(2025jul28) I’m pleased to revisit and update this post. It’s still a long way from what I’d like it to be, but I see the vision manifesting, I see the desire paths beginning to reveal themselves.
(2024nov24) I’m in the process of once again trying to… organize my blog. It occurs to me that the desire paths post might be the best place to start trying something that I want to start trying. So… for starters, I’ll list out a bunch of other posts in this cluster:
- thinking easy, information architecture hard – this feels like a good problem statement. How are we to organize information in a way that is <insert positive quality here>?
- jetpacks – I think I mainly like this one because it was a comparatively early prediction about the challenge of information overload. It contains subheaders about supernormal stimuli, filters, and people being unserious about their information diets. Also, ‘jetpacks’ are an evocative, people-shaped idea.
- notesprawl – this one is a little bit funny, which is a good sign (h/t Ogilvy’s ‘the best ideas come as jokes’). It’s an extended metaphor describing notes in terms of urban sprawl, and also gets into the question of messes.
- people-shaped – because we are writing for people, it makes sense to be mindful of the limits and idiosyncrasies of human attention.
- hyperthreading – this is contains a couple of my oft-referenced threads such as Fragmentation and Assemble The Mindcity.
- make yourself comfortable – this one feels very important, it’s in a sense what I want to be doing for the rest of this blog. I want this blog to feel more cozy than it currently does.
- do less — this is a “rejoinder” post, ie something I can share with someone who’s doing too much
- branching paths (substack) – forgetting aids remembering… architecture is a people-centric activity… crackle-boom…
Why do I make that list? Am I going to contextualize it? I don’t precisely know yet. If it were possible, I’d like all of those posts to be one post. So maybe that’s the next step, I should re-read each of those posts and then pull out whatever feels relevant from each.
But wait… I’ve already made this a Category, so you can see all the posts in the category by going to the category page (which I might rename, currently it’s “1desirepaths”).
(2024dec23) It’s possible that I might not even need the category much longer, if this anchor post can point to everything else! I think I’ll get rid of it. Let’s double-check the category for the posts not listed above… there’s write your memoirs, todo lists as narrative devices, and magic junkyard. That confirms it, I should be able to get rid of this whole category. I’m going to do that now… done. Having listed out the above links, I now want to try and update this post to better contextualize them. There was a post titled “soften the ground” which was fairly short, which I feel would be better as part of this post here. So I’ve redirected it here (below).
Also just for fun and future-ref, here’s a 2013 tweet where I said:
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Soften the ground
(2020apr17thread) I notice a thing in my media consumption patterns where sometimes there’s something I want to watch or read or learn more about, but it doesn’t really happen until something else “softens the ground”.
For example: I’ve vaguely wanted to learn more about Miles Davis for a few years now. Why? because… he’s Miles Davis! He’s cool! I wanna be cool. I wanna understand cool. he was a legend, a pioneer. I wanna understand that stuff.
But all of that was happening for me at a rather intellectual layer. I didn’t care about miles davis, only the idea of him, kinda.
But that’s not an insurmountable problem. caring about something intellectually is often a starting point for me to care about it more fundamentally. I just need to get a sense of how it’s connected to other things I care about too
I think sometime around 2015 I started listening to Kind of Blue on repeat on youtube – and that gave me one entry point. Now I wanna know more about the guy who made the thing I like. But that wasn’t enough at the time to make me watch a 2hr documentary.
I like the idea of jazz, and I appreciate it, but I would be being dishonest if I described myself as “a jazz guy”. it doesn’t shake me up all the way through. I am certainly “a scenes guy”, though, and I like reading and learning about scenes…
so at this point I have enough interest to go and read the wikipedia page a little more closely than I usually do – and if there are a couple of bits that hit me, now my interest is aroused. (Importantly, I don’t really have much say in this!)
Now we’re off to the races. Now I can spend a whole day on Miles Davis. I’m looking up what he did in Paris, I’m considering watching the French movie he improvised a soundtrack for. He’ll start popping up in my writing here and there when relevant
The most interesting thing about this whole process to me is how little of a say I get in whether or not I’m going to watch something. There is a process that exists through me, of which I am a mere (and often frustrated) servant. The more aware I become of the fullness of this process, the less frustrated I become. My subconscious really is smarter and more powerful than me, which is simultaneously amazing and terrifying.
