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Your comment reminds me of something Andy Matuschak wrote: > But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fiel
by Veen 6y ago
Your comment reminds me of something Andy Matuschak wrote:
> But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the challenges of their work, but the advice was developed in a context disconnected from those external realities.
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzXQu8ErVNv https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzX...
Essentially, be wary of taking advice about reading, research, writing, or anything else from people whose primary contribution to the world is telling people how to read, research, and write. Instead, listen to people who have used these techniques to make a substantial contribution to a field of knowledge.
The problem is that those people are far more interested in doing research and writing than teaching other people how to do it.
- sean_the_geek 6y agoThis. The best advice I have received is from people who never intended to share it and were almost shy about it. It's only thorough my observation that I learned about their skill.
- unabst 6y agoErgo, learning is stealing. Good students learn alone, and just need goals. Spoonfed knowledge is like processed food. It's clickbaity and likely spread because it makes you feel good.
- jholman 6y agoYeah! The best students learn alone! That's also why the best athletes don't use coaches. Wait, that's not right. Hang on. Even though all real learning is at least 80% internal and must be owned-and-operated by the student... maybe there's a role for spoonfed knowledge. Certainly there's a role for teachers (disagreeing with "good students learn alone"), even if morale-management and goal-setting is a surprisingly large fraction of it. But even spoonfed knowledge is helpful. For example, as far as I can tell, most good mathematicians have a lot of spoonfed knowledge as part of their learning history (but they also have even more self-guided exploration, and even the spoonfed stuff you gotta chew on it and digest it). Agreed, though, that a lot of articles like this are clickbaity and, like sugar, give you a sensation of learning rather than what you really need. This particular article, I think, contains a mish-mash of good advice and, uh, pureed pap. It's certainly not worst-of-breed.
- throwaway7281 6y agoOne exception may be Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist, who was a prolific writer. His note taking method was part of his philosophical process, I assume.
- Veen 6y agoHe is an exception in that he wrote about note-taking from the perspective of someone who used his system to make serious contributions to systems theory and various other fields. But he's a great demonstration of Matuschak's point. Luhmnam wrote dozens of books about a wide range of topics, enabled by Zettelkasten, and then wrote a couple of essays towards the end of his career about how he did it.
- pps 6y ago> he wrote about note-taking Did he? I though we have his archive and we know how he used it (from some interview, I think). Didn't thought he wrote about it directly in his system. Do you have source on that?
- Veen 6y agoCommunicating with Slipboxes http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes
- pps 6y agoThank you!
- turnerdhooch 6y agoI wish this were less abstruse.
- alfonsodev 6y agoThis comment is gold, it reminds me also about how when we build something we tend to show it to our friends or peers, when we should be reaching out to whom has the problem we are trying to solve.
- notjes 6y agoSo, essentially "You shall know them by their fruits". Seems like false prophets existed in all millennia.
- agumonkey 6y agoI remember asking IBMers if they used rational modeling to make their programs. The silence answered the question. I'm guilty of this myself. My interests and struggle become topic of suggestions to others even though it's half good ideas half fluff.
- jholman 6y ago> My interests and struggle become topic of suggestions to others even though it's half good ideas half fluff. This is a wonderfully honest observation. I suspect we all have this experience; I certainly do. Of course the suggestions come from an honest place, but often the verbalized outputs do not live up to the epistemic standards we would like to hold ourselves to. I think perhaps I should less say "do this" and instead more say "here is my experience, and my current theory about that experience, and what I'm trying to do to improve". Or perhaps even "I wonder if...". It turns out that I had to re-write this comment to follow my own advice, and I think in this case it was in fact helpful, at least for me. That's pleasing. As someone who has many opportunities to give advice to people 20 years younger than me, I'm doing a lot of "well, I used to think X, and now I don't, so a similar evolution may happen to you". Maybe that's also relevant. Maybe it's just a bad old-man habit.
- agumonkey 6y ago> "here is my experience, and my current theory about that experience, and what I'm trying to do to improve". Indeed that's what I did for a few years. My ideas have shifted now, I stopped discussing much (life is short) instead you do stuff. And suddenly mediocre companies feel a lot more valuable because instead of talking theories they do stuff. I guess I'm just rediscovering life... know how to gather a bunch of people and make something useful and enjoyable for many.
- mtgx 6y agoThis applies to coaching in general. Don't take coaching advice from someone that is less accomplished than you. He should be as least as accomplished as where you'd like to be in 5-10 years, etc.
- criddell 6y agoI think that advice breaks down when you reach the highest levels. For example, even the best hitters in baseball have hitting coaches.
- npsimons 6y agoSome people who are more accomplished than you are shitty coaches though. Some rock climbers I've known come immediately to mind.
