As I’m reading The Dream Machine about Licklider, I was struck by how we’re still trying to achieve his vision (and those of Memex etc.)
The block association feature of Logseq, “magically” surfacing connections between thoughts, is one of the biggest steps forward for years.
I’d like to urge the Logseq team to keep focus on these truly unique features, even with the pressure to support X Y Z, integrate with A B C.
Here’s the quote I was looking for. Licklider decided to keep track of how he spent his time at work:
"About 85 per cent of my “thinking” time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so. At one point, it was necessary to compare six experimental determinations of a function relating speech-intelligibility to speech-to-noise ratio. No two experimenters had used the same definition or measure of speech-to-noise ratio. Several hours of calculating were required to get the data into comparable form. When they were in comparable form, it took only a few seconds to determine what I needed to know.
“Throughout the period I examined, in short, my “thinking” time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.”
This is what we should be tackling with Logseq.