When I first started writing Practice Notes, I mainly saw them as a way to preserve observations.
An idea emerges during a conversation, a project, an experience or simply a moment of reflection. If I capture it, it remains available. If I do not, there is a good chance that it will eventually disappear. This became part of what I now think of as continuity of understanding: preserving enough of what we learn that someone, somewhere, can make use of it later.
Recently, however, I realized that this may only be the first part of the story. The individual Practice Notes are probably not the end product. They are source material.
As the collection grows, connections begin to appear between notes that were written at different times and about very different subjects. An observation about assessment turns out to have something in common with an idea about product development. A family story raises the same question about lost context that appears in system documentation. Even something as ordinary as choosing a watch can become an exploration of judgment, context and suitability.
I did not set out to connect all of these subjects. In many cases, the connections only became visible afterwards.
That suggests that a sufficiently large collection of observations can contain something that none of its individual pieces contains on its own: recurring patterns in the way its author understands the world.
This gives the Practice Notes a second possible purpose.
The first is preservation. Capture observations, experiences and ideas before they disappear.
The second is discovery. Once enough material has accumulated, look across it and ask what keeps returning. Which assumptions shape apparently unrelated conclusions? Which mental models appear in different contexts? Which ideas have gradually evolved over time without that development ever being planned?
Until recently, doing this with decades of material would have been difficult. Someone would have to read everything, categorize it, compare ideas across hundreds of fragments and somehow reconstruct the relationships between them.
AI changes what is practical.
It can help examine a large body of material and identify recurring concepts, relationships, tensions and patterns. Not to invent a philosophy on behalf of its author, but to help reveal patterns that may already be present.
That makes me wonder what could eventually emerge from my own collection of Practice Notes.
A working title might be:
Method in the Madness
It would not be a philosophy book that I deliberately sat down to write. Instead, it would be a reconstruction of the recurring ways I appear to think, derived from observations accumulated over many years and across many different subjects.
And once that possibility exists, another one follows.
Every person carries a different body of understanding. Our experiences differ, as do our professions, cultures, histories and assumptions. If more people preserved fragments of that understanding over time, each collection might reveal its own patterns.
But there may also be patterns between those collections.
Ideas might emerge independently in different professions or different parts of the world. Similar mental models might appear under completely different names. Experiences that initially seem unrelated might reveal common structures when viewed together.
AI could potentially help us discover those patterns as well.
A working name for that idea is:
Pluribus
From many individual bodies of understanding, something larger may emerge — not because everyone thinks alike, but because the differences and similarities between their experiences become visible.
This suggests a progression.
Continuity preserves understanding so that it does not simply disappear.
Method in the Madness looks across one person’s accumulated understanding and discovers the patterns within it.
Pluribus looks across many such bodies of understanding and searches for patterns that transcend the individual.
Perhaps that is where the Practice Notes eventually lead.
Not towards one enormous collection of notes, and not towards a book I already know how to write.
Towards enough preserved understanding that we can eventually discover what the collection has been telling us all along.
This version also makes Pluribus feel less like a sudden sci-fi leap: it follows naturally from the same mechanism applied first to one body of knowledge and then to many.
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