Henrik Karlsson

Child­hoods of ex­cep­tional people

Cul­ti­vat­ing a state of mind where new ideas are born

Ei­genKarma: trust at scale

Pop­u­lar ed­u­ca­tion in Swe­den: much more than you wanted to know

Net­works of Trust vs Markets

Al­most ev­ery­one I’ve met would be well-served think­ing more about what to fo­cus on

A blog post is a very long and com­plex search query to find fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple and make them route in­ter­est­ing stuff to your inbox

Scal­ing Net­works of Trust

Con­ver­sa­tional canyons

First we shape our so­cial graph; then it shapes us

Us­ing GPT-3 to aug­ment hu­man intelligence

Ap­pren­tice­ship Online

Scrap­ing train­ing data for your mind

Christo­pher Alexan­der’s ar­chi­tec­ture for learning

Reader-gen­er­ated Essays

Be­ing pa­tient with problems

The Learn­ing System

[Question] What to op­ti­mize for in life?

• Henrik Karlsson 2 Jul 2021 19:18 UTC

  15 points

  on: The Zet­telkas­ten Method

  This post was one of several nudges that made me change my note-taking system. Definitely the best thing that has happened me since, I don’t know, having my daughter. So thanks a ton.

  I do it digitally, with Obsidian, so I have to be principled to keep the notes atomic. What I like about having the notes digitally is that I can use them like functions. I make their titles statements, instead of numbers, and so I can “call” them from other notes if I want to use a certain statement in a syllogism for example.

  The really cool thing happens when I read something that makes me go update a note: sometimes that makes me change the title because I refined or changed my understanding, and then that is cascaded out into all the notes that reference it. That helps me with the mental mountains problem: notes in other domains get updated, even if I don’t realize that the new piece of information is relevant there when I make the update. Later, when I return to those notes, I can see that the syllogism no longer adds up to what I thought before and I can update there, instead of keep my old belief unaffected by the changes in other parts of my network, they way I did before changing note-taking system.

  There is also something very generative about refactoring notes that grow to big, or merging notes from different parts of the network if they repeat similar thoughts. Often that helps me generalize and go more abstract so my notes can function in several different networks. That has improved my thinking. And I don’t think I could do that with paper notes.

  I’m only 4 months in, so it will be interesting to see how it scales, and if my old notes will go stale the way you experienced.

• Henrik Karlsson 8 Feb 2023 22:02 UTC

  11 points

  9

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Ei­genKarma: trust at scale

  The first is a point we think a lot about. What is the correlation between what people upvote and what they trust? How does that change when the mechanism changes? And how do you properly signal what it is you trust? And how should that transfer over to other things? Hopefully, the mechanism can be kept simple—but there are ways to tweak it and to introduce more nuance, if that turns out to make it more powerful for users.

  On the second point, I’m not sure gaming something like EigenKarma would in most cases be a bad thing. If you want to game the trust graph in such a way that I trust you more—then you have to do things that are trustworthy and valuable, as judged by me or whoever you are trying to game. There is a risk of course that you would try to fool me into trusting you and then exploit me—but I’m not sure EigenKarma significantly increases the risk of that, nor do I have the imagination to figure out what it would mean in practice on the forum here for example.