 This is the Neobooks call for Monday, December 18, 2023, and Rick had just asked me a great question, which I will answer briefly, but it'll take us places, probably especially since you're on the call now, but I like the background. It's really nice. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it's a real place, but you're not there, right? Or is it completely? It's a fictitious place. It's a place that does not exist on the planet. Synthesized, yeah. Yeah. It's a synthetic image that looks like an actual real place, yeah, but nobody painted that mural. And that diving bird is just a smudge of pixels. I'll have to paint it out when we actually get around to it. You could leave it in. It makes the whole thing look more natural. It's the, aside from a little glimmer of trees and plants way in the background and up in the foreground on the left, I think, are those painted on or whatever? It's the only thing that sort of looks natural and therefore, and therefore tricks the brain into thinking this is a real picture. You're right. If you painted it out, you might lose some of that edge. Yeah. It would look too artificial. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Then it would look like a still light for a, you know, a nice painting like a Diebenkorn or something, although you're missing the steep street angle and the pastels. I still think you need flying birds in the background. You need some flying birds. That would really flinch it. Well, there's the one that looks like a pigeon diving to me. Yeah, it does. Yes, I agree. But I'm saying if you had it, then it would really, then you'd really be a true fake. There you go. So Rick's question to me was what is the leading edge of the Neo Books project? What is sort of the cutting edge of where we are? And I'm now forgetting where I was heading with that. One of the things was that one of the nice things about Scrivener kind of, and I never got far enough in the Scrivener to see it, but because it's a book, it's a manuscript writing piece of software, it's very good at saying here are your chapters and here's how complete they are and here's what they sort of look like. And Pete, I've been imagining sort of a similar kind of roll-up tool for markdown files that would let you sort of, that would go and infer from your outline, it would take the logic of your outline and say, hey, here's what your book looks like right now. And with some metadata or some marker or some other data inside that piece of the app or whatever, let you go progress reports like this one's unstarted, this one is first draft, this one is ready, ready to go, it's been checked off, whatever, whatever. This one has been posted and published for other, you know, well, you don't even say that because the way Nia books work, like all the pages that have any content are open for anybody's commentary or review because they're on GitHub. So in a different setup, you might actually say, hey, this has been posted for public review. But anyway, that's an interesting thought. That felt like one place because as I sort of write on the design from trust thing, and I keep going content and then meta, content and then meta. So I write something with that, that's within the body of the idea of design from trust, and then I'll be writing like, okay, I need to describe how thinking like a Nia book works. Like, how do you write a Nia book, which then depends on writing a piece about writing wickily because it builds on the whole notion of writing in a social manner for a wiki and also structuring language so that it works as a wiki, but then also works as a book. So that's meta. So I go off and I do some of that and then I come back and I do some content and it's so far not throwing my brain completely off and I don't spend enough time doing it. But I can tell that as the pages mount up and as the content mounts up and the nuggets kind of mount up, I'm going to get increasingly confused about where I am and what's up. So I'm, and a lot of my not getting lost in the long run kind of depends on my clarity now. And so I started a page for nuggetization, which is like, how do you choose something, how do you know when something is a nugget? And what is, what is the smallest atomic size of a nugget that's comfortable for this, for these purposes, that kind of thing. But I haven't written that much, that much into it, but I'm realizing that those are the things that need to happen in order to explore the space. And the last thing I'll say is one question that came up in our last call, I think, was how do you tell, how do we write links so that we know that one link should be translated in and another link is just meant to be a link in the text to something that we leave outboard to refer to and how does a nugget do that so that the nugget is reusable, but the links might actually be dependent on the author using the nugget, if that wasn't too confusing. But, you know, Obsidian lets us do Transclusion, which, or a light form of Transclusion, which means if you put a bankmark in front of a link, it'll pull the text from that other page, that other markdown page, becomes part of the page that you're writing right now, you can't go in and edit that page in the current page that does the Transclusion, you have to go back to the original. And then Pete's current massive wiki builder, which is the single, the site, the static site builder that will generate the new site anytime it detects a new page in your vault from Obsidian doesn't include a way yet he hasn't, the time or the resources we haven't funded him to go right away for the website to reflect that transcluded included texts. So that's one of the little pieces that would probably wind up needing to be built in order to assemble a Neobook. And that's kind of a piece of what I was thinking. Rick questions, Pete questions, explanations, thoughts. I'll let Pete go first. I don't have, I mean, I got lots of thoughts, but nothing coherent. And I think most of that made sense to Pete because Pete knows the back end and how all the moving parts work or don't work. Rick, some of that may have been a mystery to you. I was trying to explain it in a way that would make sense to you. Oh, no, no, I think I've got the gist of it. It's the pragmatics of it. And even writing up something so that if I were to come to this having read it, I