---
title: "Concrete Book Club Idea"
---

- #[[E: Ad hoc book clubs]]<span id='A1uR7H7HI'/>
- Goal<span id='17rcyJsfb'/>
    - getting a deeper understanding of the book<span id='Cy0znjFJs'/>
    - generating artefacts and processes that help us retain that knowledge in the long-term<span id='EZv30XxFI'/>
    - possibly generating public artefacts useful for others<span id='_4ilkDiO4'/>
    - getting much wider perspectives through the diversity of group members<span id='Z6TxpH7vO'/>
- Book<span id='ub-y6G1b3'/>
    - **Thinking Fast and Slow**<span id='LbXYZuWWj'/>
        - pro<span id='lX8gCoeJv'/>
            - interesting and relevant to many of us<span id='otkc8lEh6'/>
            - **Andy Matuschak** specifically called it out as an example of a book that many of us have read, but few retain much understanding from<span id='vTuR0JitF'/>
        - con<span id='Hgzt3Bxu-'/>
            - very long (is it possible to choose sections, or are there sections that are fluffy and can be quicky skimmed?)<span id='IEI0JL61X'/>
    - could also be something like **Knowledge Cartography** edited volume<span id='PIJeBqZ2w'/>
- Participants<span id='5ZGSd0gDt'/>
    - How much energy do we expect for how long?<span id='upt1E0d-F'/>
        - do people have to commit to a certain cadence or drop-in/drop-out<span id='14n8REBJZ'/>
        - enable peripheral participation - seeing our work and commenting, posting on Twitter etc?<span id='ZXXzfG8Ad'/>
    - How Roam-centric is it, how much familiarity with technical tools, or specific processes?<span id='2YWTECut1'/>
    - Initially people like Jon, Joel etc, but could be expanded to people at Minerva, CSCL people, big communities<span id='5YpiXpuD_'/>
- Cadence<span id='CUSfqkEOU'/>
    - One chapter or more per time unit (two weeks?). Would be useful to be able to divide it into chunks of equal "idea density" - maybe someone who has read it could do that<span id='PRXQ3nkmx'/>
    - Reading book, and then spending several weeks organizing ideas instead of just chapter by chapter and that's it... But hard to keep momentum going?<span id='TmHoQpxkI'/>
- Synchronous ideas<span id='14dkFqMtR'/>
    - **silent meetings** - how would that work focused more on exploration than taking decisions<span id='eJme4A10i'/>
        - the **P2PU** course on CSCL, with editing in Etherpad<span id='ezIiV0mw_'/>
    - can we use Minerva platform?<span id='JRaT-pc8z'/>
    - FROG?<span id='89yJYLdcG'/>
- Annotations<span id='XlEnUCLph'/>
    - Hypothes.is on a pirate PDF?<span id='VCh1oMNN8'/>
    - Collecting Kindle highlights and overlaying them for a heatmap (doable, but useful?)<span id='pgcr1DgB8'/>
- Automated emails<span id='x78f0hLaA'/>
    - reproducing **Email-driven SRS** by **Quantum Country**<span id='7TxLxXRH1'/>
    - JSON dumps of Roam pages, and a script that automatically merges comments to the same block<span id='gtC2JwbqU'/>
- Roamex<span id='T1L_kExyV'/>
    - Download JSON dump every day and have a script that uses updated-at and updated-email or other things to generate change logs, email diffs etc?<span id='FwP0Rha8u'/>
    - Importing JSON over existing JSON fails, because IDs are identical, if we were able to overwrite, would be able to update externally<span id='q9fOd6-0-'/>
- Individual writing<span id='1ZMU_9z9h'/>
    - Writing prompts, questions - write before you see anyone else's reactions<span id='A5fhJ1jw3'/>
    - Are there study group questions for this book anywhere?<span id='HuGtmJU9W'/>
- Note taking/summaries<span id='FGPyZEc4Y'/>
    - useful to have some kind of summary, at least as a roadmap/collective thing to refer to (maybe there are good notes already we can use)<span id='4z7Kj_vDI'/>
    - stimulate questions and connections, applications<span id='ZZ4ONr6_b'/>
        - somehow use Knowledge Building scaffolds?<span id='y-rJS1ifS'/>
    - epistemic fact checking - distributed looking into citations and seeing how well he represents them<span id='RSa2QiLcB'/>
    - collectively building an argument map of the points he makes, and the evidence?<span id='eVq02dRlG'/>
        - then reading another book on mind/thinking etc (maybe from different perspective), and seeing how they contrast, the evidence maps mesh<span id='gipWZu7pn'/>
            - could be distributed - one group reading Kahneman, another reading another book. could we generate questions for the other group?<span id='BoN1zSBLn'/>
                - flash mob - let's read 10 books on brain science in teams of four, and figure it all out...<span id='V6-jYOd5G'/>
- Public artifacts<span id='dTbE5wjI7'/>
    - What would be useful for<span id='AtgipVzEK'/>
        - people who are not planning to read the book<span id='OE3iPtVqs'/>
        - people who have not yet read the book, but plan to<span id='dlD1W1lt3'/>
        - people who have read the book<span id='6K96odXnr'/>
        - second cohort of book club members<span id='B58sMDEpU'/>
- Spaced repetition<span id='mP9EzqGt_'/>
    - reproducing **Email-driven SRS** by **Quantum Country**<span id='7TxLxXRH1'/><span id='CqGpNjTQi'/>
    - collectively creating cards<span id='toNPGmHX8'/>
    - sharing privately created cards<span id='zpFdON4fw'/>
    - collecting SRS analytics, to determine which cards are more useful? But what is a good metric - retention? Understanding in five months? How to test, how to isolate?<span id='eswpNcTR7'/>
- Experiment<span id='Dklkyz-04'/>
    - Are there hypotheses that we can formulate up front?<span id='T5j8z7ili'/>
    - Is there data that we should be collecting during the process?<span id='idPO5xmkh'/>
    - With a shorter book - we could iterate faster (run again, organized differently)<span id='Rmg3QFqJq'/>
    - Lead to some kind of public write-up of the process<span id='toBTz9SWi'/>
    - Second cohort?<span id='IqlGvyEWf'/>
- Expert visitors<span id='r3duN6IqD'/>
    - Could bring in someone from Minerva for example (faculty in neuroscience) once we have specific questions that stump us<span id='u6PbUuiAT'/>
- Using our Zettelkasten<span id='Z5S-MYAry'/>
    - being able to bring in notes and comments from other books<span id='L_-Z-9wTp'/>
    - but problem is that we can spend the rest of our lives discussing these issues, with the book as a thin alibi<span id='jPq_Fp4iE'/>