Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

On 2 July 2022, I hosted this conversation with Sam Biagetti of the excellent Historiansplaining podcast. We discussed Sam's interest in geography and history, his process for his rapid pace of putting out podcasts, the tremendous demand for learning on the internet, the magic of film, Nietzsche, Judaism, and Orientalism. I have some audio issues at the start but they clear up as the podcast continues. I'm @bryankam on Twitter. Click here to schedule a discussion with me.

This is a conversation about personal knowledge management that I had with Achim Rothe on 22 June, 2022. We discuss tags, folders, and searching. Schedule a Twitter space with me!

This is a live conversation I recorded on Twitter Spaces on 16 June 2022, between me (Bryan Kam) and Achim Rothe. We discuss our history of note-taking, our usage of personal knowledge management, and tools for thought. Achim discusses how he came to build Trickle.app, and I discuss how David Allen's Getting Things Done and Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes led me to build my own knowledge management system, an implementation of Zettelkasten. We also discuss how software development relates to knowledge usage, metasystems, pragmatism, the problem of never revisiting notes, and how to decide what to remember, Schopenhauer, how note-taking relates to photo-taking. Errata: I said that Schopenhauer is quoting "Owen Smith"; I'm thinking of Sir William Jones (1764–1794). Schedule a Twitter space with me!

This is a live conversation I recorded on Twitter Spaces on 11 January 2022, between me (Bryan Kam), Isabela Granic, Athenian Stranger, and others. We discuss abstraction and perfection, including Spinoza's Ethics, Charles Sanders Peirce, the medieval scholastics, as well as Ancient Chinese, and Greek philosophy. I edited out the very beginning, when we were getting set up, but otherwise it includes the entire conversation. If you would like to schedule a conversation with me like this, please click here.

This episode is about the universal versus the particular, in film, poetry and prose. There's a new thing, which is that you can now read this episode's transcript! In this episode, I discuss the Wenders film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987). (Wenders' Q&A should be posted on the BFI YouTube channel.) I also consider the relationship of the universal to the particular; see this Twitter thread. I refer to The Master & His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist (2009), as well as The Problem of Knowledge, by Ernst Cassirer (1950), Conversations with Goethe (1836–1848). I also refer to Being You, by Anil Seth (2021). At the end, I read "Love Constant Beyond Death" (1648), by Francisco de Quevado, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Historiansplaining podcast and the upcoming Twitter Space I'm holding with Sam Biagetti.

From the blog: What I'm up to now. Listen to my first conversation with Achim Rothe (2022-06-16). Listen to my second conversation with Achim Rothe (2022-06-22). Read my announcement for my discussion with Sam Biagetti. Listen to my conversation with Sam Biagetti (2022-07-02). Please schedule a conversation with me (limited time only!). Or consider recording a clip to send to this podcast (click the +Message button).

Mermillod et al.: The Stability-Plasticity Dilemma (2013) Erik Hoel: The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization (2021) Carhart-Harris et al.: The Entropic Brain (2014) Von Neumann: The Computer and the Brain (1957) Shakespeare: Sonnet 122

R. J. Hollingdale's 1994 translation of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human (1878) My piece on the avant-garde Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Boyce: Why Some Children Are Orchids and Others Are Dandelions (2019) A. C. Graham: Disputers of the Tao (1989) Quanta: Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly Swarms (2020) Shakespeare: Sonnet 95

In this episode I give Kuhn's 1973 lecture "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice" (1973). There is a PDF of the lecture here. The book he discusses is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I found the clip of Kuhn speaking on a closely related topic in this clip from 1995.

W. B. Yeats: All Things Can Tempt Me. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962 book). Thomas Kuhn: "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice" (1973 lecture) PDF.