’s again, naturally how the mind thinks creatively.

00:14:08 - Speaker 2: For sure. I’m a big believer in the, as you said, feeding the sleeping mind problem, working on problems in the background, stew, and yeah, this externalizing your thoughts in some form is a way that helps you turn it over.

And that can be lots of different forms. It can be sketching, it can be writing, voice memoing is another interesting trick, even just talking to another person, right? This is where an open-ended chat, you know, the classic water cooler talk or just taking a walk and talking with a colleague, working through something that that helps see that that’s doing that background process in the brain, and I agree. Whatever it is should be enjoyable and comfortable. And so that means for uh something like in one of these analog tools, I think the reason why sketchbooks and mole skins and whatever have continued to have such a place in the heart of creative people like me and many others is that they’re just enjoyable. You grip a nice pen and the feeling that tactile feeling of your, your hand. Moving across the page, I think whiteboards, the whiteboard can have a similar feeling as well. And with digital tools you need, you need the same thing. If it’s fun and enjoyable to open a new notion page and assign it an emoji and drag in some media and type out your text and then share it with a colleague for discussion, then you’re going to want to do it. And then that in turn is a nice virtuous cycle.

00:15:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is a podcast about tools for thought, and I think it’s appropriate to, you know, keep it scoped, but I would say the human creative process is so much bigger than tools, things like uh the social element, you know, who you’re talking to and who you’re motivated by, uh, the physicality element, the position of your body, how it’s moving or not, the location element like we’re talking about in Intro. These are all super important and I think it’s easy for us as technologists to over rotate towards what’s on the rectangular screen when there’s so much more to the creative process. And again, it’s something we’ve tried to tap into with Muse so that for example, you can use it while you’re reclining on your comfy couch or you can use both your hands at the same time and use all the degrees of freedom you have in your arms, things like that.

00:16:04 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Related to that, one thing I wanted to ask you about. is whether you’ve read this book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Yep, classic. Yeah, I found myself thinking about that in this tools of thought context. So just to briefly summarize for for those that are not familiar, the author basically categorizes our ways of thinking in daily life in these two creatively named System One and System 2 brains. Where system one is more the, the fast thinking, the, the quick judgment, the, the immediate reaction, and the system two brain is slower, more analytical.

I especially like the system one brain’s main, the framing of the system one brain’s main job is this assessing normality, they call it, that is to say we have these built-in habits and assumptions about the world’s worldview and this. Just this way that we expect things to be, everything from how my furniture is arranged in my home to what the political landscape is like in my nation. Our system one brains are constantly taking stock of whether what they’re seeing fits into that established pattern and essentially kind of raises a flag or raises. Something into our attention when something breaks that pattern.

So that system one fast instinctive emotional brain, I think is pretty natural to reach for in certainly in social settings, but especially in information age, style, um, online gathering places, the social media and so on, whereas the system too. is obviously what we’re most interested in in our team and with the tool thought that we’re building, which is the slower, more deliberate, more logical, analytical, slower both in a literal time sense, but also in a sense of more consideration and purposely breaking the habits that are already in your mind. And trying to form new connections.

00:17:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s true, but I also think there’s value in domesticating if you will, the system one mind. It’s so powerful, but it’s also by default very wild and instinctual, but if you know, give it the right care and feeding with uh the, the right intellectual material. That you’re ruminating on to continue the animal meta for here, um, it can be very powerful. And again, I think this is especially true in your sleep, basically, where if you take in the right materials, do the right active reading, and if you give that a few days, you’ll often form interesting new connections and ideas.

00:18:26 - Speaker 2: For me, a go to technique is to literally sleep on it. And in fact, I’ve even brought this up often enough on Teams sometimes that people poke fun at me that my solution to any tough problem is to go to sleep, but I really find that so many breakthrough solutions or new ways of looking at something have occurred to me after that stepping away and particularly the restorative power of, of sleep and what happens to your mind at that time, and that obviously just actually requires Time you can’t if you’re trying to turn around a decision the same day, you can’t, you can’t sleep on it either literally or figuratively and so trying to maybe arrange your creative life or set things up in your work or other places where you want to make good decisions and have good ideas to allow yourself this time.

