Social learning

Why I'm excited about tools for thought

All my friends have heard me evangelize about Curius.app nonstop for the past year. For those who don’t know, Curius is a Chrome extension that allows you to bookmark pages that you are reading and highlight on the webpage. You can also see what your friends are reading and highlighting.

I have always loved the feeling of reading with others, especially the feeling of roundtable discussions in a small seminar class. Curius felt magical to me because for the first time, it allowed me to experience that feeling online, through discussing what I read with my friends who are scattered across the country in real-time. My friends and I tag each other on pieces that we would enjoy, and we go on to have conversations in our Curius comments.

I can also categorize my readings with tags and trails. Tags are helpful because I can easily pull up all the articles I have read about generative AI, for instance, a collection of all the personal websites I have enjoyed browsing through, all my readings for a class I’m taking at Stanford, or recommendations from a friend. Before, I had a Notion page for organizing things like this, but I hated having to toggle between Notion and my browser.

I’m excited about Curius because it reminds me of how technology can help us think better and think together. For as long as I have remembered, I have loved reading and writing, but it was always a solitary habit. Even when I began to read things digitally, it was hard to organize reading takeaways across platforms and to share them with others. I wanted the ability to make connections across a digital interface and to connect with my friends through reading.

Curius resolved both of those issues. But what especially excites me about Curius is that it is a step in the opposite direction of generative AI or text autocomplete. Sometimes, I want a tool that writes my email for me, but most of the time I write, I am not looking for something that replaces the thinking process. Rather, I am looking for something that facilitates the next step in the thinking process.

Curius helps by putting my reading in conversation with other people and in conversation with myself.

Thinking together

What if we have more social reading tools, so that you can see what your friends are annotating and highlighting in real time (e.g. Curius for iBooks and Kindle)?

What if we have a social search engine, where instead of having a query return links ordered by PageRank, you see a more curated list of resources from your friends or people you look up to?¹

For the past few months, Curius has driven my “knowledge discovery.” It has helped me find things that I didn’t know I wanted to know: seeing the cool personal websites, ML papers, and projects my peers are hacking on has led me down numerous productive rabbit holes.

I also feel that I glean more from a piece when I’m able to read it with friends. My views become more informed when I have people to spar with and challenge my beliefs. And I love the experience of reading together in and of itself.

There’s a Ken Liu quote that I like about the feeling you have when you read another person’s writing:

Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe.

And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.

Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?

We live for such miracles.

There’s something so special about giving a reading recommendation to a friend, them actually reading it, and then having that conversation together. I only recommend what I think they would like. And when they read it, we are able to connect over a shared intellectual bond we otherwise would not have had. People are brought together by conversation anyway, but when it is enhanced a central idea that both are grappling with, the connection can be more potent.

Thinking better

What if technology can help us unearth connections between our thoughts (and what we have read)? In both my work as a classicist and a VC, the part of my job that I have enjoyed the most has been pattern matching the past onto the present. Sure, Omni is doing this, and Mem, Roam, and others are attempting to as well, but I haven’t found anything that feels joyful and intuitive to use.

I'm inspired by one of Sari Azout's blogs:

Even if machines can do a lot of the classifying, drawing associations between things in a way that feels personal is still a deeply satisfying muscle worth exercising. When you have a concept or theme in mind, what you have is a mental bucket, a magnet for anything that relates to the subject of your obsession. An obsession, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for the mind. Our interfaces have been feeding us, but don’t allow for any digesting. In that sense, curating, collecting, and listmaking help us turn the web from a place of mindless consumption to a place for mindful sensemaking.

What if I can somehow non-mechanically “port my brain,” or have some visual mind palace that I can play with and edit?

What if there is a search engine that knows what you want even when you yourself don’t know how to articulate it?

Where do we go from here?

I’m a staunch believer that the future of knowledge is social. Discovery from peers is often better than search — it’s why we ask our friends for restaurant to go to and books to read instead of just Googling and browsing things online. The internet has transformed how we find information and connect with each other, but there isn’t one integrated solution that addresses how people think together and learn from each other.

This is a problem I want to work on solving.

1. To some extent, Curius does this already, and so does Startupy. But I don’t think either has executed super well on this vision.