can more fully understand what you just said. So conceptually, I got it, but the fine strokes is where, where, you know, where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. Exactly. I hope you actually do it. But I will say something that did come up to mind as you were talking about trust. And this is something I'm already doing anyway. In terms of doing research using AI, as I go to different places to get asked the same question to see whether I get different responses and what references do they give? And, you know, one, one question that I would have for you, what would your series of questions be about the book in an outlight form without even knowing necessarily knowing what you're going to answer them? But having said that, what I found when I go in and I put in my questions that I've been posing and seeing what it generates, it generates new ideas. So it becomes a co-creator. I don't know, you know, I rewrite whatever I get back, but it just gives me a scaffolding, so to speak, to be able to, you know, it gives you something to work against or for, depending upon where you agree and disagree. So I'm intrigued by how to use AI in that manner. Okay, so sorry, I was just about to ask you, are you asking about asking other people questions or about asking each other questions? No, I think you can do both and. I mean, you can answer people as well as that. So you get an answer or you get your best response to the question or in craft it and rewrite it in a way that makes sense to you and then go to an expert and then ask them the question. You can either do it blindly or openly to see where there may be some added value to it. And I think that that's definitely a growing edge to what we're doing, even just writing content is like when and how do we use things like chat, you know, chat GPT and how do we attribute them and how do they flow through the work? So Klaus's book, I think you've noticed from the conversations here, Klaus is mostly auto generating the text of his book by asking questions by putting prompts into chat GPT and then, you know, pasting the answers into his book manuscript, including the prompts. So his manuscript includes the prompts and he's doing some, but really, I think lightweight editing of the text. And what you just said was you would use that conversation as as inspiration, but you would largely rewrite the text, you would write your own text sort of coming back in, which makes sense to me. And I think I think this is a variable to be set by the writer. Exactly. And then to be properly disclosed in the work somehow, because I think it's important that we say this was purely done by human neurons, or this was assisted in this way, or this was completely generated. Yeah, hybrid model. Yeah, yep. I very rarely had anything where I felt completely satisfied with response. I found it to be a good response, but there's always something that, you know, needs tweaking or whatever, you know, or it evokes something where I want to add value. Yeah, exactly. But coming back to you, there's two things here. One is the idea of what it is, which we were talking about, and there's what you want to do. The question is, how much energy or time do you have to think about how you would describe the concept of Neobooks to attract other people to it? Right. The current plan with the Neobook I'm writing is to have two introductions, one that says this is a Neobook and it gives you a little bit about that and then leads you over to the website. So it doesn't really go into a lot of depth about any of these issues or any of that kind of stuff. But hey, if you want to go do more, follow this link over here. And then a second introduction, which is the actual introduction to the material at hand. And so I'm trying to keep the Neobooks intro as light as it might be to be really to be interesting enough that it sets a hook. And other potential writers are like, oh, I want one of those. And one of the things it'll say is if you would like one of those come here. Well, that's a piece that I'm interested in seeing how far that's been developed or articulated. So I don't know whether. So I've got a page called the Neobooks intro, which I will send you a link to right now. That's perfect. That's great. To me, that I'm just curious to learn more about because I see that as something as being such a foundational thing. And I think it's really important to have that. I'll look at it and. And so this page includes the problem that I mentioned a moment ago, which is that in the middle of the page, you'll see a bankmark in front of a link that that is meant to be transcluded in because the text that's in that in that linked page, which is nuggets are really powerful or something like that. That's the phrase. Please please follow that one link because there's a bunch of other links on the page. That's the only link that's important because I'm considering a content of the intro, the actual intro. But that should give you a that should that should give you a pretty good orientation to what's going to. What I think now is the explanation needed. That's in the book, in the in this new book. Now, this is just a clever. This is the new book about the new book or the new book about trust. So actually, I eventually both. But right now it's the first introduction to the new book about trust. OK, exactly. But but what that got me thinking about was there needs to be a new book about new books and this this front chapter would very likely be the front chapter of that as well. Yeah, the intro to that. Plus some more text that to sort of flesh it out as an intro to explain what is the path through the logic of that book? Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense. It's sort of like chicken and egg really, isn't it? I mean, it's very much it's very much like inventing the chicken while baked while poaching the egg sort of thing. It's like a little little puzzling here. And I'd like to see the iterative process of how one informs the other. Yeah. Because you're in the discovery phase at the moment of how to do it and how to set it and make it make it attractive for people to say, OK, this is what a new book is. Exactly. I have a amorphous feeling for what it is or could be. But I'll be interested in learning from your work in progress. Thank you very much. Do you have any anything to add to any of this? I from a techie side as well. All sides, I actually have I have I just came back from a new webcam. Well, that's right. I wanted to see how that went. So we'll find out in the free Jerry's brain call a little bit later. I have a funny feeling. Maybe. Yeah. Well, it's a nice community. It's an interesting community because I've got some really good tech that doesn't get used as much as it should. So the community is good at being a semi decentralized community. And they have gifts to bring to the world, but they don't really concentrate that on that very well, from my point of view. So anyway, they've got a bunch of tack that there's a there would be an indie web way of doing new books, I think, or there there could be. The the technology that they've got is kind of it's web based and through marking up metadata in the websites, web pages, maybe is a better way to think of it. You can do things like. Syndicate comments and aggregate posts and do some cool kind of decentralized kind of decentralized authentication and stuff like that. So more people should be using it, but it's it's free and it's too good to use kind of. Or I mean, it's like better than the thing that an adopter would would be already working on, so the adopter would go, well, it's not the thing I'm working on. So I'll just finish the thing I'm working on. Oh, that's weird. I don't know. It's weird. Anyway, they they they're largely centered around identity and blog posts and a little bit of activity. So it grew out of micro formats. It grew out of the the cool stuff that was happening in the web like 20 years ago from Tantech Chalak and Mark Kippermarks and folks like that with some newer stuff from Aaron Parecki and Chris Chris Aldrich. So I don't know, they're doing cool stuff. And when we get a little bit more oriented towards some architectural stuff or something like that, maybe we'd want to reach out to them and talk about how you would do the stitching together of new books that you're thinking of doing in a micro formats way or in the web way. So to be a little bit more concrete, I I we had the first day was it's any web camp is usually kind of an on-conference thing. So the first day was sessions and the second day was practicum actually doing stuff. So the main thing that I did, I showed somebody how to get a massive book you set up as their first website, which was cool. But then the other thing I did was get something called Web Mention partly built into a massive wiki. So Web Mention is the idea that with a tiny bit of H2O markup, if you're doing a blog post or a wiki page and you link off to somebody else's blog post, your software will ping the other. So if I said something like I saw Chris Aldrich today, or I was reading Chris Aldrich's post about typecasting today and when I made a link for that, the publishing software would go out to Chris's blog and say, hey, Chris's blog, this guy P over here just linked to you. And it would do some other stuff too. Like they've they've got a little bit of reputation stuff. You know, it it's possible at least to to get it for Chris's website to go, yeah, I don't know who that is. I'm going to ignore it or it looks like they're like it looks like Chris knows Peter from some other connection. And then I'll bubble it up to Chris himself so he can he can read it. Right. And then Chris's website will also, if Chris thinks it's OK, he'll start accumulating, you know, mentions like it'll be Chris's blog post. And then, you know, Peter Kaminski over in this this site mentioned blonde, you know, but this is the snippet from it, right? And so on and so forth. So that's a Web Mention. And just just briefly. So do Web Mention sort of lightly try to fill in some of what the web doesn't do because the web is kind of one way. And Ted Nelson's original vision was that there would be sort of two pretty pretty active two way links so that if somebody mentioned you if a year after you wrote something, somebody pointed to it in Ted Nelson's vision, you'd be notified and maybe even make some money. Yeah, but because the web doesn't work that way, Web Mention do a little bit of that. When I started doing my homework thing, I had in mind I'm just going to be able to make it so that a massive wiki will ping another website and say, hey, I just mentioned you. And then ultimately, you want to be able to do the converse, right? You set up the right stuff in the massive wiki and somebody mentions your page and that page pings you and says, you know, or maybe it gets added to the bottom of the page as a comment or whatever. That's where I was starting off with. And and we got one one of those directions actually working. Kind of in a real hacky way, but I mean, in a real prototypy way. But I forget if it was Chris or Angelo, they were immediately like where you were. It's like, oh, bidirectional. I guess we had started talking about obsidian and it has cool bidirectional links and massive wiki should do web mentions. And then, oh, web mentions could facilitate bidirectional linking between massive wiki or something like that. Right. So we didn't I I tamp that down. I said, I'm going to try to do that today. But it's also if you remember back if you can, like, teleport yourself back in time to, you know, 2000 small number in the blogosphere and blogosphere used to be very active and web mentions are essentially the modern equivalent of pingbacks. So this used to happen with blogs all the time, blogs would mention each other. And, you know, they would automatically know that there was discussion going on. And so on one person's blog post, you'd see discussions centered on that blog post with a bunch of other blogs. And if you went over to that blog, you know, so on and so forth. So in indie web tech could be doing that right now, if anybody cared to adopt it. So they're not super evangelical, which is fine. But I tried to bump, you know, I said, you guys, I don't know about the federated off network because they're trying to do the same thing as indie off. You guys ought to know about some of the community. I forget now. They did. There's a static site generator called 11 T and by process of diffusion, Chris Chris Aldrich kind of just mentioned to the main 11 T person. Hey, you know, this is what you can do with web mentions and, you know, by process of diffusion and and