Since Semyonova did not care to look at things from the peasants' point of view and mixed her research with attempts to convert, I wonder how many of the things she recorded were directly intended to shock her.

Hmm, I guess conflict resolution would be garbage, but simultaneous editing is rarely a good experience anyway. Otherwise storing and sharing text files using a file sync service is fairly good compared to other options. Thanks!

Thanks!

I wasn't aware of Etherpad. Other Google Docs equivalents seemed impossible to self-host and extend, so a non-starter.

I agree with your overview:

• Etherpad provides collaborative editing, but integrating it with other services will probably take extra work
• Logseq has better structure, but worse automation
• Emacs can do most things on one computer, but rapid sharing is even harder

Pieces for a general purpose personal computing system. Ideally:

• Edit data by hand
• Store as plain text
• Self-host, access from any device
• Write formulas to derive data automatically
• Mix and match structured data (markdown, tables, nested lists, whiteboard)
• Search and navigate, like any wiki
• Automate through a web API and webhooks
• Collaborate in real time

The strict divide between high slack and low slack reminds me of synchronous and asynchronous companies: hybrids seem to work poorly.

Seven sketches in compositionality explores compositionality (category theory, really) with examples:

• Dish recipes
• Chemistry, resource markets and manufacturing
• Relational database schemas and data migrations
• Projects and teams with conflicting design trade-offs
• Cyber-physical systems, signal flow graphs, circuits

I mean, it's easier to find two people willing to play than ten. So you'll get more data. With one or two teams it will be hard to draw any conclusions at all.

It seems picking a 1v1 game would work better as an experiment.

Caveat: ask each person to name someone they personally worked with.

Hard to get right, but not sure whether it's harder than knowledge investment.

Wouldn't have helped Louis XV. We might need infrastructure in place that would incentivize people to make themselves easy to find.

Is it really true that money can't buy knowledge?

We can ask the most knowledgeable person we know to name the most knowledgeable person they know, and do that until we find the best expert. Or alternatively, ask a bunch of people to name a few, and keep walking this graph for a while.

This won't let us buy knowledge that doesn't exist, but seems good enough for learning from experts, given enough money and modern communication technology that Louis XV didn't have.