What should all this information help you decide?
Alex Karp runs Palantir, a software company that helps governments and businesses bring information from different places together and find connections in it. Its work includes military and intelligence uses, which raise serious questions about surveillance and how that information is used.
Journalist Michael Steinberger explores Karp and the company in The Philosopher in the Valley. The book also raises a question that matters on a much smaller scale: what happens after you’ve collected the information?
Start with the mess
In the book, Steinberger describes the ordinary problems hidden inside large collections of data. A name is misspelled. A record is out of date. Information is stored in different places, so people can’t easily see how it connects.
“Data” can sound distant and technical. Here it just means recorded information: names, messages, numbers, pictures. Having lots of it doesn’t guarantee that you can make sense of it.
Steinberger also describes a comparison made by Clive Humby, a mathematician and entrepreneur. Humby compared data with oil, including a detail that matters: the raw material needs work before it becomes useful. It isn’t enough just to have it.
That is the thought we’re taking into a very different setting: the things a person saves for themselves.
Imagine you’re choosing somewhere to live
You have photos of places you like, a list of rents, messages from landlords, and a few thoughts about what matters to you. You’ve saved plenty. Now you need to choose.
One place looks beautiful but is further from work. Another costs less, but you still don’t know whether it’s noisy at night. A rent figure you wrote down last month may no longer be right.
Saving another ten photos probably won’t settle the noise question. You need to notice what you don’t know and find a way to check it.
This is our example, not a story from the book. It makes the question more concrete: what information would actually help with the choice in front of you?
Bringing that question to Capture
Capture is an app we’re building for saving rough thoughts, grouping related ones together, and keeping tasks separate. Applied to Capture, the question becomes: once someone has collected those thoughts, how could the app help them work out what to do next?
That is a direction to explore, not a claim that Capture already makes decisions for you. And it doesn’t mean every thought needs to become a task. Some ideas are worth keeping simply because they interest you.
But when you do have a decision to make, a useful starting point might be a small group of related thoughts. Read them with three questions in mind: what do I know, what am I assuming, and what do I still need to find out?
Keep the original words nearby. “I wonder if this place is quiet” must not turn into “this place is quiet” just because a summary sounds confident.
Try it with one ordinary decision you’re facing. You may discover that you already have enough information to take the next step. Or you may find one unanswered question that matters more than everything else you’ve saved.
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Reading notes: Based on passages from Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. The publisher’s description supplies the introductory background. The oil comparison belongs to Humby, as reported by Steinberger. The housing example and Capture application are ours, not Karp’s advice or an endorsement of Palantir.
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Shared with Capture
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