absorption or something like that. 11 T is now a pretty good web mention, you know, participant. And I think it's doing some other indie web stuff too. Anyway, so I think I think the connection between I it might be nice to have a connection between new books and some indie web stuff. And it might some of the things we're we're thinking about connecting connecting content rather than people and blog posts might be something that they could help us think through architecturally or we could help them think through it architecturally or and then we could do it at higher fidelity or higher quality or something like that. Thank you. So that's one of the things I think about this discussion. The other one is kind of pragmatic. What's what's the next step? Is the next step? Transfusion is the next step? Creating an ePub out of. Do you mean what's the next step for for new books or what's the next step in general for this space? New books. So rather than where new books could go, what's the thing that we can do in the next given that it's the holidays, maybe six weeks instead of two weeks. But yeah, five weeks instead of two weeks. Well, that's like I think that the tasks that are right immediately in front of us, a piece of it is Pete, the thing that you you did with me a couple of weeks ago, which was taking a Google Doc and trying to like filter it out as Markdown and from that, we didn't get to identifying all the quirky tags that showed up and getting rid of them. And we also didn't get to nuggetizing the manuscript so that it would be smaller, smaller Markdown chunks. And then immediately after that comes the how do we roll this up and spit it out as an ePub, given whatever combination of technology we would need to do that. So those feel like the very, very immediate questions, which then will trigger a zillion smaller questions like, oh, what do we do with the prompt? How do how do we keep the prompts near the text, near carte plauses text, but not have them interrupt the text? Probably. And oh, how do you handle links and how we blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah, there's a hundred things that will tumble out of that effort. For my part, I'm interested in a text slash architecture, a zig of Neobooks. And then having having. Well, something, something a little bit more specific than a road map and maybe a little less specific as a task list, but something in between a road map and a task list to start burning down. And I'd also be interested in and I would need to help with evangelizing and recruiting more people for the tech zig. And I think if we describe that even just in one post someplace and said, a little bit of here's where we are and we're a little bit about where we're aiming and here's what we're trying to get done. I think we and just float that through not just our community, but also the neighbors. I think we find some more people. Yeah, I think that would work fine. So let's do that. OK, just go ahead. I've got a meta interest, by the way. So one of the things I found myself doing unselfconsciously at and then I was self conscious about it. I mean, not in a bad way. Just, you know, oh, I'm doing this. The the bridging. And so I'm interested in the bridging of communities and intercommunity weaving. So I would be interested in being a little bit thoughtful, self conscious about it as Neobucks reaches out to the neighbors. So the neighbors being Fellowship of the Link, Free Jerry's Brain, Prosefusion, you know, whatever else, there's a few more. Dave Witzel's community, Hodgson, there's a few other bigger groups, sort of nearby also. Yeah. So I have interest in maybe that's not it's a meta interest or an interest in a different realm, but just helping me understand how intercommunity gets done is an interest I have. Sorry, go ahead. No, just a couple of questions, a couple of reactions earlier on when you were talking, Jerry, about Neobucks and I was it suddenly hungered up the image in my mind. Instead of students going off and doing their solo stuff is that it could be that the Neobucks provides a platform for collaborative learning where they can learn from each other much more effectively. That's the goal. Exactly. The second thing is, well, how can you go? How can what are the best? And this is just reframing what I'm hearing is what are the best techno collaborative transformational processes that can be developed to accelerate learning and how to do that? And the third one is that the conversation for me is a little abstract and and I appreciate it. But on the other hand, the pragmatics. So are there some sort of, you know, if you're going to attract people, what are the little sort of I don't know what you've even thought about? Like five, ten little things about what are the component parts of what Neobucks are and what are the elements that are going to change over time? Obviously. And, you know, how is that it's emerging? I just came from another Zoom call through Excel, which is the AI group. And they were talking about various things that are developing that's a constantly changing field and people are learning this, that and the other. And it's sort of it's got a lot of interest because a lot of people want to learn from each other. Well, how can you create the same type of culture around a Neobuck where people say, I want to get involved with this because I just see the potential of techno collaborative, transformational learning at scale. I like that a ton. There's also. I wrote in a chat sort of note taking, learning and knowledge building. These are all neighbor things that are not all the same, each one of which opens up a Pandora's box of interesting questions and different collaborators and other sorts of things because like just note taking that students take notes and that's that's sort of the bridgey place and a lot of the build a second brain folks and others are all about, hey, here's how to accelerate and improve your note taking. And here's a methodology, right? Tiago Forte has a bunch of that kind of stuff. But then there's a difference between sort of learning how we learn. That's a whole other kind of thing as well. And then how we create community or shared knowledge is another thing that's right next door and we need to figure out what are the comfortable bridges that that let us connect those those kinds of things. And