Why?

This writing practice is new for me. Much of my past work has manifested as more of an essay-ified journal with the goal of expressing emotion, not ideas.

I don’t yet have a sharp process for collecting external information, updating my beliefs in light of them, and evolving my epistemology over time. The process happens, but it’s mostly unconscious and means I have less clarity on important issues than I’d like to.

A few months ago, I got frustrated by this and started making a “Belief Map”.

My basic idea is to take a set of topics, describe my current thesis, articulate 3 reasons why I hold this thesis (even if purely emotional), assign a confidence, and then collect some external resources that have contributed to my stance. It’s not too different then creating a bunch of essay outlines and never writing the full thing. It was really fun and I’m bringing it back.

The Map

Click the “Belief Map” tab on the navigation bar to see the initial stages.

It’s AI-generated slop in there right now because I spent most of today finishing up yesterday’s experiment on semantic-based steering and creating the frontend for the map itself, but I’ll be nuke that and instantiate a regular practice around it soon.

I’m interested to see how this unfolds. I hypothesize that the hardest part will be building a consistent “bookmarking” flow to collect resources. I have not yet found an ergonomic tool to pipe information through my writing channels that makes it easy to go back through the archives and generate ideas around data. I’m curious about how prolific writers do this…