NISHIO Hirokazu
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Intellectual Production
"Intellectual production" (chiteki seisan, a term from Tadao Umesao's classic
The Art of Intellectual Production) means creating knowledge.
Textbook knowledge is copyable and rarely differentiating; the value lies in creating
knowledge fitted to the situation at hand. This has been my consistent axis of interest,
which I always phrase as: improving intellectual productivity (the means)
for the progress of civilization (the end).
How the scope has expanded
The starting point was the work inside an individual's head. From there the scope has
grown step by step: to tools (an "external brain"), to collaboration with AI, and to
mutual understanding in groups (broad listening).
The rhetoric — "improving intellectual productivity" — has stayed the same while its
subject expanded: an individual → an individual with tools → an individual
with AI → a group. That is the story of the last twenty years.
Record of practice
- 2013: Published Coding o Sasaeru Gijutsu (Japanese) — a book tracing the evolution of programming languages, deliberately built from knowledge that resists obsolescence. Chinese and Korean editions followed, and it is still being read a decade later
- 2014: Published Natural Language Processing with word2vec (O'Reilly Japan, in Japanese)
- 2017: Started a public "external brain" on Scrapbox — an open working log of thought, now over 24,000 pages
- 2018: Published The Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge (in Japanese; Korean edition followed) — my central book, analyzing the techniques of intellectual production from an engineer's point of view
- 2019: Launched Keichobot — a chatbot that asks questions to help you verbalize vague thoughts. The concept predates ChatGPT (Nov 2022); the engine was swapped to an LLM in March 2023
- 2021: Started building Kozaneba — digital stationery for organizing thought, in the lineage of the KJ method. Keichobot handles verbalization, Kozaneba handles structuring
- February 2022: Released the English translation, The Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge, free to read online
- April 2024: The Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge reached its 5th printing; gave the commemorative lecture "The Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge with LLMs" in June, starting a sequel project for the LLM era
- 2023–present: Toward group-scale knowledge creation — practicing broad listening, framed as augmenting our capacity to understand one another
Tools (self-built, publicly available)
- Keichobot — a chatbot that draws your thoughts out (verbalization phase)
- Kozaneba — digital stationery for organizing thought (structuring phase)
Read more
Related stories: Broad Listening in Practice / Plurality
This page is a record as of 2026-07-28. Intellectual production is an ongoing practice,
and this page will continue to grow.