then what what technology is needed to make that easier? A lot of that, a lot of what I just described is very likely just social, not technical. It's it's it's writing these things up in a way that attracts people who want to start using the tools in their current state to do things a little bit differently. I think I like to do some of what I was just saying doesn't require a great leap, great technological leaps or even small technological leaps that requires people collaborating differently. Well, just just the four things you mentioned, one thing you can cut out is the note keeping because it's already there. I mean, you can use technology to do that effectively. The question is if you take the three other elements there, well, how can if it was like a Venn diagram, collaborative learning or transformational knowledge building into community, whatever phrase you want, how how can you create a secret source around that, which is enabled by technology? Yep. And so you just drove through an important question, which is the two large language models obviate personal note taking and that the assumption seems to be growing that, yep, yep, we're not going to need to take notes anymore, because I get an automated email from Zoom after after we do this call, that's going to give us a nice summary of what happened. And my brain is like, I'm really interested in the human note taking still happening actively next to the machine learning machine learning version of note taking so that those two things meld in some way. And that is like a really open question for me, because I'm not sure. I'm some days not even sure how to explain that. Well, I'm sure. Oh, good. AI note taking is not note taking. But how is it not? Wait, how is it not note taking? Because the note that because the summary I get back from Zoom looks like a rapporteur sat down and listened to the conversation. And then then Pete and Rick had a long, long conversation about blah, blah, blah. And they sort of decided this and this. And at the bottom, it will be Pete committed to do X. And that's note taking. Is it not? Go ahead, Pete, you go in first. It's it's not note taking. So note taking is a human activity where a human is listening and probably participating in something and taking notes. So the human is doing a curation step as she's note taking. So so you might say that an AI can produce a summary of a call, but even an AI summary is different than a human summary. And the so a couple of things happen in note taking. One of the most important things is the curator of the notes is learning and making connections and things like that as they're as they're taking the notes. Right. So probably they're if they're good. If they're so we don't do good note taking. That's another another story. But if somebody is doing good note taking, they're drawing little diagrams. They're making connections to other other notes that they have and things like that. The AI has not done that. Even if you're reading AI, an AI summary of a meeting, the the interesting part is not happening when the AI has tried to rearrange the language of the transcript or whatever into a different form. The interesting part, the thinking part, the note related part is the note reading where you, Jerry, are reading a AI summary of the note of the meeting. And again, forming connections, making assumptions, hopefully going back to the original because the AI note taker is thoughtful enough to put links back to the right part of the transcript and going, huh, did Pete really say that? What did he really mean by it? I think the AI might have caught something that I didn't. Let me let me go back and actually listen to it again and and perform human comprehension on it rather than language reassembly. I don't disagree, but I'll just say I think there are different tactics. And there are sometimes when I deliberately do not take notes because as soon as I get into curation mode, I can't be fully listening because I'm trying to do things. So I've been going to more meetings where I just totally try and listen without trying to curate. And then, but what I have found when I look through some of the notes, I say, yes, and but it didn't do this or it didn't do that. And to me, that is that's a different activity that can go back and look at what it missed. And then, of course, you know, dynamics can go along in a group where everyone missed what the hell was going on. You go back and say, well, did you really see what happened in that dynamic? You're a clueless about what happened there. Did you see the triangulation that went on in that group? You missed it all. So so an LLM for me is is not a tool that generates understanding. It's a power tool that you use with instances of language to do human understanding. So it's it's an adjunct to somebody, you know, attending a meeting and then looking at a generated summary of it and thinking about how they match and how they don't match, thinking about overall flow in a way that you couldn't before. So for me, that that metaphor of a power tool, you know, I can I can I could make a wooden dresser with, you know, a chisel or something or or stone tools or something like that, but I'm a lot more effective with power sander and a table saw and, you know, screws and, you know, electric screwdriver and all that kind of stuff. Right. So the electric screwdriver and the table saw did not construct the dresser. In that case, the humans still did, but he or she could have done it a lot faster and gotten to a more constructed place with the power tools than without the power tools. So two things, if I remember both of those things, one of them is that I can easily envision better prompting, helping the AI do more of the things that we think a good curator would do. So coming up with tags and ideas relating this to other concepts and finding patterns across concepts, building collections of like, like articles and like things. Those all feel like promptable things. And so so the space of what does a good curator or note taker do, I think, could be rapidly fulfilled with good with better prompting. And then the other thought is that the thing the point Rick made a moment ago is hugely important, which is that. The moment none of these things passes through a human mind is the moment we're no longer involved in the thinking or the