Every Link Is a Decision
In public.
Here's something I've never said plainly:
Every link in Jerry's Brain is a decision. (I didn't see it that way until Jochen wrote it that way.)
Not a filing decision — a judgment decision. Does this connect to that? Is this relationship worth naming? Does this node belong here, or somewhere I haven't built yet?
I've made that call roughly 1.2 million times over 28 years. More, if you enumerate what to link to, what to call a node, and where to look next. Curatorial, editorial decisions that are surprisingly fun, and always throw me into System 2 thinking.
Nobody asked me to. No algorithm surfaced the connection. No prompt generated the link. I saw something, I thought it belonged somewhere, and I connected it — in public, permanently, under my own name.
That's curation with intention. And it compounds.
The Brain I have today isn't 635,000 nodes. It's several million decisions that reference each other. The value isn't in any single node, it's in the argument the whole thing makes about how ideas relate.
This is what I mean when I say Stump Jerry's Brains is a live sensemaking session, not a demo.
When you toss a topic at me in front of an audience, I'm not searching a database. I'm navigating a 28-year argument and showing you, in real time, how that argument was built and where it leads.
An AI could do many things with my Brain. What it can't do is be the person who made those millions of calls — and be accountable to them, live, in the room.
That's the session. That's the offer.
PS: Curious about how we snipped long-term relationships and brought on the Global Financial Crisis? Explore here.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.