I know on the Muse team we often like to do things in part or each of us I’ve seen. likes to do things in parallel.

We may have a few different projects going on at a time that even maybe you switch back and forth between a little bit. Sometimes that can be lack of focus, which is, you know, a bad sign, but in some cases, I find this is a really effective way to work on something for a while, maybe get a little stuck or not be sure what the best path forward is, sort of step away, switch my contacts for a few days or something, and when I come back to it, I’m because in a way this background process has been working on the problem the whole time.

00:19:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then bringing it back to tools for thought. I think it’s important then that the tools not try to draw too straight of a line between ideas and steps.

Often I feel like tools are trying to, you know, you get the inputs in, you form the right connections, and then somehow the tool will like lead you to the right answer.

I think the process is just inherently much messier than that and you need to let go a little bit and say, The tool is going to help you make this stew and then you’ll sleep on it for a few days and then somewhere else something new will pop out and you might not even be able to see that straight line, right? and it might not be refied in the tool, but you have to trust that that process is going to happen in your sleeping mind.

00:20:19 - Speaker 2: Another area under tools for thought I was curious to get your take on is the role of attention and focus, and I touched on that with the System one brain and how it surfaces things to the to the system 2. In the process of doing deep work and going deep on a problem. We know it’s important to be able to focus on something deeply, but how do you see that as interacting with a tool for thought like news or these others we’ve talked about?

00:20:44 - Speaker 1: Well, now that you mentioned it, my half joking answer is that perhaps the most powerful tool for thought that I have is industrial strength noise canceling headphones, like the type you wear when you’re using a chainsaw. It’s actually very helpful in in slotting out the noise that I have here in the city.

00:20:58 - Speaker 2: On controlling noise in your environment. I think it was one of our very first email updates from use that we linked to a what I think of as a very useful tool in the Creative person’s toolkit, which is a white noise generator. In this case, it was one for the, for the iPhone, but I’ve used a web-based white noise generator that does, you know, rainfall and fireplace crackling and whatever that I can put into a pair of headphones, especially noise canceling headphones.

It can be really nice for particularly you’re in a noisy environment like trying to work on a plane or a train or something like that, because absolutely, it takes effort to keep your attention on something and the more that your environment demands your attention, the more you, the less effort you will have to spend on the thing you’re trying to focus on.

That’s why I like quiet office, uh, physical. that’s conducive to to doing work.

00:21:46 - Speaker 1: I think if there’s even the possibility that you’ll be distracted or pulled back from your creative thought process, it’s, it’s hard to get into it. I remember this when I was a full-time programmer, even that I had a meeting on my calendar at like 3 p.m. made it hard to do certain programming problems in the beginning of the day.

It’s because you knew at some point you were going to be in. and you had to break your train of thought. I think there’s the same dynamic happening if you know that that little red dot could come up or if you could get a notification pop on your screen.

So one idea we’ve had with Muse is to really be respectful and giving the creator control over if they’re ever going to have anything interrupt their work and anything else appear on their screen.

00:22:20 - Speaker 2: The reason I brought it up was that I see this as, I guess, coming back to this glorious vision for what computers could do for people. Some decades back and where we are today, attention or really a direct conflict between what you want out of call it consumption technology.

So when it comes to your phone and your messaging apps and your social media, precisely what you want is to feel connected.

You literally want to be interrupted. That is the feature, the feature of it. You want to feel connected to what’s going on and you know about the breaking news right away.

And when there’s some important message from from a thing that’s happened with your team. Or a thing that’s happened in your family that you’re going to find out, be connected to that, be able to turn around and respond immediately.

And that’s well and good, but it is just in direct opposition to what you want. If you want to sit down and get a really big chunk of productive work done, or particularly bring your energy and attention to bear on a problem that is maybe just past what you’re currently capable of doing, whether that’s a new thing you’re trying to learn, whether it’s because you’re an academic that’s trying to Develop a fresh idea that’s pushing the boundaries of science, whether it’s you’re a product creator or a startup person and you’re trying to You know, figure out the strategy for your company or something like that. You’ve got, you’ve got to really push yourself and you need every spare, or you need every single cycle of your brain computing power you can get and anything that draws your attention away or demands your attention interferes with that, makes you slightly less able to go after solving that problem.