activities or anything like that is has lots of implications. But I think that the act of the act of all this information touching our neurons and being interpreted by them and improved by them is massively important. So even though I think that the AI could be made a whole lot more capable in terms of the functions of note taking and curating, I think that the human role is really, really essential if humans are going to stay in the loop and be part of decision making at all. Otherwise, so since the earliest days of the brain, there was a feature where you could crawl a website or you could crawl your file system and it would create a web of links. I decided immediately never to use that because I didn't want anything going in my brain namespace that hadn't passed through my eyes and my brain because I knew that the namespace was important and I didn't want to clutter it with a bunch of just like, oh, that showed up on a crawl. And that was just a design decision or a use decision. I mean, a long ago, but I think it's in the same realm. It's like, I think we need to stay connected to the decisions being made in and around us, even as the AI's get more capable. Well, I think it is going to get more capable. It's going to be able to take on some of the human dimensions that perhaps humans don't do very good job of, for example, looking at group dynamics, listening tone of voice, emotional tone, etc. And it might capture things that you're not aware of as it's happening. And your other your other example of, hey, did you notice the triangulation there was great also in that we were sometimes just blind to stuff that's happening. And if somebody goes back and reads the meeting to us in a different way, we'll be like, oh, my God, I was just manipulated like crazy. Yeah, exactly. Whatever. Yeah, exactly. Or detecting a victim hood virtuous signaling or any other deviant, alt-right, scapegoating, yada, yada, you know, it will start deconstructing and identifying when, you know, these these manipulative ploys and people say, oh, did you notice that Donald Trump just used this and he then used this and then he used this, then he used this and this and this and this. And five or seven years ago, I saw a demo of some grad student had done basically a mood and tempo and other kinds of things. Recognition system for like Zoom calls for video and so it was implemented kind of as a coach for individuals so that you would get some prompts that came back and said, well, your pitch and your cadence basically are saying you're angry or whatever, you should sound less angry and it gave crappy advice. And also you're eating up all the time in the call. You should let more other people talk. That was important and so forth. So that was like seven years ago before all this technology really hit. And I think that AIs could also probably do a really nice diagnosis of rhetorical techniques and spin techniques and spin techniques like that would be terrific to see automated because also because I think we get used to them and having them named automatically by a thing that doesn't habituate as easily, it probably does, but probably not as much as we do. And calling them out more explicitly over and over again would be a great thing. Exactly. Yeah, just just just in terms of detecting personality disorders. So, for example, this is a political diagnosis, not a psychiatric one, but which is what I've called the it's the the dark quad, not try. And that is people who have a social leadership personality disorders, which is megalomania, narcissism, sociopathy and orthoteranism. Well, you know, those those sort of traits can be picked up in the language of how it's being used and if we can get I to be more sophisticated and being able to give people feedback about how they're being manipulated by by by politicians and educating people about these various techniques so that they become much more savvy and that would help media literacy. That may not be the brave new world you were thinking of, but, you know, I think the new world we're coming into is not going to look that much like the worlds we think our future looked like. And it'll be scary and interesting simultaneously. You know, the dark triad, I think it's a quad, actually, it needs it needs what needs orthoteranism more explicitly. Well, and pathology, I mean, and they said make a Macavelian to me. I prefer to use pathological megalomania to Macavelian myself, but, you know, the related constructs. So the triad was narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, sociopathy, sociopathy. Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Right. Cool. Well, not so cool. No, it's not. But, you know, we need to be detecting these people much earlier on in their careers and making sure they don't get into power. Yeah, but instead we have a system that rewards those people and that is that punishes normal people for for running at all. Exactly. And what's happening right now in politics is that the people who might have been reasonable are being run out of town. Exactly. The chiefs are being filled by others. Yeah, that's it. Well, how do you take on the dark side? How do you take on the dark side? I think our next meeting should be held in a cave and we should all wear rebel alliance clothing. And Pete, you might have to generate a rebel. I think I've even got a wallpaper. Hold on. It's been so long. It's been so long. Could have sworn. The other thing that I have, you know, is will I get to the point where it will instantaneously assess people's quality of evidence so that when somebody makes a claim, it automatically is evaluated to the degree of truth with citations that refute the claim. That would be awesome. I think that's really hard and we should get Mark on fun in this conversation because that's part of what he's building. I think that's going to happen. But the interesting thing, it's going to be through your personal filter bubble. So it's like, what do I think of this? What would I think of this? And that's going to be different for each person. I found my background. Neil Stevenson has something he describes a system very much like that. Everybody's got personal filtration in dodge in the fall of hell or dodge in the fall. Something like that fall or dodge in hell. Not an easy name to remember. I'll give you an example of one. So there was one