.@QiaochuYuan: "I need tuning so bad malcolm omg" (referring to being able to set diff moods on various apps like twitter or youtube) Me:
Why our tools are so bad: living in the future about thought
11 tweets · February 2021 · 33 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter
> I'm not working on this directly myself, nor do I know someone who is, but I'm working on creating a meta-team to effectively identify things like this that need to exist & make them exist, iterating until ppl are more satisfied than they'd even imagined
QC: > i am into it! > you’ve been a big inspiration in helping me notice this sort of stuff > & now i can’t stop omg malcolm why are our tools so bad > except @RoamResearch > this feels genuinely important like i should downgrade my belief in the efficiency of the tech ecosystem
Me: > Something something original seeing > VC funding rounds probably related but not a leverage point > Well I guess like, roam not having easy access to funding years earlier is kinda bad > But also that's a huge lemon problem QC: yeah no kidding
QC: > so you think the bottleneck actually is ideas? hmm. could be you get used to seeing things the dominant way if you immerse yourself into the ecosystem. hmm. Malcolm: > Bottleneck is not exactly ideas but the right ideas? + execution? Fractal ideas?
Malcolm: > This is why I emphasize metaphor design, although on its own it's not enough QC: > but don’t these guys go to burning man and microdose acid > maybe they keep their feelings and spiritual stuff separate from their work stuff tho
QC: > maybe it is just that they spend their time at work doing work stuff so they’re forced to think in work frame idk Malcolm: > That's a huge part of how the assumptions get reinforced > it's not incidental that Conor wasn't working at a big company when he came up with Roam
Malcolm: > Various VCs have talked about how a founder is someone living in the future > & lots of people at Google are living in the future wrt technical work, cloud, ML, etc > but not in relation to play, relationships, value, meaning, ontology, etc
This doesn't fully explain why they're not coming up with tools like Roam that would improve their capacity for development etc… I think the unquestioned assumption thing above = not living in the future wrt eg "what is a thought?" / "what is meaningful information?" …ironic:
(there was more to our chat, that I also want to post, but for now @QiaochuYuan and I have followed a momentum-wave and are spontaneously hopping on a zoom call to co-watch Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos) youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-z…
Also, if you want to spontaneously join us, as part of exploring living in the future wrt remote conversation, here's a zoom link to our call! (Probably up for the next 1-2h) us02web.zoom.us/j/87304842540?…