Emergence of Ideas

Writing makes a train of thought visible. The process put pressure on the idea. Writing is where we clash views, fledge out edges and find potential connections.

Writing is a great way to put pressure on your thinking: it’s hard to summarize something you don’t understand. By trying to explain an idea, you’ll try many framings, flesh out its edges, and see new connections — Andy Matuschak

Building publishable content is nothing more than connecting and extracting duplication from content. Breaking things down into smaller ideas leads to Emergence.

I merge knowledge in notes by seeing something in two or three places and then naming it. Give the things I’m noticing a name and start to clip the pieces across different notes. I saw this in this article, I talked about this in this conversation, and I heard about this in this video.

The rest is a matter of connecting. Ideas can emerge when we see repeated pieces of information in different places. Everything is already out there. Art is the re-arranging of the known.