(2021-02-04) Interview With Conor White-Sullivan Of Roam Research Full Transcript

Anne-Laure LeCunff: Interview with Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research. In 2008 or so, I got really interested in collective intelligence. I mean, it’s pretty obvious now with coronavirus that the systems that we have, the institutions that we have, aren’t able to make fast decisions—fast, informed decisions in uncertain times.

shift the paradigm of comment-based content

I was originally interested in figuring out how you could figure out what’s actually true online

A thing that gets vetted on Wikipedia has to have first been published in the New York Times or something like that, or from some other third party. And I didn’t think that that was going to work going into the future. So, the first problem that I worked on was trying to do this for hyper-local politics.

crowdsource the pros and cons of any policy change that was gonna happen in that town

storing ideas as just strings of text doesn’t actually allow you to do any of the more challenging work

no one person’s gonna be able to read everything that every single person says, you need a better way to actually see the structure of arguments, or the structure of trade-offs in a decision, or all the competing factors in the decision. (Structured Writing)

I eventually figured out that to solve the problem, a simpler problem to solve, was how does one person take 20 different people that they’re reading and start to create some sort of synthesis or math-like map of the idea space, across a bunch of different books that they’re reading, or a bunch of different observations or conversations that they’re having, and gradually be able to index into the individual things.

And then the specific thing that I found really helpful was Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”, where he talks about this idea of syntopical reading.

So there was a project in the 50’s. It was called the Great Books Series, where this guy, Mortimer Adler, and I think it was Encyclopedia Britannica, they got all the books of western canon and they indexed all the places in Hagel and Kant and John Locke and all of those classic books of western thought

it would be a lot better if it wasn’t just these 50 books that people had decided

we’ve always wanted to build a layer on top of the web where every person can have their mental model of how the whole world works, and they can start to share ideas across everything. (worldview)

You first mentioned speed of thinking, and then when you think about taking notes and creating an archive of your thoughts, which is more like depth of thinking. How do you see Roam helping with connecting the two, thinking fast and thinking better?

you need to be able to get compound interest ([[compounding]) on your thoughts. Good ideas come from when ideas have sex basically: the intersection of different things that you’ve been reading or different things you’ve been seeing.

that’s the core idea in the Zettelkasten. You move a little bit slower as you go through a book. But you get some nuggets of thought articulated that then end up allowing you to produce, and when it comes time for you to write something it’s much faster because you’ve already done a bunch of that ahead of time.

right now, Roam’s a real-time collaborative, so you can have multiple people in a single workspace. I think the real opportunity for us is when you can share notes across databases and across workspaces. So I would say that today, the level of collaboration isn’t quite… It’s much more limited.

Because, for example, if we’re taking the super slow grandfather version of Roam. Like Wikipedia, for example, where it’s lots of people collaborating on content and connecting the dots

I see a pretty strong difference from Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia has this idea that it is possible to get to a single source of truth. Through that slow deliberation, moderation process, there’s a neutral point of view and there’s one thing which just reflects reality, and I think that’s completely bullshit.

It’s more similar to a federated Wiki. So the guy who invented Wiki, Ward Cunningham, realized that, I think even before Wikipedia came out, that Wikis don’t allow you to deal with original research.

if I like some of your thoughts on like how to use Roam efficiently, and you’ve made those thoughts public and you’ve made this reusable, I can just grab them and put them into my workspace

So when I think about the future of collaborative thinking, I think more about how Visakan Veerasamy uses Twitter of just threads on threads on threads. And when he’s making threads, he’s re-tweeting himself, he’s re-tweeting other people, he’s searching through Twitter to find the appropriate tweet for each thread.

see if somebody has a critique. There’s a lot of complicated design problems for us to solve when you’re thinking about the multiplayer version of it

There’s a cool Roam right now where… I’m actually collaborating with one of our users on it, where we’re mapping out all the transcripts of some Eric Weinstein’s podcasts... he makes about 100 claims inside that article

Roam does feel like a second brain. But it’s still tethered to my brain,

how do you think about discovering stuff that other people created?

just write all the things they’re thinking. And I think that the first thing that we’re interested in is, how do you build systems so that it’s easy for you to take those and basically gradually refine them

need to have a habit of tagging something basically as a To-Do to synthesize the idea further, and then periodically go back and review those and write them in a more crisp language

What are some ways you think people can use Roam right now to tackle the pandemic?

We’d bootstrapped the company by working with a bunch of people in the field of AI research, particularly AI safety. So folks who were at the Center for Existential Risk, and Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and Center for Effective Altruism were some of the earliest people that we were building the tool for.

But I think for most people, now, if you’re not an epidemiologist and you’ve never done anything in biology, or figuring out supply chains or manufacturing, now probably isn’t the time to just start trying to teach yourself everything

It’s a crazy opportunity for people to do deep work, because a lot of the other normal distractions of daily life have been remove

I do think it’s a time where people can think about what comes after this, the world’s gonna look really different. We’ve lost a bunch of trust in our institutions... People are having to homeschool their kids, or are being forced to homeschool their kids. So maybe that’s more topical. It’s like if you have kids that you need to teach and you want to figure out how to create some sort of dependency graph of… Help them learn how to map out their questions... guides for autodidacts... here’s some better ways to think about teaching yourself the things you wanna learn

this is a good time for you to think about religion, or mythology, or reading the books that have been on your shelf for forever that you actually wanna dive into, and get into some philosophy. I think it’s a great opportunity, or learn a skill that you’ve wanted to learn for a long time.