The Deep Plate and the Shallow Pond: On Two Theories of Information Depth
We spend our days drinking from a firehose. Our natural response to this deluge has been to develop distinct, almost philosophical approaches to managing what flows through us. I’ve come to think of these as two conflicting theories for how information should be held. One says depth is a function of singular focus; the other, that it emerges from a wide, shimmering surface. I call them the Deep Plate and the Shallow Pond.
The Deep Plate practitioner believes in containment. Their method is a form of intense, vertical excavation on a single topic. They might open a new note for a concept that’s caught their eye—say, the history of urban planning. For the next hour, or day, everything they read, watch, or think about is directed into that one vessel. They chase footnotes down rabbit holes, link disparate sources within that single document, and build a lattice of understanding that is dense and self-contained. The note becomes a deep well, a unified artifact of concentrated thought. The focus is on pressure, on drilling down until you hit a vein of original insight. The plate isn’t just deep; its walls are high, keeping the world out so the work within can clarify.
The Surface as Substance
In stark contrast, the Shallow Pond theorist rejects the idea that depth requires such isolation. For them, depth is not found in a hole but in the subtle, interconnected ecology of a broad, maintained surface. Their workspace is a flat plane—a sprawling canvas of notes, each one brief, provisional, and heavily linked. Depth here is relational. The power isn’t in any single note’s profundity, but in the number of shimmering connections between them. A thought about urban planning might link to a note on tree root systems, which touches a note on network theory, which brushes against a quote on Byzantine administration.
The Pond is never still. It is fed by a constant, gentle rain of new links and annotations. The goal is not to finish a “deep” note, but to keep the surface tension alive, allowing patterns to emerge from the play of light across the whole. Insight here is lateral, a sudden understanding of a shape that was always there, made visible only by the vast, shallow field of points. The labor is in tending the connections, not fortifying the containers.
Neither approach is correct, of course. The Deep Plate yields formidable, portable knowledge modules—essays, talks, firm conclusions. It’s a mode of production. But it risks myopia, becoming a silo cut off from the wider system. The Shallow Pond fosters surprise, serendipity, and a more fluid, evolving intelligence. It is a mode of perception. Its danger is dissipation, a collection of glimmers that never cohere into a strong, directed beam of light.
My own practice oscillates, sometimes uneasily, between them. I will spend a week deepening a single plate, feeling the solid satisfaction of a thought fully worked. Then, overwhelmed by its isolation, I’ll shift back to skimming the pond, tracing links until a new pattern convinces me to start another plate. The tension itself might be the point. It’s the meta-debate of how we think about thinking: whether true understanding is built by holding one thing tightly, or by holding many things lightly, and letting their reflections do the work.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: