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> Ideally, notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years. Personal opinion : I think this is not the right way to loo
by antpls 7y ago
> Ideally, notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years.
Personal opinion : I think this is not the right way to look at knowledge. What you think as "knowledge" today will only be data for algorithms in 10 years. Some knowledge today won't be useful in 5, 10 o 20 years from now.
The best way to validate knowledge is to share it and review it with peers as quickly as possible. Ideally, you would make your notes public and they would be easily findable by anyone, so anyone can continue your work at anytime.
Note taking for long term retrieval doesn't make sense in a world of internet and machine learning. In the future, you will just enter a question in a text box and algorithms will search inside billions of documents, deduce facts and write an essay to answer your question.
To me, note taking only makes sense for very short term "todo", or when to listening to someone speak. "Note taking" when reading a book is called "annotating", and they are training data for ML algorithms (not for your brain)
- kranner 7y ago> Note taking for long term retrieval doesn't make sense in a world of internet and machine learning. In the future, you will just enter a question in a text box and algorithms will search inside billions of documents, deduce facts and write an essay to answer your question. That is a narrow view of the reasons people take notes on books. One might want to save one's personal impressions of a piece of fiction, ideas about superficially unrelated concepts that suggest themselves, etc.
- tajd 7y agoI agree. Note taking can be about identifying facts, interesting ideas or arguments but it can also be about arguing with the author, making links or recording your own understanding. The activity of taking notes, for me, is really about codifying your understanding of a section of text.