I think in graphs.
I swear, so much complexity of my life right now comes from me wanting to be able to graphically draw out an interconnected hypergraph but also have a convenient textual representation of said hypergraph
I’m sure this makes zero sense to people. But ugh. It’s so frustrating to have the ideas in your brain and just not be able to really tease them out in a useful way for others
Text scales, but requires serialising the graph, which doesn’t convey the interconnectedness that makes whatever I’m trying to say important or powerful. To be comprehensible to other people basically means breadth-first traversal, and now I’m explaining a whole tech tree of concepts, and most of my readers have lost interest.
And then you update the graph and you have to redo the traversal!
(- me)
When I truly understand something, I can almost see it in my head as this beautiful interconnected web of concepts. I can feel how all the strands tie it together.
Linearising that in writing is hard for me, and some strands get lost, but it’s still usually useful. Trying to linearise it in real time, in a meeting, with social calculations layered on top? That doesn’t tend to go so well.
This description reminds me of writing my master’s thesis years ago, trying to find a thread to pull that would produce a coherent linear narrative. Resulted in me throwing out multiple 100+ page starts before I found a way to make it work.
The elusiveness of “finding the right thread to pull” constitutes a huge barrier for me to overcome to start writing.
Often someone asking a question provides that thread, and I can have a much easier time unravelling the part of the tangle that answers their question.
Bounding the traversal is also hard. Often the graph is so connected - concepts related to so many others, at least by analogy or tangentially - that a complete traversal would never finish. Breadth-first doesn’t always help, because not everyone wants an overview of every related concept before I answer their question - they already know, or they don’t care.
Part of the skill of communicating with a brain that works this way is deciding what branches to prune early. That depends on the audience! This can be easy in a 1-1 conversation where the person can interactively give feedback on what they want to hear, and is much harder when writing A Blog Post for an imagined audience.