Beeminder & Bibliographies
I'm writing this blog post a little earlier this week because I'm out of town for the weekend and Beeminder demands (well, politely but firmly requests) I get this done by Saturday evening. Speaking of Beeminder, last weekend I pushed something to my public GitHub for the first time since university, and it's something to do with it too (it's a Python script to count up the words I'm typing for these posts as well as my general notes). Turns out I do like seeing the pretty graphs go up!
Also last week I finished reading Gödel, Escher, Bach, which disappointingly for the contrarian side of me is just as great and important and insightful as everyone says it is and is totally worth reading for anyone even slightly interested in the roots of mathematics and (computational or biological) cognition. One small but valuable part of the book is the annotated bibliography at the back. Every entry has a note from Hofstadter and the whole collection (along with the discussions of some of the books mentioned in the bibliographies in the text of GEB itself) offers many pointers to the ideas discussed and expanded on in the book. Or at the very least, it can lead you to who was writing the hot takes on AI circa 1961 1. The whole thing is imbued with Hofstadter's perspective, not just in the commentary but in the curation too.
So given all the writing out there on all manner of subjects and the people willing to sound their opinions on it, why aren't there more annotated bibliographies like the one in GEB? There are some things like it online but none of them really come close:
- Linkposts on blogs: Have curation, and usually commentary from the blog's author as well, but usually lack much of a theme beyond 'stuff that happened in the authors area of interest this month' so they aren't great for gaining durable knowledge.
- Hyperlinks on articles/blog posts etc.: Curated, tightly coupled to the topic, and has context, but usually covers only one 'slice' of a major topic. Also link rot and paywalls can limit how much of the linked information you can actually access.
- The References/External Links sections on Wikipedia articles: Usually pretty well curated and closely tied to the article's subject, but the sources are selected for authoritativeness rather than readability or accessibility, so you get a lot of ultra-dense academic journal articles and newspaper articles from 30 years ago. Also the External Links section is usually pretty meagre and suffers from dead links as well.
- Google/Whatever the cool AI search engine is these days: Not that curated (lots of generic SEO slop) and only answers whatever narrow query you give it without giving any insight into the broader context of the thing you're searching, or why people reach certain conclusions.
What seems to be missing is a durable, high quality source pointing to the 'canon' of a particular subject, curated from the perspective of someone knowledgeable enough to take the outside view and pull out what is relevant for people new to the subject. Maybe all the people with enough domain knowledge are too busy to write long posts for neophytes these days, but it would be pretty nice to have a few to peruse.