Spanning problem-space
Determining how best to improve one’s own suite of mental models & thinking tools is a hard problem: we can’t easily see ideas beyond the horizon, and ideas we haven’t yet invested effort in developing are distorted at best, but determining the value of ideas is necessary because of the scarcity of time & other resources. This is further complicated by the fact that knowledge-seeking is not a single-player game: everyone is constantly refining their suite of mental models, making decisions based on them, and producing material that makes certain ideas more or less accessible, and the value of a mental model is determined in part by the people who share it or share adjacent models, in somewhat complicated ways.
My current idea of how best to improve the value of one’s suite of mental models is based on a couple assumptions:
- Ideas are adjacent to each other in semantic space based on shared attributes.
- It is easier to learn an idea if it is adjacent to an idea you’ve already learned. The ease with which an idea is learned is proportional to the number of adjacent ideas already learned.
- Adjacency in semantic space, seen as a network, is a web, not a tree. Some ideas are adjacent to each other even when none of their immediate peers are adjacent — such as when seemingly unrelated ideas in seemingly distinct fields have striking similarities.
- A factor in the value of an idea is its adjacency to other valuable ideas. Part of this is ease of communication: when we have a…
