.004 February Sensemake

This month I saved 8 pieces of non-fiction (research paper, blog, essay, substack, company papers, practitioner paper), 0 pieces of art, 2 resources (gif and wiki page), and 0 magazines. For books, 3 books through the Southern Reach series, If Beale Street Could Talk, and partially through Open Socrates by Agnes Callard. I also went to New Orleans with some friends and consumed friendship, lots of good food, and some good drinks. Also one bad food for one mild bout of food poisoning that made me delay my flight home.

IIII IIII III <— that many things (not counting experiences or unfinished books)

This month seemed in search of help so I broke that down into 3 categories: Help me Work, Help me Write, Help me Know What's Possible.

“We are a landscape of all we have seen” — Isamu Noguchi

Help me Work

I keep needing to confirm things about work. What are we doing right, wrong, and how do I tell anyone about it?

What we do right: This was triggered by a hail of self-doubt after participating in our group's conversation project about funding and ethics on campus . The things I'd said felt shallow and I was laughing too much, trying to get comfortable with how seriously trapped I felt in a larger system eaten by a larger system. I found a paper claiming that when people narrate a memory rather than just remember it in their head, they are able to point to more nuanced, complex emotions around the experience. Even writing this right now helped me understand myself a bit more and be less embarrassed. Post-processing. It was a good reminder that the process we work with is about helping people process and connect, not say the perfect soundbite.

What we do wrong: I'm trying to learn more abou the human systems LLMs are built on. Michael Geoffrey Asia's first person report on being a data worker, the Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy is a good window into it. Trying to do something meaningful with the information and push more prototypes towards smaller models but it's a small nudge that's I'm having trouble actually executing. Advice on this is very welcome.

How do I tell anyone anything: I also saw this neat little gif referenced by Anil Dash's blog on making better documents . I'm finding legibility (professionally and probably personally) to be particularly challenging. It's a real fear to have the things in my head cut off to the rest of the world. I remember the gif more than the blog and returned to it a couple times.

Help me Write

Legibility and narration lead quite naturally into this bucket which really only has one good (read: soul lifting) occupant: Ten Writing Prompts from Lucy Ives published in the Paris Review's substack. She's a beast. Love these prompts and how they ask you to pay attention the way you really like to and try a bunch of stuff because you can.

The other one circles back to work writing with a couple examples of how mixed methods product research reports can be written up digestibly.

Help me Know What's Possible

The work examples run into what's possible because I don't know so many things! I want to share our work in a way that's helpful and not overwhelming to people. I want to imagine other kinds of governance that don't lead to autocracy [ DemNext report on more-than-human-voices in democracy ]. I want to see other options exist for an Internet into shared resourcing and civic organizing [ Aaron Swartz's wiki ].

I like the Internet for getting to know what else is possible. It's why I still get stuck in infinite scrolls. It's a small dose of the feeling of sitting at the family computer and refreshing StumbleUpon in my school uniform. It's helpful to learn there are other ways of thinking and framing and knowing.

Here's to more than one way to make sense.

That’s the digest, you can see all the citations here .