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I've taken 3000 pages of notes in a linear, bullet-point fashion, and I also keep up with education research. As far as I can tell, both in studies and in pers

by knzhou 6y ago

I've taken 3000 pages of notes in a linear, bullet-point fashion, and I also keep up with education research. As far as I can tell, both in studies and in personal experience, the fiddly details of your note-taking schemes don't matter. The only thing that matters is attempting to integrate the information into a cohesive whole, which takes intentional thought. With linear notes, there's a failure mode where links that should be made aren't; you can even walk around believing outright contradictions without noticing. But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?"). Both of these reflect a failure to aggregate and chunk the information into hard tools, but no productivity system can magically fix that; it always takes time.

ErikBjare 6y ago
>But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?"). Isn't that exactly what the point of a memex-like system is? Instead of simple X-Y links, you get 3-tuples such as (X, "can cause", Y).
estoniandwarf 6y ago
For Academic writing like the creator of zettelkasten was, web method is much preferred. For linear notes, the remedy is not really feasible, you'd have to go through everything thoroughly fixing unlinked notes. For the 2nd, the 'failure mode' of the web note taker as you describe, that isn't really a problem. Notes are just tools/building blocks to writing or coming up with cohesive ideas/arguments. If you don't know what Y was for, its either irrelevant or you've found a gap in your knowledge you need to plug.
jbd0 6y ago
Zettelkasten can handle this. Create a note called "My Theory" with the contents "X causes Y if Z", where X, Y, and Z are links to the relevant notes.

by knzhou 6y ago

ErikBjare 6y ago

>But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?"). Isn't that exactly what the point of a memex-like system is? Instead of simple X-Y links, you get 3-tuples such as (X, "can cause", Y).

estoniandwarf 6y ago

For Academic writing like the creator of zettelkasten was, web method is much preferred. For linear notes, the remedy is not really feasible, you'd have to go through everything thoroughly fixing unlinked notes. For the 2nd, the 'failure mode' of the web note taker as you describe, that isn't really a problem. Notes are just tools/building blocks to writing or coming up with cohesive ideas/arguments. If you don't know what Y was for, its either irrelevant or you've found a gap in your knowledge you need to plug.

jbd0 6y ago

Zettelkasten can handle this. Create a note called "My Theory" with the contents "X causes Y if Z", where X, Y, and Z are links to the relevant notes.