Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardening

The Informed Life

Maggie Appleton is a product designer at Ought, an AI research lab that’s working on ways to scale open-ended thinking with machine learning. She’s also an advocate of sharing personal knowledge online. She publishes one of the best digital gardens I’ve seen, located at maggieappleton.com. In this conversation, we discuss the what, why, and how of digital gardening.

Show notes

• Maggie Appleton
• Maggie Appleton on Twitter
• Ought
• [Metaphors We Live](https://amzn.to/43q0eEj) By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI by Maggie Appleton
• Goffman’s Theory of Performance of the Self
• Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Adam D. Barnhart
• Clifford Geertz - Britannica
• Substack
• Work with the garage door up by Andy Matuschak
• Niklas Luhmann - Wikipedia
• ChatGPT
• Nicole van der Hoeven on Obsidian – The Informed Life
• Obsidian
• Hacker News

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Chapters

1. About Maggie (00:01:37)

2. Grounding abstract understanding through metaphors (00:04:12)

3. Taking in a broad perspective (00:07:55)

4. Applying anthropology to cultural phenomena (00:08:58)

5. Digital gardening (00:11:20)

6. The challenge of structuring digital gardens (00:16:34)

7. Why publish this stuff (00:19:31)

8. Digital gardens for emergent thinking (00:24:07)

9. Trust and truth and generative AI (00:26:32)

10. Closing (00:36:57)