On Sensemaking

A fun tour.

One of humans’ biggest quests has been to understand the world around us. I’m not sure we’re all that good at it yet. It would be useful if we were better.

The topics you’ll see on this page, all related to sensemaking, constitute my playground. These folks’ dreams and fantasies have influenced my vision profoundly. Twenty-eight years of curating a single mind map (plus an unhealthy dose of curiosity) has led me here.

Visions and inspirations

Sensemaking has many relatives, including:

• Collaborative Sensemaking

• Collective Intelligence

• Hive Mind or Group Mind

• Extended Mind

• Large Scale Collective IQ

• Knowledge Ecosystems

• Superintelligence (which might or might not involve humans)

• And a new favorite, CHI (Collective Hybrid Intelligence)

Of course, sensemaking has its opposites:

• Herd Mentality

• Crowd (Mob) Psychology

• Groupthink

• Other Dysfunctional Group Dynamics

And of course, sensemaking shows up in fiction:

• The Encyclopedia Galactica in Asimov’s Foundation series, as well as Psychohistory

• A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age

• Borges’s Library of Babel (especially if you can find the index volume!)

• Minds in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series

• The Borg in Star Trek, as well as the Holodeck (tea, Earl Gray, hot) and the Tricorder

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (DON’T PANIC!)

• The Pensieve in the Harry Potter universe

• The X-Men’s Cerebro

• The Palantír from Lord of the Rings

• Alethiometers from the His Dark Materials trilogy

• The Construct in The Matrix

• Precogs in Minority Report

And in speculative (wishful?) non-fiction:

• 1500-500 BC: Indra’s Net

• 1937: HG Wells’ article World Brain

• 1945: Vannevar Bush’s Memex

• 1945: Teilhard De Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky’s idea of The Noosphere

• 1960: JCR Licklider’s Man-Computer Symbiosis

• 1968: Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos

• 1974: Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines

• 1977: Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay’s Personal Dynamic Media

• 1980: Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizomal Networks

• 1987: Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video

From the tech side, the many different sensemaking efforts I’ve heard of include:

• Knowledge Graphs

• Distributed Knowledge Graphs (DKGs)

• Enterprise Knowledge Graphs (EKGs)

• Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGs)

• Personal Knowledge Networks (PKNs)

• Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

• Open Knowledge Networks (OKNs)

• Dynamic Knowledge Repositories (DKRs)

• Knowledge Gardens

The advent of generative AI shatters some constraints that made realizing these visions hard to see before; now it’s possible.

You can browse all of these, in context, in my Brain here. To suggest others, please write me or comment below this post. For a guided video tour of these nodes in my Brain, go here.

Who is working on this?