Why Do We Love Knowledge Graphs?

Most of us find densely interconnected knowledge graphs mesmerising. Why?

After a while, knowledge vaults turn into messy but mesmerizing spiderwebs, and it feels amazing.

Whoa! That looks beautiful! What is this?

—KNOWLEDGE GRAPH VIRGINS

Knowledge graphs are, by far, one of the biggest attractions of my knowledge management assembly line.

“Dots collection → Information processing → Thinking → Writing”

Believe it or not, they are not where most heavy lifting occurs. They’re not even the most useful data visualisation technique. But they’re magical because they trigger important emotions like writing with a premium pen in a favourite notebook. They’re catalysts for something that moves the needle—something bigger.

A Growth Hack

Diving deep into knowledge graphs’ reasons for existence would be prohibitive for the short format of a newsletter issue. Instead, I’d like to highlight one of their characteristics that I consider paramount for Tools for Thought (TfT) builders.

You might not be one, but you could be someone currently choosing a PKM tool to commit to or to switch over to. Your typical contenders at the time of writing would be players like Notion, DEVONthink, Roam Research, and, of course, Obsidian. This last one gained tremendous momentum lately. I’d argue that the reason for that is that, unlike most other application developers who know that a visual knowledge graph’s value decreases as the number of nodes and connections increases, Obsidian’s team decided to provide this visual sugar anyway.

I strongly believe that allowing users to see a spiderweb of a knowledge graph is an extremely potent growth hack.

Let me explain with a few noteworthy examples.

Propellerhead’s Reason

Propellerhead Reason’s growth hacking gimmick: the swinging cables. Source: Pinterest.

Music producers and audio professionals working in recording studios operate analogue appliances that are often neatly organised into standard-size racks and interconnected with patch cables. Those cables generally have standardised 1/4 inch jacks on both extremities, allowing you to route audio signals from one device's outputs to another's input. More often than not, such patching will be done at the back of the rack, keeping front panels’ knobs and sliders visible and clutter-free.

Reason is Propellerhead’s flagship product that simulates the assembly of virtual replicas of such audio equipment into virtual racks of your computer-powered studio. None of the constraints of the physical world apply in the digital realm, and the sky is the limit when imagining new ways of routing audio signals from plugin A to plugin B.

However, the genius of Propellerhead was that they doubled down on the photorealism of Reason. All of the virtual boxes imitated familiar knobs, names, colours and form factors.

The thing audio junkies couldn’t stop raving about was that Reason would allow you to “flip” the virtual rack to reveal its back panel where the abovementioned patching was happening. But that’s not what blew their minds away. The real “wow” factor was that those patch cables would be (wait for it) swinging for a few seconds as they would in the physical realm.

This visual gimmick added strictly no value to the sound quality or production workflow. But everyone I know who picked Reason as their main DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) made up their minds precisely the moment the virtual rack was turned around.

Scrivener

Scrivener is arguably so popular because it recreates the familiar stationery writer’s tools, such as the typewriter, a scratchpad, a binder, and index cards spread on a desk. My index cards and the corkboard look minimalistic, but you can make them photorealistically textured in the settings for an even greater analogue look.

Scrivener is a software that positions itself as a long-form writing station. It owes its popularity to its ability to replicate this fertile analogue writing setup in the digital realm. Its electronic index cards, filled with text or images, can be dragged on a virtual corkboard. As you progress through your writing, you can have it prominently displayed either by splitting your screen, showing it on a separate one, or even projecting it on a wall, bringing it as close as it gets to that cinematic cliché of having a cloud of newspaper cutouts, photographs, index cards and post-it notes pinned to a corkboard and connected by yarn threads.

Connecting the dots visually creates a familiar-looking knowledge graph we often see in movies. Source: thebeaverton.com

Scrivener is one of the most complete writing workstations on the market today. There’s a relatively steep learning curve, which will pay off if you stick to it. The tool's complexity is the function of the amount of features provided to help you write efficiently. However, like in the case of Reason’s swinging cables, the pivotal “shut up and take my money” moment is when a writer unfamiliar with the software discovers that he can have his index cards visually laid out on a virtual corkboard.

The Comfort of Familiarity

So, why are we strangely attracted to knowledge graph spiderwebs so much?

I believe the reasons are similar to those that made applications like Scrivener and Reason popular: it’s comforting.

Our brains are wired to seek familiarity. Our computers provide us with desktops, files, calculators and trash bins. We like reading more of the same. We suffer from confirmation bias. We date carbon copies of our ex.

I’d argue that we’re peculiarly drawn to the universe-looking knowledge graphs because they are very familiar to us even though we’ve never seen one before.

It’s how we learn, make decisions, and organise our thoughts. We’re just carrying those graphs in our heads. In other words, it’s how we think.