Month: March 2023

I read Building a Second Brain (BASB) a while back and got some great ideas from it (and read The Extended Mind as well, which is a great argument for why you need to spend some time on that second brain, both technologically and socially/environmentally), I believe, but I wanted to point out that there is a playlist on YouTube that takes the idea of progressive summarization and shows how it works, bit by bit. Tiago (author of BASB) shows how he takes notes on his Kindle app, moves them into Evernote, bolds them in one pass, then highlights the bolded stuff in a second pass, then takes the highlighted ideas and creates an outline from those ideas (he’s doing a book summary with a single source, but this can be extended to combining multiple sources of info pretty easily), then writes up his book summary, all while talking through his thought process while he’s doing it.

It’s a 3+ hour timesink, but I found it useful (especially the part where he takes his notes and creates an outline from them) to take the idea of processing your notes from something that you consume to something that you create. (I was about to make an analogy to how the body processes stuff, but then I considered what we create and I decided to spare you all ?)

Anyway, I skipped the shortest video (the one on moving your highlights from Kindle to Evernote) because I already have a process that takes my highlights from Readwise Reader, Kindle, and Medium and puts them into my favorite note-taking app (Tana, by way of the Readwise Obsidian Plugin – crazy manual process, but valuable!) and I really stopped paying attention in the outline to output video, because I have some experience doing that, too. The outline video, though, really gave me some great ideas on how to use the notes I have from my reading to help fuel my output here, at work, in my presentations and articles and in the classes I teach.

I have spent a little time asking ChatGPT questions, both work-related and personal (What elements are in a good security policy for libraries? Can you give me an outline for a class on knowledge management? What are the best places to visit in Louisville, KY?) and considering the answers I got (a reasonable list of things to include in library security policies and a good start to a “rubric” to evaluate policies as I am asked to comment on them at work but zero sources to tell me where the info comes from, a nice collection of topics to consider for a KM class but zero sources to tell me where the info comes from, and a pretty nice list of tourist traps in Louisville but zero sources to tell me where the info comes from). Not sure if you all caught the issues I might have with ChatGPT… I couldn’t figure out at all where the info comes from, but I was pretty happy with the results that I got from what seemed to me to be the process I’d have used (search for policies, collect various elements, produce the rubric from all those elements, etc.) but in 30 seconds, not 3 hours.

Yesterday, Google opened Bard up to folks on their waitlist and I got a chance to start futzing with it. The first thing I noticed is that in response to the same sort of questions that I’d asked ChatGPT earlier is that Bard gave me a source. A single source which brought up the question of how this was better than a search I could have done on my own, but a source was provided. My second question was to give me an outline for an essay on using soft skills at work and it gave me 3 “drafts” of the outline that I could use, but no sources this time.

I’ve not played with the Bing AI chatbot yet, but in one of the 15 trillion (not misinformation, just a slight exaggeration for effect) articles I’ve read in the past few weeks and months on the AI landscape, someone mentioned that Bing was “extensively footnoted”, which makes me think it might do a better job of citing it’s sources (I’m a bit hung up on this, maybe, but I’m a librarian and that’s a hazard of my profession).

Overall, I’m interested in the product of these chatbots and the idea that it can do some of the grunt work of finding, synthesizing and producing information that I do now by hand (and at great effort!!) giving me the opportunity to concentrate on providing value around the information it gives me and being able to make value judgements about what information to include. This would be easier to do if it was better at citing sources – but as the offerings mature and get more features and capabilities, it’s worth keeping an eye on at the least.