00:23:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. I think a related idea on this. The theme of headspace and how you’re feeling is the aesthetics of the tool environment.

I think it’s really important that creators have control over the aesthetics of their environment and can change it to their taste. I think if we told an artist that you have to go into this studio, has to be exactly the size, you can only paint the walls this one gray color, you can only use this one paintbrush, you have these, you know, 4 colors you can use. Uh, you can only paint in the style. It’d be like, what are you talking about? We do that all the time with software. Your environment has to look like this and, and by the way, it often looks and it can, it can feel trivial just like to give us users this basic agency over what they’re doing in their environment. But I think it’s really important. One small example from you is we have these setting panels type things and most apps, when you open the settings type panel, you know, it goes in the upper left or it goes in the upper right, and that’s that, and hopefully you’re OK with it if it’s covering some of your content, well, too bad, but we had this idea that even for something as simple as Settings panel, you should be able to put it where you want to put it so that if you have something on the right hand side of your screen that you’re working on, you can put the settings panel left or vice versa. And just giving users basic agency over like over their environment like that I think is really important.

00:25:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think one of our get switch research pieces touched on the desire for creative types to nest, where basically when you walk into the professor’s office, when you walk into the designer’s studio, you tend to see an arrangement that reflects their personality, their certainly the needs of their work.

But also as a kind of home, kind of a creative home, and I think that connects not only to the utility of it, OK, I, I tend to use this one tool, physical tool, so therefore it’s sitting in a place that’s easy for me to reach my desk, but also just reflects this feeling of comfort, safety, familiarity, and I think you’re able to do your best work and be, be creative and productive and focus when you feel those things. And it’s much harder to do it an unfamiliar. environment, a sterile environment, one that, um, one that maybe isn’t adapted to your needs in the same way.

Going back to Andy’s great article about tools for thought, he has a section there where he talks a bit about sort of the machine learning AI stuff. Now I guess GPT 3 is the new, the new buzzy item, and this is a question I think I’ve run into quite frequently and when I talk about what I’ve worked on, what I’m working on here at Muse, what I’ve done. As well in the research lab, which is to kind of oversimplify the response that often, you know, if I say I’m working on tools for thought and kind of describe what that is, there’s a reaction that’s, well, pretty soon AI is going to be here and do all our thinking for us, so like what’s the point of that? And I don’t have a great answer to that. Uh, I don’t believe that in my heart, but maybe that’s because I’m incentivized not to believe it because I enjoy building tools for people to think and create. So maybe I’m, I have a little bit of a blind eye to it, but have you run into that question? If so, how do you think about the role of, let’s say AI, however you want to define that in tools for thinking and creativity?

00:26:49 - Speaker 1: Well, let’s say first that there are a lot of interesting areas where AI is vastly superior, but people are still really interested in learning.

So my favorite examples here are chess and go and other games like that.

The computers now are insanely powerful. People still love learning those games because there’s the intellectual challenge and the reward, and I I actually think a really interesting frontier for tools of thought is how do you leverage this amazing AI power to help people learn these games faster in a programmatic way. So I can imagine something in the style of Andy’s mnemonic medium, which is, in his case, it’s using space repetition to help you stay at the frontier of your knowledge, so you’re kind of when you’re on the brink of forgetting or when it’s most important to learn a concept is when it challenges you with a question. Um, I can imagine a similar thing um applied to a domain like a game where instead of having Some linear and predetermined set of lessons or problems, it plays you and says, OK, these are your weaknesses, um, you need to do some exercises in these three areas. I’m going to keep giving them to you until you master them, and then we’ll move on to the next area and that can all be done programmatically because these computers have a much better understanding of the game than we ever will, even experts.

