Have you any further thoughts about where the content for this project would come from?
Yeah; here’s a sketch, from a few different directions:
What: I think the first stage is organizing stuff that already exists and is pretty well-collected: going thru the Sequences, the CFAR handbook, Thinking and Deciding, clearerthinking.org, and so on. I think the second stage casts a broader net, and is something like the process that made The Personal MBA, which is basically a book-length distillation of a ton of business books into their basic concepts; I have a shelf of psychology / self-help books which I think could similarly be distilled into a handful of patterns each. The third stage is something like original research / pushing the frontier forward—finding the holes and filling them, running comparative experiments in areas where we don’t have much data or experience, and so on.
[I describe them as ‘stages’ but I expect them to happen simultaneously, with the stages as my guess of where the bulk of the effort will go when. I also basically don’t expect to run out of content to mine; I’m more worried about running out of a sense that organizing the content is worth doing.]
Who: I expect there to be 1-5 people who put significant effort into this, followed by a long tail of people making minor changes, and am imagining that a basically open setup makes more sense than trying to vet entrants (after all, it’s easy to revert changes).
Meta: I think I’m planning on mostly ‘trying it and seeing what happens, iterating on the fly’, as there are a bunch of unknowns that are pretty cheap to just run into and see how they resolve. [For example, I can imagine a world where there are a bunch of CFAR developers who are quite into this / paid by CFAR to work on it, and another world where it’s all basically ignored by them; can imagine it being useful for people to coordinate on splitting up effort vs. just doing whatever makes sense; can imagine putting a bunch of work in to shepherd this vs. it having a life of its own.]
Yeah; here’s a sketch, from a few different directions:
What: I think the first stage is organizing stuff that already exists and is pretty well-collected: going thru the Sequences, the CFAR handbook, Thinking and Deciding, clearerthinking.org, and so on. I think the second stage casts a broader net, and is something like the process that made The Personal MBA, which is basically a book-length distillation of a ton of business books into their basic concepts; I have a shelf of psychology / self-help books which I think could similarly be distilled into a handful of patterns each. The third stage is something like original research / pushing the frontier forward—finding the holes and filling them, running comparative experiments in areas where we don’t have much data or experience, and so on.
[I describe them as ‘stages’ but I expect them to happen simultaneously, with the stages as my guess of where the bulk of the effort will go when. I also basically don’t expect to run out of content to mine; I’m more worried about running out of a sense that organizing the content is worth doing.]
Who: I expect there to be 1-5 people who put significant effort into this, followed by a long tail of people making minor changes, and am imagining that a basically open setup makes more sense than trying to vet entrants (after all, it’s easy to revert changes).
Meta: I think I’m planning on mostly ‘trying it and seeing what happens, iterating on the fly’, as there are a bunch of unknowns that are pretty cheap to just run into and see how they resolve. [For example, I can imagine a world where there are a bunch of CFAR developers who are quite into this / paid by CFAR to work on it, and another world where it’s all basically ignored by them; can imagine it being useful for people to coordinate on splitting up effort vs. just doing whatever makes sense; can imagine putting a bunch of work in to shepherd this vs. it having a life of its own.]
https://patterns.obormot.net/