Epistemic notes reveal growth

Of the many cool features of Maggie Appleton’s personal site, one of my favorite is the use of plants as epistemological indicators. I’ve adopted my own slightly modified version. Here’s how it works:

If my content is new, it gets a 🌱 (seedling). This communicates that, not only is the content unfinished, it’s also not fully conceived. It could grow into a substantial idea, I may prune the note entirely, or I may later contradict the core idea.

A 🌿 (sprout) has grown beyond initial formation and may even appear fully developed, but it has not gone through a quality control process. Sometimes I may leave a note at this level because my mind is not fully convinced.

A 🪴 (plant) is, for the most part, finished. Like any of my writing, it may no longer reflect my evolving perspective or take into account changes in the environment, but new growth takes precedent over perfect plants.

A 🌲 (evergreen) is finished. Unless my perspective changed dramatically, these will remain as-is for the forseeable future. They represent the end-of-the-line for a subject, at least for now :).

I’m playing fast and loose with these concepts because it’s new to me and because it’s for my own needs first. These icons help me tend my garden by indicating where more writing and thought is needed and let me filter out what’s “finished”. If you find a note that does not appear to be accurately marked, blame the editor 😉.

March 2023 Revision

After using four epistemic categories for nearly two years, this is what I’ve discovered.

First, categorizing my own work into epistemic buckets is hard. I tend to think new writing shouldn’t be evergreen, but the content that actually sits in plant or sprout isn’t based on its age, but how satisfied I feel about it. I tend to move articles to evergreen after a waiting period, even though I’ve hardly edited them.

Second, four categories are too many. I noticed that Maggie’s site is down to three now, and I’m going to follow suit. In reality, I want the first category to contain unfinished work. The sprout category, where it can be complete but not quality controlled, always lands in plant. The difference between seedling and sprout ends up being how incomplete the writing appears.

Lastly, I’m very grateful that I didn’t make this more complicated. I’ve been able to use this system for nearly two years in large part because I don’t overthink it.

Without further ado, here are my updated epistemic definitions.

Current Epistemic Buckets

Any content that is unfinished or sketchy starts as a 🌿 (sprout). Sometimes these are no more than a link to someone’s article that I want to delve deeper into and summarize. I rarely put anything on my site that I’m not already fairly convinced about and, when I am uncertain I use ambiguous language, so this is not an indicator of confidence. When I do have further thoughts that may contradict an earlier article, I’ve taken to adding it to the page itself under a new heading.

Content that is mostly finished ends up a 🪴 (plant). I may need to run spell check on it or integrate hyperlinks, but the core of the content is complete. When I’ve written an article on a subject that’s new to me, I’ll often leave it as a plant for a while because I lack confidence in my understanding and want to revisit the topic later.

Evergreen (🌲) content is here to stay. Surprisingly, these articles get more edits than others because they’ve become foundational to my online thought and discourse, so this designator doesn’t mean that the article is stale. These are the articles which are most often shared with others. When several evergreen articles grow in a particular subject, this is my indicator that a new garden may need planting.