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- Tags: AI escritura fav Zettelkasten
[!summary]Arvind Jain, the CEO of Glean — one of those big enterprise AI companies you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re deep in that world — recently published a twitter article about “context graphs,” and buried in the middle of their enterprise pitch is an observation that I think is directionally true for personal knowledge management.
Highlights
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I’ve built my entire research workflow around the idea that connections between ideas are more valuable than the ideas in isolation
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But a knowledge graph is inherently static. My vault does have information about how I came to know things — I have git backups, and I link to sources, which is part of why the interlinking is so valuable. What I tend to do with the information is write articles, which end up in another folder. But the graph doesn’t capture the process that connects reading to writing, or tell me where that process breaks down.
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you don’t want to automate your thinking, you want to understand it well enough to support it.
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. My Obsidian vault can tell me what I’ve written and when, but it can’t tell me how — the actual chain of reading, annotating, connecting, drafting, revising. It can’t tell me which processes produce my best work, or where I consistently drop the ball.
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Jain’s core argument is that we need to shift from modeling what exists to modeling how change happens. For personal knowledge management, I think this translates into looking at the efficacy of our methods and habits moreso than how tidy the first-class information (or even metadata) is. When did you last review how many days typically pass between highlighting and processing? Between processing and writing? Between writing and publishing? I certainly hadn’t, until I started poking at this.
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there’s a deeper implication of the context graph framework that I want to emphasize. Jain distinguishes between knowledge (what exists) and process (how things happen). But there’s a third layer that I think matters even more: intent. Why did you do what you did? What were you trying to accomplish?
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This is why I’m skeptical of fully automated approaches. The tools that try to “organize your notes for you” tend to fail because they can’t distinguish between intent categories. They don’t know whether a highlight means “this is important to my research” or “this was a funny quote I wanted to send to my friend” or “I’m giving feedback on a friend’s book and do not ever want this book resurfaced again” — sure, I can flag that manually, but it’s a pain.