Concrete Book Club Idea

• #[[E: Ad hoc book clubs]]
• Goal
  • getting a deeper understanding of the book
  • generating artefacts and processes that help us retain that knowledge in the long-term
  • possibly generating public artefacts useful for others
  • getting much wider perspectives through the diversity of group members
• Book
  • Thinking Fast and Slow
    • pro
      • interesting and relevant to many of us
      • Andy Matuschak specifically called it out as an example of a book that many of us have read, but few retain much understanding from
    • con
      • very long (is it possible to choose sections, or are there sections that are fluffy and can be quicky skimmed?)
  • could also be something like Knowledge Cartography edited volume
• Participants
  • How much energy do we expect for how long?
    • do people have to commit to a certain cadence or drop-in/drop-out
    • enable peripheral participation - seeing our work and commenting, posting on Twitter etc?
  • How Roam-centric is it, how much familiarity with technical tools, or specific processes?
  • Initially people like Jon, Joel etc, but could be expanded to people at Minerva, CSCL people, big communities
• Cadence
  • One chapter or more per time unit (two weeks?). Would be useful to be able to divide it into chunks of equal "idea density" - maybe someone who has read it could do that
  • Reading book, and then spending several weeks organizing ideas instead of just chapter by chapter and that's it... But hard to keep momentum going?
• Synchronous ideas
  • silent meetings - how would that work focused more on exploration than taking decisions
    • the P2PU course on CSCL, with editing in Etherpad
  • can we use Minerva platform?
  • FROG?
• Annotations
  • Hypothes.is on a pirate PDF?
  • Collecting Kindle highlights and overlaying them for a heatmap (doable, but useful?)
• Automated emails
  • reproducing Email-driven SRS by Quantum Country
  • JSON dumps of Roam pages, and a script that automatically merges comments to the same block
• Roamex
  • Download JSON dump every day and have a script that uses updated-at and updated-email or other things to generate change logs, email diffs etc?
  • Importing JSON over existing JSON fails, because IDs are identical, if we were able to overwrite, would be able to update externally
• Individual writing
  • Writing prompts, questions - write before you see anyone else's reactions
  • Are there study group questions for this book anywhere?
• Note taking/summaries
  • useful to have some kind of summary, at least as a roadmap/collective thing to refer to (maybe there are good notes already we can use)
  • stimulate questions and connections, applications
    • somehow use Knowledge Building scaffolds?
  • epistemic fact checking - distributed looking into citations and seeing how well he represents them
  • collectively building an argument map of the points he makes, and the evidence?
    • then reading another book on mind/thinking etc (maybe from different perspective), and seeing how they contrast, the evidence maps mesh
      • could be distributed - one group reading Kahneman, another reading another book. could we generate questions for the other group?
        • flash mob - let's read 10 books on brain science in teams of four, and figure it all out...
• Public artifacts
  • What would be useful for
    • people who are not planning to read the book
    • people who have not yet read the book, but plan to
    • people who have read the book
    • second cohort of book club members
• Spaced repetition
  • reproducing Email-driven SRS by Quantum Country
  • collectively creating cards
  • sharing privately created cards
  • collecting SRS analytics, to determine which cards are more useful? But what is a good metric - retention? Understanding in five months? How to test, how to isolate?
• Experiment
  • Are there hypotheses that we can formulate up front?
  • Is there data that we should be collecting during the process?
  • With a shorter book - we could iterate faster (run again, organized differently)
  • Lead to some kind of public write-up of the process
  • Second cohort?
• Expert visitors
  • Could bring in someone from Minerva for example (faculty in neuroscience) once we have specific questions that stump us
• Using our Zettelkasten
  • being able to bring in notes and comments from other books
  • but problem is that we can spend the rest of our lives discussing these issues, with the book as a thin alibi