00:27:51 - Speaker 2: Chess actually makes me think of this book I read a little while back by Garry Kasparov. I just looked it up. It’s called Deep Thinking where Machine intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.

And famously, this guy is both the chess, one of the world famous sort of um what’s the word for it, chess grandmaster or whatever, the the highest ranked chess player in the world for, for a period of time.

But he was the one who was first, the first time that the best human at chess in the world at the time was beaten by a computer, and many really heralded that it was this huge, certainly PR win for the people that were building these AI algorithms, but for a lot of people that it really heralded the beginning of call robots taking our job or the AI is going to be here or or what have you.

And he gets, it’s, it’s so interesting because on one hand, he just reflects on the experience of that just being so, I’m not sure what the word is for the, the, the, he walks through the experience of grappling with this alien intelligence or this thing that plays the game in a way that is so different from any how any human would.

Then he goes on to talk about how the game has changed in the years since, which is now it’s just taken for granted that chess computers are better than human players period.

But it didn’t necessarily lead to A generalized artificial intelligence for now you just, it’s computers can be extremely good at playing chess and that doesn’t really seem to lead to something beyond that.

You know, you can obviously go from there to, OK, now they can play go and they can play StarCraft. Maybe that does eventually lead to something general purpose. But the, but the point you mentioned that made me think of the book was he talked about how the game has changed in the form that really what it comes down to is humans and computers collaborate. To play their best game.

They analyze, for example, the games of the players that they’re going to go up against. So even if you’re not using a computer at the time of playing the game, your game has changed substantially because you have this computer, I don’t know what it is, assistant helping you in the, the training, the analysis, the pre-game, the postgame, um, and so in fact, we’re seeing that it’s not really that chess AI replaces human chess playing, it’s more that it’s, it’s just morph.

00:29:57 - Speaker 1: The whole mor the whole sport, right, and I think that points to the, the general future here. It’s, it’s not AIs taking over all our jobs and our work it’s more of a symbiosis and collaboration.

Perhaps the most obvious version of this is, uh, the AI is very good at generating a bunch of plausible possibilities, especially one like GPT 3, you know, just spits out a bunch of texts and maybe 90% of them are no better than plausible, like you read them closely, don’t really make sense, but 1 out of 10, the human can say, ah, that’s actually quite interesting. I’m going to pluck. That one for my business email or what have you. Um, so I think we’ll see a whole wave of tools like that, but otherwise I’ll believe that the takeover of AI when I see productivity statistics, which of course we haven’t for some decades.

00:30:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think on the creative tools in tandem or in symbiosis with a human generative design, I think is one area that’s got some, some buzz on that, and that’s the basic idea that you can feed a computer algorithm or or an AI of some kind.

A set of constraints for a problem you have, you know, you’re designing a building and you want it to be this, hold this many people and have these kinds of structural qualities and have these kinds of aesthetics qualities.

And it essentially generates you a bunch of options and then you can choose between them and kind of winnow winnow down this kind of assistive tools often that has to do with more the called the brute force, the ability to generate lots of options and lots of weird options potentially. Uh, actually, one place that um I’ve used that thing, not a, not AI but just an algorithm is in naming several different companies, including Hiroku and Inc and Switch. I basically wrote little programs that took some of our raw input that we brainstormed. And combine them together in every feasible way. In the case of Inc and Switch, we knew we wanted two words separated by an ampersand. We came up with every word for each slot A and slot B that we wanted, and I just wrote a program that spit out every single possible combination, and we could go through them and look for what we liked best. That that that’s pretty far from generative design, I suppose. But, but it fits into this general assistive tools thing. And certainly one thing I, I hear from folks a lot when they talk about this is, OK, we, we’ve come to accept autocorrect in our writing.

00:31:58 - Speaker 1: Uh, what’s the autocorrect for though I feel like autocrack is getting worse. It’s just like it’s going rogue. It says underlining random words now.

00:32:04 - Speaker 2: I actually did an experiment some, I, I got it irritated enough with autocorrect in terms of it’s great when it works, but when it doesn’t, it’s way more effort to go back and correct or, yeah, it’s way more, more effort to get what you want.

I did an experiment for a little while of just turning off autocorrect on my phone.

Actually, you know what, I think I was about as fast. I was like slower overall, uh, or slower on individual words that autocorrect would have gotten, but if you took away the correcting for mistakes, uh, thing that I so often had to do it, I think it came out as kind of a net wash, and then also not being there was definitely an emotional win to not being frustrated with the thing, uh, auto correcting a person’s name or whatever for the 10th time.

00:32:46 - Speaker 1: Another potential angle on AI and tools for thought is via social networks.

As much as I like tools and and software, it’s probably the case that the most powerful technologies, if we will, that we have for thought are the social networks and the institutions that we participate in.

The thoughts that we have are so influenced by our friends, our colleagues who are talking to what we’re seeing, and of course, we’re seeing a lot of that happening via social networks these days, and there’s a lot of ways you can say that’s bad or troublesome, and there’s certainly some work to do, but just something like YouTube or Twitter, being able to help you find people in your area of interest. To talk to and learn from is, is very powerful and I think there’s actually a lot more we could do in that space that is using AI to build robust social networks and in turn helps you have better thoughts.

00:33:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that also connects back to the creative fodder idea, as we’ve said many times before, ideas don’t come from nowhere. They’re they’re brickage of other ideas. Where does that come from? Well, exposing yourself to as many different ideas as you can through as many sources as you can. Something like Twitter, for example, is just a really amazing place to do that. YouTube as well can be.

Now, I think it’s hard or even impossible to have your own ideas or have original ideas if you’re constantly plugged in. Same thing is true at a like a work or a team level, your company’s slack, your whatever other formats you have for connecting with your colleagues, it’s really powerful to be connected to that group mind. And be influenced to bombarded by and influenced by all the ideas and opinions.

But in the end, if you want to have an original thought, I think you need to disconnect from that a little bit. But to completely disconnect, you’ll just won’t have that fodder.

But if you’re plugged in all the time, you’ll just never have an original thought because you’re just being pushed to and fro by everyone else’s ideas. And so there’s some pendulum swing of connection to isolation, where you can connect for a while, get all that fodder, disconnect a little bit, go a little deeper on your own ideas, come back and reconnect.

So thinking about the future, we’ve already seen some exciting movement in tools for thought, making it into production or commercial environments with things like notion, Rome, Sigma, as well as great research work like Andy’s work on mnemonic devices, or something like Aki, the space repetition. Uh, system that’s, it’s kind of related to that. What do you think the future holds, particularly given the, the public goods problem you mentioned earlier of how this stuff gets funded? Are we gonna enter a renaissance where we can maybe finally reach the beautiful vision that these folks from the 60s and 70s, 80s outlined? Do you think there’s a new direction where things will go? Uh, is it going to continue to be hard to get tools of thought? Built in today’s world.

00:35:27 - Speaker 1: The economics problem is going to remain hard but not insurmountable, which I mean these things are inherently somewhat of a public good. It’s hard to fund them slash capture the value when you make great tools and I think that’s going to be the case for the foreseeable future given the social technology that we have.

But that said, I feel like it’s still very doable to make a lot of progress in these areas and it just takes a bit of, of will and vision and perhaps The the willingness to forego maximum economic return for yourself personally, but I feel like even small teams with today’s technology can make a lot of progress and I think we’re seeing that.

And then I think in the substance of the tools, I think first of all, we’re going to continue to see certain trends keep playing out. So one is this trend of uh mixed media and multimedia in the same tool. I think that’s very important, I think with tools like Notion and Sigma and Rome, people are becoming more and more accustom. that and that’s going to be baked in and we’re going to be less tolerant of tools that are strictly for one medium. I think another trend that we’re continuing to see is the improved aesthetics slash the consumerization of industrial strength thinking tools, which again I think is great.

00:36:26 - Speaker 2: Needs to be fun, fast, a little playful. You could argue that Moleskin, which is a, you know, just a sketchbook company, but I definitely count them as a tool for thought. They’re more expensive than but no better in a practical sense than a GP paper notebook, but people like how they feel, they like how they look, and that aesthetic element makes a difference for, I think you. Your ability to do good creative work.

