the sphere of knowledge
thoughts on ideas, digital gardens, and Sid Meier's Civilization V
howdy friends, happy wednesday!1
We will never fully explore the universe; as it expands faster than the speed of light, we are trapped inside of our little bubble of what we can observe.
If knowledge had a physical form, I'd imagine it would work pretty similarly. Ideas fly by us like stars in the night sky, each inhabiting its own little corner of space. I will personally only meet a handful of ideas throughout my lifetime; as a species, all of our greatest experts combined could only amass enough universal knowledge for a rounding error preceded by a scary number of zeroes.
I use Obsidian for all of my writing, note-taking, and organizing. One of its features is a graph view, which illustrates each note as a colored dot. If I put a link to a note inside another note, it creates a link between the dots.
Graph View is a breathtaking sight. Even if it's useless as a navigation tool, it's fun to watch it grow and take shape as my constellation of written knowledge expands outwards. I can see the fragmented thoughts at the outer edges clash with the dense, central webs of things I've spent hundreds of hours thinking about.
An increasing number of people are devoting their lives towards meticulously categorizing their mental models of the world into little, interconnected notes like these. They've christened the discipline of digital gardening2, treating each blossoming idea as a seed in need of regular cultivation. Digital gardens change constantly, and urge their caretakers to keep expanding, connecting, and weeding out published notes.
Digital gardening stands in stark contrast to the traditional layouts for bloggers and writers. Here on Substack, for example, we make standalone posts and publish them one after another, at specific times. Once they're out, they might get an edit or two but rarely change entirely.
As I touched upon this in my previous post, I actually prefer the traditional paradigm for now. Having a reader-friendly archive of my growth as a writer, creator, and person is more useful, I think, than if I took you to my barren plot of land and said, "look at all those seeds! aren't they pretty?". Hopefully, this will change one day.
tall and wide
One of my pandemic pastimes was playing many a game of Civilization V with my friends. They were very good at it, and our hours-long calls would often involve intricate strategy discussions (interweaved with lots of bribery, nuclear armament, and cursing out the barbarians, of course).
One of the most pivotal strategy decisions would be whether you wanted your civilization to be tall or wide.
Wide civilizations sought to emulate the height of the British Empire, settling and conquering anything in their sights over vast swaths of the world.
In contrast, tall civilizations could nurture only a few cities— but they were each incredibly powerful, and could be well-fortified with a much smaller army.
The tall-versus-wide decision lends itself to many situations. Think about the type of person who hedges all their bets on a single winning stock, versus someone who exclusively buys index funds. Or, someone with a massive network of acquaintances versus another who sticks to their tight circle of best friends.
The world of learning also offers such a choice. Would you rather cast a wide net at the surface to catch thousands of fish, or dive into the deepest trenches in search of larger unknowns?
Personally, I'm very much a wide player when it comes to knowledge. I write words; I engineer; I design; I make music; whenever someone asks me, "what do you do?" I can never give a satisfying answer.
While I can't claim to be an expert in any one field, I enjoy dipping my toes in a lot of seemingly unrelated things at once and discovering novel connections between them. If I spend too much time focusing on one thing, I get antsy about the 100 other things I also want to do at the same time.
If my own knowledge had a physical form, I'd imagine it to look something like a sphere. It would be as close to the huge, massive sphere of all human knowledge as that sphere were to the set of all possible things we could possibly know.
Meanwhile, an expert's knowledge would appear more spindly, growing up and up towards the ceiling until it finally broke through and expanded what we knew as a species. I have tremendous respect for everyone who devotes their lives towards such an endeavor, but it's not something I could envision myself doing.
Even though building tall has a much clearer technological benefit, I still think going wide is just as important. A whole bunch of isolated ideas aren't useful without those of us willing to build the bridges across them as well. In a world flooded with information, I hope to make it that much easier to discover what you're looking for.
-bencuan
🏝️extras
food for thought: the ambling mind - L. M. Sacasas
To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us. Perhaps this is the deeper fitness we should actually be after.
stalk my online reading: Curius
stalk my offline reading: bencuan.me/bookshelf
stalk me on twitter: @bencuan_
it’s actually wednesday for once! huzzah!
If you'd like to become a digital gardener, there are lots of resources. For more on the history and philosophy of the practice, my favorite expositions are Joel Hooks' and Maggie Appleton's thoughts. To put your thoughts out into the world, check out Quartz or Obsidian Publish.