I sometimes we just because they have interesting, strange stuff on there and how people think. But there was a guy who gave a very good presentation. There was a Danish study showing that people who wore facial masks had slightly higher rates of COVID infections. All right. You couldn't dispute that fact. That's true. However, the inference. You cannot say that it's not a cause and effect relationship. And so it should automatically flag what are the confounding variables that might account for this? Namely, people wearing masks were taking more risks than people who weren't wearing masks, maybe there's so many variables and people they immediately jumped on. They're saying, oh, no, there's no point wearing masks. Yeah. No. So I mean, you can look at facts and then you can look at interpretation and then you can look at the the the fallibility of the interpretations. It's sort of like the famous study of bombers that were coming back with lots of holes in them and the military wanted to reinforce the parts of all the holes were and a really smart guy said, no, actually, you want to reinforce the places where there aren't that many holes because that's the ones that aren't making it back are dropping because they got hit in those spots. It's counterintuitive. That's exactly. But interesting. Yeah, faulty inferences. Exactly. And we're making them all the time. Constantly. And it's getting worse. It is. So when is the light of AI going to triumph outside? Abraham Wald. Is the guy in what's the principle? Wald's principle. I don't know that it has a name, but it's the damage we're not tending to is the article I've got on this. I think there's yeah, there's a principle that the named principle. Well, it doesn't have a it. The reason I ask is because we should be able to refer to it more easily than that time, the guy at the World War Two Physicist Bob, you know, you know, I would love that. I think that's great. Use AI, man. Find it. See what it comes up with. Yeah, good point. Here's Wald. It might say somewhere on his page I haven't looked. He was an operations research guy. It's actually called survivorship bias. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Yeah, I think. But survivorship bias, I'm not sure if it sort of means exactly that, but it could be. So I was able to get chat GBT to tell me who that was just by saying who is the guy that talked about holes and World War Two airplanes. Oh, good. And it worked. Yeah, it worked great. This counter to an approach greatly contributed to improving aircraft survivability during the war. I love that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's a survivorship bias or survival bias. Survival bias is a little bit better. So it's so it's the valves. Observation is actually avoiding survivorship bias. Exactly. That's why it's not a good game for it. Right, right. Exactly. There's a whole wonderful motherload of stuff around lessons from failure. There are several books titled something like that. Roughly, it's just a it's just a lovely, lovely thing. One of my favorite little fishers in history to explore. Other thoughts for right now. We can also fold this call. A half hour before noon, that's fine. Yeah, just a question for future. And that is how can we be more helpful to what you're trying to do? And are there other players that might be interested in learning more once it's in a form that could attract more people to come and say, I want to play here. I think you, Rick, love the questions. And I realize that I've been working toward goals that are near but not on what you just said, meaning I'm trying to write a new book about design and I'm trying to explain what new books are. But there was another goal we talked about several calls ago, which is like, hey, when is this thing? What is the cake baked enough that we can show people in the window on the oven and say, look, there's a cake baking, you might want to join the cake baking party? And I think we're probably pretty close to that. But I need to I need to sit with that question and figure out what does that look like so that we can craft a message that goes out to our community and says, here's what we think we're doing. And here's what it is, which is some of what Pete and I decided to do a moment ago, like, let's write a piece to attract geeks. But I think that this is a two-parter. I think this is a there's a piece of it that's about technical people who can who can help. And then there's a piece of it that's about any and all writers. Yeah, you know, and writers and improvers, I mean, yeah, neobooks only get interesting if communities arise that start treating the nuggets and subject matter as things they would like to improve, much as volunteers improve Wikipedia page entries. Exactly. So one thing we did mention was the idea of alternate weeks, having something that where a piece of writing was shared, where outside people can come in and they can get a sense, you know, a brief introduction is a bit of writing, whether it's what you've just written. And then, you know, ideally, it would be nice if it was on some place where people can go to an advance so they can read it and then use that as what emerges out of that discussion that would enable that writing to go and flourish, you know, whatever direction it needs to flourish, you know. That's really interesting because at first I thought, well, we've kind of been treating working with the with the actual writing as a thing we're like doing separately from these calls. Like we're not we're not using these calls to workshop texts. And Pete and I were staring at like causes manuscript going, well, OK, how do we get more people to comment on it? How do we get this edited so that it looks like a book? And then on the other hand, I'm like, it would be a great idea to have workshoppy sessions around texts here, in particular, if we can split our brains between the content itself as a book and the content written as a new book. So what I what I mean is some of the feedback would be like, hey, it didn't make sense when you went from this statement to this statement to this chapter. And then some of the comments could be like, hey, there's a nugget over here that's not carved out as a nugget. It would probably be better living, you know, separately like that. And to get to that second thing, you know, we would