00:36:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and one other existing trend that I see continuing and accelerating is leaning on video slash video games.

These are mediums that were hard to use or hard to produce content for even 5 or 10 years ago, and now the technology is such that basically anyone can make really high quality content in these areas and so we’re seeing more more and more of that, YouTube being the predominant example, but I think video and Slash the video game model will be integrated more into Tools for Thought.

And then looking forward, OK, I think there’s a fairly obvious bet about AI that we talked about. I think that one’s been played out a fair amount on Twitter and so on. So I won’t go into that too much here.

But if I had to pick one less obvious trend to bet on, it would be, but if I had to pick one new trend to bet on, it would be leveraging software to enhance these traditionally non-toolly aspects of the creative process. So, the social side, the physicality side, things like that. I think those are kind of two pretty different worlds historically, um, but I see more tools, uh, bridging that gap and leveraging the importance of those spaces for your creative process.

00:37:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, very interesting. What are some examples of products or companies or um tools that you’ve seen that tap into this community and people’s side of things.

00:38:00 - Speaker 1: So it’s often the case that gaming industry was the leader here. So there are now these incredibly sophisticated communities around individual video games where people follow creators who they’re really interested in, and it started as just kind of watch someone playing the video game, then they become these, these social environments where there’s a kind of community around it, and then it becomes a way to learn how to play the game. Like there’s a bunch of tutorials and lessons and you learn from other people in the community and you watch each other play and stuff. Like that, and that’s all mediated by technology, um, because it’s, it’s otherwise very hard for these people to find their community because there might be 1000 people in the world who are really into this niche video game and who are playing at a high level with the right tools and platforms between like Twitch, YouTube, and the game itself, for example, and Discord, you can, you can form a community.

00:38:44 - Speaker 2: And I’ll note that that includes not just playing games.

But also like speed running or something like that, but also includes creating the games.

Many indie game developers stream themselves, program the game designing game on Twitch. People jump in and watch that and learn from them.

And there’s also, yeah, huge YouTube communities and channels and things around just generally learning to program and learning all kinds of technical skills.

Certainly I’ve learned things about video editing and things like that. Through, through YouTube.

So this kind of watch a creator or producer use some sophisticated piece of software to do some, do their creative process, maybe thinking out loud as they do. That’s a really powerful way to share tacit knowledge about how people do what they do.

00:39:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then I think it’s like you’re saying, it’s trickling down from games into more like professional environments or tradecraft environments, things like you said, Photo editing, video editing, or things like woodworking, there are now sophisticated communities around that and online tools we can learn.

But then I think bringing it back to tools for thought, we’re starting to see these, these communities and tools form around more like intellectual topics and ideas.

So there’s, there’s a bit of a progress studies community developing, for example, now we have podcasts and classes and Twitter. Cohorts and some slacks and some discords and those feel pretty early, but it feels like we’re bringing some of those patterns and sensibilities from the gaming world and into these more intellectual domains.

00:40:12 - Speaker 2: Well, that comes back to that I think when we say tools for thought, sometimes you talk about maybe for example methodologies, how to work things like getting things done or inbox zero or building a second brain or something like that. Um, so you’ve got communities, you’ve got Software that you run, you’ve got analog tools, you’ve got uh techniques and methodologies. So really this is, I guess, a lot, a lot broader than just as you said earlier, what goes in the rectangle.

00:40:40 - Speaker 1: And also I think technology is going to infuse all these other areas and we’re going to have a sort of Technologies for thought, if you will, um, both software per se, but also communities, networks, methodologies, habits, institutions, Twitter threads, and so on, all working together to help people develop better ideas.

00:40:59 - Speaker 2: Well, that makes me pretty excited for the future of being a thinker and a creative person.

00:41:04 - Speaker 1: Well, with that, I think we can wrap it, and if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at musesApp.com by email. We love to hear your comments and especially ideas for future episodes.

00:41:18 - Speaker 2: See you later, Mark.

00:41:19 - Speaker 1: See you, Adam.