Furthermore, I think “soften the ground” is a powerful general principle for all tasks, not just “I wanna watch this movie”. Instead of feeling vaguely guilty about the stuff on your list, realize that things happen almost naturally once the ground is appropriately soft.
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(2023sep25) Was just talking with @neuranne about creativity and ideas and I found myself naturally bringing up the idea of paving the desire paths in the context of… stories that I often bring up in conversation. I wish I had a better log of them. One that I brought up in a recent conversation was the anecdote of the discovery of Stainless Steel. I’m now also reminded that I talk a lot about the origin of Sony. And about Victor Wooten. I’m wondering now if a part of me feels a little averse to the idea of making my references so visible. There’s another part of me that does want to do it, so I’m internally conflicted and there’s probably a negotiation that needs to happen in order for me to make progress.
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[2021mar24thread] my twitter philosophy, which informs my content philosophy, which is informs my life philosophy, is something like… pay attention to the sticky riffs in your conversations, and embellish them, and then use them as landmarks to navigate by, and pave the desire paths.
people ask questions like “how are you so confident” and “how do you remember all your tweets” – it’s all sort of the same thing. I’m confident because I know my stuff, I know my stuff because I have this magnificent memory-palace, it works because I allow the emotions to guide.
once you have a few good riffs or talking points or whatever you wanna call them, those are like buoys or lighthouses that you can navigate by. they are like major cities in a trade network. you can build out everything in between them. connecting them creates additional wealth.
and here’s the really wild thing: this is a multiplayer co-op game. we don’t have to do it alone. we can build desire paths to each other’s thoughts. and all of us are enriched by the wealth created by the trade.
If we do it really, really well, I would actually bet that Twitter could ascend into legendary status relative to all the other social networks. 50 years from now this part of Twitter could be looked back on as THE place to be, across the whole Internet.
I’m not sure that anybody who works at Twitter even realizes just how powerful the potential of this is.
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Assemble the mindcity [2019may28 thread]:
Now that more of us are playing the threading game: As we compete+collaborate effectively articulate things we all care about, And weave each other’s thoughts into our respective webs, The desire paths will assemble a mindcity paved with the best individual thoughts.
We used to each aggregate & share our favorite blogs and blogposts, each of which were themselves elaborate thought paths. That was great, but twitter’s killer feature is that each specific thought is both self-contained and modular. The rate of reference & rework is accelerating.
It’s easier than ever to play, and it’s cheaper than ever to make mistakes. You don’t even need to solve entire problems by yourself – partial contributions and partial coinages can be tremendously valuable, because each tweet can function as a setup or a punchline for your other tweets and for other people’s tweets
the system of routing is IMO fundamentally superior. And the cost of false starts and dead ends is decreasing, you can take more swings than ever before. A thousand tweets is a smaller commitment than a thousand blogposts, for both writer & reader
One of my biggest frustrations with the old way – which is what drew me to threading in the first place – was that good ideas from the past get forgotten. Once enough people are combing through threads, the good stuff can continually be resurfaced, & the resurfacing is positive signal
I’m already seeing a substantial increase in people quote-tweeting each other’s old tweets in response to other people’s tweets. This is exhilarating. IMO the value of each individual tweet and the threads these tweets are in are increasing dramatically as a result
The race is on to assemble the best possible articulations of ideas in ways that are not just funny or clever, but deeply resonant in ways that make other people want to revisit and reuse them repeatedly broke: viral tweet woke: tweet that’s referenced & reused in many threads
The more people play the threading game, earnestly, directed by their own taste and curiosity and eagerness to share what’s good, the better chances individual tweets have of reaching a sort of semi-immortality. One person’s thoughts can become connective tissue serving thousands
The important distinction is that thoughts have to be repurposed, reused, referenced, even contradicted. They have to be *in play* as currency, not frozen into plaques in museums where they languish in a sort of disuse-death
ThoughtRank or TweetRank is the next iteration of PageRank
how braincells make connections: https://twitter.com/slava__bobrov/status/1502973100538875905
“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar Internet company. Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time . . . identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
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further reading:
https://thehooksite.com/walkways-utilized-by-students-at-ohio-state-university/
http://www.waxine.nl/waxine/thoughts/20150105_desire_paths.php
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/05/desire-paths-the-illicit-trails-that-defy-the-urban-planners