need to be more complete with the nuggetization of the other texts that are just long, you know, long Google docs. But my my part would be happily critiqued in that way right now. Go ahead. I mean, I think there's different ways of doing it. You can sort of using a zoom lens. You could have something and zoom me out, look in the outline or a chapter or the questions for a chapter or little nuggets. You know, the person who brings something can decide the zoom lens. And to me, it's just the experience. You know, this is not final work. This is work in progress where people can come and use it as a sounding board for things. I mean, that's what I would be interested in is using as a sounding board for something, whether it's on Substack or whatever it is. And, you know, trying to create a learning community about how your books can evolve over time. And I just added this to my brain because it showed up early in this conversation. Um, cool. So, but, you know, I don't know whether you want to stop the, you know, bowl rolling with with one session in the new year where you invite people in and have a little, I mean, I think just having people show up, I think it's helpful for people if they want to come prepared, they can. And so that, you know, I prefer to do that myself. Yeah, if, you know, if I work it out, rather than just showing up and the people show up, they'll just get the gist of it and say, oh, maybe I'll read the next article that, you know, somebody puts out so that it's not just, you know, reiterating the, you know, whatever's written. It's it's a bit more in depth. So there's actually a nice writer's workshop process that I learned from Dick Gabriel, which involves a circle of people, each of whom is an author who then share each of them shares works. And then one at a time you, you, you pre-read each piece so that you have to come prepared. But then there's a series of steps you go through when that person's work is being workshopped and it's quite productive and really interesting. And I think would be very adaptable to what we're doing. Do you have a link to that one? I do. I thought you might. He wrote a book about it. I'm sure it did. In fact, and there's writer's workshop patterns. Let me see. Oh, there's even a pattern language for writer's workshops. Damn. So that book would make a good new book. Yeah, I'm thinking. And also my brain is the brain server is having some kind of indexing problem that Mark Drexler mentioned last week and is still happening. So I just sent you a link. And when you go there, you will find that there's a little message on top that says you need to go index this thing. So I have a I have a trouble to get into the brain people to try to fix that. All right. But writer's workshops are cool. Thank you, Rick. Thank you for all the great ideas. That was really totally fruitful. And I think we're thinking along very, very similar veins. Just as evidence by your questions and commentary and curiosities. Well, it's somewhat of a divergent generative mode. And now it's sort of, OK, let's let's converge on something and see where this could be, you know, going from the abstract to the pragmatic. So yeah, it's a circular process. And an acquaintance from a conference a few years ago pinged me on LinkedIn. And I and he said, what are you up to? And I said, well, I'm trying to write a book about design from trust. He said, oh, I'd be really interested. And I haven't replied yet. And I'm like, I should invite him into the conversation. Right. And I'm like, oh, I have to think through what that means and how to compose that and where to point him so that he can step into the conversation, which probably means, Pete, I write a couple of pages. I certainly already have like how to write your own new book pages in like that's already fleshed out, starting if they're not done. But but they're they're sort of in progress. But there should be another landing page for anybody who it's like, hey, if you're interested in writing a new book, start here that then points into the different resources, that'd be cool. OK, I'll go create one last thing, actually. And that is, you know, Klaus has already done it. He has a story behind it. It could be that one of the sessions could be his story of doing because you know it, but other people don't. And the question is, would that be of interest? This is the product. This is it. And then you hear what Klaus went through to be able to do it. Now, there's going to be many different pathways. But that's the the the the beauty of collaborative learning is how people use the technology in different ways. So. But maybe have cloud have classes. You know, that's that's zooming out because he's got the book. But you know, how can he tell his story in a way that and that could be recorded, could be useful for people saying if you want to hear about how Klaus did it, here's a recording of and this is the questions we had with him. You know, short presentation or whatever and maybe something and just, you know, take it from there. That would actually be a great asset for Klaus to have that we could then attach to the Neo book as the story of how it came about. Exactly. And there's also a new app that somebody created that forgotten its name. It starts with an O where you send it a video and it automatically finds possible call outs or short segments to go post on TikTok or wherever else. But it'll basically. Nugget ties, I think it does some nuggetizing of its own, but then it also does some production so that it hands you, I think, finished and ready to upload snippets of pieces of a conversation. One of the too many tools that have arrived recently. We need somebody with social media, Klaus X to have a new book about how to use the social medium or effectively to get. So if you have anybody who wants to write a new book about the advances of social media and how to, you know, that would be I'd be interested in reading that new that new book. Yeah. Sorry, here it is. It's Opus. Opus clip is the thing and I will put a link in the chat. Forever resourceful. Jerry, thank you. Just found it. Sweet. And I'm going to connect it to nuggetization because it is doing its own AI nuggeting of some sort. And with that, we our heroes head back into their normal days. Peter, see you on Peter's brain. But thank you. All right. Take care now. Bye now.