- cambalache 6y agoThat's why Lionel Messi does not need any coaching. It's not like your advice is wrong it's just too simplistic. There are several reasons why a coach could be less accomplished than you and still be a great coach: 1) Provide a third-person , objective perspective on your performance. 2)Be a great motivator.3) Work like a resonance board to your ideas, plans. 4) Helping you to avoid mistakes they made. 5)More time to dedicate to specific pain points in your performance, etc. Grand-masters going to a World Chess championship assemble a team of other GMs, who are usually less (many times, a lot less) accomplished than them, but they bring a lot of good stuff to the table.
- volume 6y agowhat about NBA players?
- Bhilai 6y agoThats a weird advice, most accomplished sportsmen have had coaches less accomplished then them. All top tennis pros, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic have had coaches less accomplished then them. Most football coaches are less accomplished then their star players. I am pretty sure this is true for most fields, not just sports.
- smarx007 6y agoDid someone manage to convince him to OSS or sell licenses to his system? Seems similar to http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors but more dynamic and with some extra link discovery. I am trying logseq right now but the bullet-point format is a bit limiting (equally so when I compare my own freeform paper notetaking with bullet journalling).
- pps 6y agoIt's only for presentation. He writes in Bear on MacOS and use his script to make backlinks https://github.com/andymatuschak/Bear-Markdown-Export https://github.com/andymatuschak/Bear-Markdown-Export . He made a video presenting how he works, should be somewhere on YT. But if you're asking specifically about that website source code then yes, he was asked about it. He didn't publish it. There are some alternatives: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
- pps 6y agoFeynman with his (super simple...) method for getting deep understanding is a great example.
- warmwaffles 6y agoI've never head of this. Care to provide a link?
- sankumsek 6y agoI can't speak for OP, but I think they might potentially mean this: https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/1/23/the-feynman-technique-model https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/1/23/the-feynman-technique-m....
- Dig1t 6y agohttps://blog.doist.com/feynman-technique/ https://blog.doist.com/feynman-technique/ basically go back and forth between trying to ELI5 the thing, and reading source material.
- abnry 6y agoIs it really though? Any CPU powerful enough can compute primes large enough. I suspect that Feynman was a supercomputer who could often brute force it. His method may work for him but it doesn't mean he has a complete understanding of how to learn it general. He can learn, but he may not know how he does it or how others should do it.
- 0x445442 6y agoYeah, it's like all the sports and horse race handicapping gurus offering their picks for a fee. If their methods were so good, why not just apply them rather than spending the extra time trying to run the meta business?
- cafard 6y agoWell, Jacques Barzun was an excellent writer and historian. He wrote a fair bit on writing, and his Teacher in America contains the chapters "How to Read and Be Right" and "How to Write and Be Read", both with sound advice.
- accountLost 6y agoOn the other hand these people can sometimes lead you to some more serious material if they share their sources. Seems to be the case here with this link in the post : https://maartenvandoorn.nl/reading-guide/ https://maartenvandoorn.nl/reading-guide/ (changed to the direct link to the author site to avoid medium.com)
- siliconmountain 6y agoI always open these links hoping to find some new source or concept on note-taking, thinking, meta learning etc. But Im dissapointed by the continuous flow of shallow hustle porn material Looking at the more substantial link that you provided now, thanks for sharing!
- garden_hermit 6y agoBuilding on this advice, I highy recommend the essay titled "How to Read a Book" by Paul Edwards: https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf Edwards is an academic historian of science who write incredibly long and dense books drawing on hundreds of sources. If anyone knows how to read, its him, and his advice was truly useful for my own reading.
- lappet 6y agoThank you for sharing this. I seem to follow some of his methods and there are some I need to adopt.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- isthatsoup 6y agoThanks for this. I clicked on this thread thinking "why should I care about how den zhadanov reads books? what has he accomplished exactly?" and confirmed my suspicious when I saw the picture of him reading one of those junk business self help books. Snake oil. This person, however, seems worthy of consideration.
- hckrnrd 6y ago“junk business self help books.” Indeed many a bookshelf is littered with such babble, but to group Nobel laureate, Danny Khaneman[1] into that group would be a gross overestimation. [1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Kahneman https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Kahneman
- nosmokewhereiam 6y agoThis is awesome: It's useful, it's enlightening, and I wouldn't have found this without your comment. Thank you!
- Denzhadanov 6y agoThank you for the advice! I'll add that to the list
- munificent 6y agoThere is a fundamental challenge here. If you want to learn X, you look for a teacher that is great at X and teaching. Teaching, writing, and other forms of communication are sort of meta-skills that you need to pair with some domain so that they have something to communicate. The intersection of "great at X" and "great at explaining" is often very small. In practice, you end up having to make trade-offs like wading through poor exposition because the author is the real deal. Another common failure mode is what we see here: People that are so good at explaining, hustling, and branding, that they become popular despite likely having very little expertise at X.
- d0mine 6y agoThe best athlete is not necessarily is the best coach and in reverse the best coach don’t need to be the best athlete— different skill set.