Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conversational canyons, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 4, 2023 on LessWrong.

Conversations are streams: they pass by without leaving much behind. But if you add a notebook—if you write down short summaries of what you talk about so you can return to it in later conversations and expand—then you have a landscape for the conversation to flow through, and this changes it in interesting ways.

When I started writing summaries, I thought it would be a small change. I already kept a detailed journal—I could just as well keep one for conversations, too. I could jot down a few notes about the key ideas, turning a two-hour conversation into 400 words or so. After a few months, however, it became clear that these notes were in fact not a small change. The notebook had entirely altered the shape of my conversations.

Because I had the notes, I would review them if I was to speak with the same person again, adding comments about thoughts I’d had in the interim, rank ordering which topics I wanted to revisit, and so on. This way good ideas and topics would not be dropped but revisited and expanded. They would be connected to new insights, merged, and refined. Through this, the conversations became richer. They became more useful and interesting.

The conversational stream was flowing through a landscape. On its banks ideas would wash up. Gradually, the banks would move, too—the landscape is shaped by the flow of words into a canyon. A canyon that shapes the stream of words in turn.

I don’t write down the conversations I have with most people. But there are a few who I keep coming back to—friends with minds that are forever churning, minds like mysterious machines I can never fully grasp but am continually delighted by. When we talk they all take me to different places; when I add a notebook they all go deep.

The first conversation I wrote down was with Torbjörn, a software engineer who has an uncanny ability to guess my thoughts. When he gets excited he SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, and he gets excited about everything.

At the time, we talked on the phone once a week for about two hours. I would set off from my house toward the ocean and cross into the nature reserve. Walking along the ravine and the cliffs for a few hours, I would talk to Torbjörn about open research questions and software projects we were involved with. He would ask me for strategic advice about his consultancy. We also talked about our relationships, aliens, the ravings of the world around us, mopeds.

While talking, we would take turns jotting down keywords to aid our memory, and then, when I got home, I would add what we had said to my note-taking system. I revised old notes in light of how our thinking had evolved, adding new links between different ideas, and so on. (For this particular conversation, I used Obsidian. But the tools are not important. And I roughly follow the note-taking strategy that Andy Matuschak outlines here. But that is not important either.) If Torbjörn wanted some of the notes, I would email edited excerpts to him, so I didn’t have to format my notebook in a way that makes sense for him to read.

First, I mixed the conversational notes in with my other thoughts. But I’ve since found that keeping the conversational notes separate from other notes is better—it creates a stronger sense of place. Now, I enter the Torbjörn notes, and all past conversations flow up. Mixed in with the other notes, they were diluted. (I do interlink it heavily with other notes, though.)

During the week or so until we talked again, I would occasionally revisit the notes and add a thought or two. It kept the conversation alive in my mind. I’d update a list of topics I wanted to cover next time, shuffling their relative importance.

This priority list, which was added to deal with the mess the notes became after a few...