Roam Research embraces disorder. Disorder makes us creative, productive. Just look at the desks of creative and productive people. Einstein, Jobs, Twain, Edison, etc. They are always far away from minimalism and cleanness. Or look at the notebooks of Leonardo or Nietzsche. Disorder.

I know there is a lot of hype around Niklas Luhmann’s note-taking system—zettelkasten. The argument in favor is that he wrote a lot of books. But he was a prodigious thinker, not because of his note-taking system. …

In this installment of [[Roaming Writing]] newsletter, we talk about self-organized systems, antifragility, optionality, principles, and rules — with special appearances of ants, organs, gardens, jungles, desires, fishes, and baits. This diversity of topics — chaos? — is a consequence of writing on Roam.

«I myself, while writing these lines, try to avoid the tyranny of a precise and explicit plan, drawing from an opaque source inside me that gives me surprises.»
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

Ants are better than organs

Ants are very captivating creatures. They can produce complex, apparently intelligent structures, without planning, control, or even direct communication between the ants. …

This is one of the most difficult preconceptions we must get rid of when using Roam Research: there is no structure or location where you put the text you write but phrases — blocks — that relate to other phrases or even phrases born from the relationship between others.

(I am in no way, shape, or form affiliated with Roam Research and do not in any way profit from commissions or referrals to it. I’m just a regular user. Some ideas can be applied to apps like Roam Research.)

Traditional digital writing

When you start using Roam, you may have the temptation to…

I believe in a kind of writing that is rhizomatic, fractal, or in modern terms, antifragile. Writing as the doing of thinking. I believe that Roam is an ideal app for this kind of writing.

I want to talk about my experience in both — the antifragile writing and the app.

I’m not planning to get too technical or instructional. There are other sources for that. In the end, this is about writing and thinking.

But the thing is that these ideas and their final delivery are written mostly on Roam per se so I can’t promise rigid linear writing…

[…] does an incredible job as a note-taking, brainstorming, information-gathering tool, working much like your brain does to allow you to capture, link, and organize ideas in a flash. It really shines as an IA tool. It allows you to quickly prototype maps of information, establishing links between ideas (or pages or nodes), sites, or other files.*

Sounds good, right? Well, this description is not for Roam. It’s a review written in 2002 for a great app called Tinderbox. Yep, 2002. And everything in the review is true.

Roam Research is not the first app that tries to be the…

The pursuit of success is time-oriented — you draw a line from your past to an ideal future. A fragile line depending on events and obstacles.

That’s opposite to the…

Against what my teachers and Aristotle taught me, via negativa is one of the most powerful forms of thinking for learning and making decisions. Some examples.

When you choose a career, for example, you decide through via negativa, especially in nonconventional careers. You can’t exactly know what your career is about because you haven’t course it.

Ask any new student to define what her career goes about and ask them again when they have finished it or if they are working on it. No way she could know what was it about. But she knew what it wasn’t.

When you…