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Knowledge tools, finite and infinite | thesephist.com

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A big library holds a kind of strange faux-infinity, spanning across hundreds of topics with voices from millions of authors. Good libraries can contain in their finite space a feeling that, even if you read for centuries and centuries, you would never exhaust the knowledge contained within their walls, not only because there are simply so many books, but because there’s so much to learn when you take the ideas from one book as a lens through which to read others. Infinities assembled out of finite building blocks. I find this idea of assembling infinites out of finiteness really charming. With enough raw material and creative re-combination, you can conjure an infinity of ideas from something large but finite. It led me to think about what may happen if we designed knowledge tools to evoke the same kind of “infinite library” feeling, by the same mechanism of assembling infinites. Your average note-taking app is quite finite. If you have a thousand notes, you have a thousand notes. The

A big library holds a kind of strange faux-infinity, spanning across hundreds of topics with voices from millions of authors. Good libraries can contain in their finite space a feeling that, even if you read for centuries and centuries, you would never exhaust the knowledge contained within their walls, not only because there are simply so many books, but because there's so much to learn when you take the ideas from one book as a lens through which to read others. Infinities assembled out of finite building blocks. I find this idea of assembling infinites out of finiteness really charming. Wit

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