Anybody who thinks reading and writing is powerful, and anybody who thinks sharing is powerful, ought to be excited about knowledge graphs.

Knowledge graphs are powerful -- they underpin Google search, Facebook, Siri, etc. And open source tools exist for keeping your own knowledge graph. (Here's my favorite: https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/wiki/. It has, to my knolwedge, two ongoing users.)

I was part of a small study group once -- four to seven people, meeting daily for a couple hours to share economics notes. It was critical -- I could not have made it through the first year of grad school otherwise. Knowledge graphs can scale to far greater numbers of users.

So many people are biting their nails about the rise of AI. I belive we could leverage existing technology to bring about human superintelligence before then.

Internally, our minds work nonlinearly, but when it comes to written media, we process text linearly. That is slow, wasteful -- if someone writes a book full of gems of wisdom, but scatters redundant illustrations, obvious examples, or unnecessary motivating passages between them, you've got to wade through that chaff in order to find the gems. Knowledge graphs let us write and read nonlinearly -- faster, better targeted, hence able to cover more information, more kinds of information. It's like tables of contents all the way down.

Writing is great because it allows a reader to build on the work of earlier writers. Knowledge graphs, in addition to that, let readers build on the work of other readers. If I mark a passage as "obvious" or "critical" or "beautiful", that metadata can guide another reader. Online systems already use this idea to some extent -- facebook likes, reddit and HN votes, etc. can help inform reader choices. But knowledge graphs in principle allow for arbitrarily general metadata -- for instance, "show me every statement [group] has written about [topic] which has been marked useful for [goal] by at least [number] readers".

Publishing even a small body of useful, organized information can be extremely valuable. Craigslist, for instance. Although there was an obvious economic argument for publishing the information on Craigslist.

In fact, economics might be making us stupid. Non-monetizable information is of enormous importance. Globally, we are experiencing an epistemic crisis. Huge swaths of the public mistrust science, journalism, history. We appear to be at least nearly as susceptible to fascism as we were in the thirties. The arguments for freedom of speech, or civil rights, or being kind to strangers, ought to be as obvious to us as which job pays how much money.

Camus talked about something he called "philosophical suicide", wherein someone stops trying to think high thoughts. They fall into an economic routine, the specialize, their awareness narrows. They might excel at what they do. But a world full of such narrow thinking is a dangerous place.

I had heart surgery, almost died, and for years after, knowledge-gardened furiously. I wrote, reviewed, organized, categorized. I pondered long passages and reduced them to a few words, which became easier to process. What is pleasure? What are the elements of consciousness? Where is my boundary of certainty in ethics? Can I enumerate the state space of a conversation? It was a transformative experience -- I changed from an awkward, selfish, angry young man to a warm, gregarious, relaxed middle-aged man.

It was also slow, because I was working alone, and I used trees, which are less expressive than graphs. I can only dream of how transformative it would be to process those ideas in a group, nonlinearly, using a knowledge graph.