Book: Tales from the Ant World by E. O. Wilson

With this post I aim to synthesize some ideas from the Tools for Thought movement (e.g. Roam) with Systems Thinking (e.g. feedback loops). The result, as advertised in the title, is a tool for helping people think in systems. Let me first explain what I'm talking about, then walk you through some design considerations, and finally show you a prototype which takes a description of a system and converts it into causal loop diagram. Imagine if every news article included a little visual explainer to help you understand the story better.
If you're impatient (who can blame you?), here's a quick demo:
Five links that stood out to me over the summer:
Spring has sprung, as have five more links to things I enjoyed reading over the last three months:
This year, rather than posting a digest of links monthly, I'm doing the same quarterly, aiming for five to ten of my favorite links every three months. I read 128 articles over January, February, and March, and favorited about 30% of them. In retrospect, here are the magnificent seven that really stuck with me:
Days after capturing a "new" insight, it can be humbling to realize that you are repeating yourself. This might not be a bad thing, as you mull over a complex idea in its various forms over the course of many weeks. But what if your note taking app could act as a co-pilot? It could surface similar notes that are relevant to your current writing, and if you use such a system for long enough, help you synthesize across your own thinking over many years. You might want to link to the semantically related note, or to merge with it entirely. Building on a previous technique, I implemented this idea as an Obsidian plugin: