3 ms·

Anyone sharing a picture of their graph, or who even pretends to navigate/look at the graph as a graph in any useful way, is definitely a bullshitter. In my exp

Anyone sharing a picture of their graph, or who even pretends to navigate/look at the graph as a graph in any useful way, is definitely a bullshitter. In my experience, the graph is just a consequence that is sometimes pretty to look at, and that's it. But what is it a consequence of? I think there is a ton of value in taking notes (probably more value than in having notes), so what I get out of Obsidian, my PKM tool of choice, is probably no more than vim keybindings on a text editor, but that text editor can autocomplete references to other files without getting in the way of bulleted lists or prose. Pretty much agreed for the most part, but if these chic new PKM tools get people who need to take notes but kind of suck at it (like myself) to take notes, then that's a good thing. Definitely not as miraculous as some claim. The cult around Roam in particular is well beyond laughable at this point. Edit: The other thing I find very pragmatically useful, and is also a relatively simple thing (but a thing nonetheless!) is querying your notes. So I can take meeting notes, add some followup items as checkboxes, and then have a note that aggregates all of those to one place while linking back to their original context.

Macha 5y ago
Yeah, the three things I get out of Obsidian compared to my previous approach of a generic text editor + folder of markdown are: 1. As you mention, I can just shove a todo in a note and then I have a note to query all of these so I can make sure I'm following up on things I should be. For me todo systems came and went but it took integrating at the point I'm keeping records when most "todo" items come in for one to stick. 2. Embedding can be kind of handy. I think there's more places I can use it, but I do it so I can e.g. embed my discussion of a ticket in both my 1:1 notes when reporting to more senior leaders, and also my personal log of what I did that day. It's not like a lifechanging moment but it makes me appear more professional and prepared when I'm not going "Hold on a moment, let me pull that up waits for JIRA to load", or having to search for files to open them up as I'd closed them down to avoid tab overload. 3. Templates. I have some e.g. for standup, for 1:1s with specific people, for a daily/weekly note (which includes some recurring todos in the template, to link back to point 1) --- For the graphing features, yeah, I take a lot of notes, and a lot of them are leaf nodes apart from a few highly connected ones, and those tend to be stuff like "Weekly XYZ meeting agenda", rather than anything enlightening. Having a leaf node each for each ticket I'm tracking in my system or each day's standup is going to make any diagram an absolute mess. However, the other thing I do use Obisidian for is my tabletop game sessions. These tend to have much more "stable" entities (Player character X, location Y, Maguffin Z). While I don't personally use the graph there, it at least looks much more sensible there to the extent that I could maybe imagine it makes sense for people using the tool in a creative writing/research context. People find mind maps valuable too, even if that never did it for me, so I can imagine people inclined in that way would appreciate basically hyperlinked mind maps. --- For the point on whether such a structured note taking system is useful at all, I think it really depends on "Does the number of distinct items you need to keep track of exceed your mental organisational capacity to keep track of them?". When I was just a mid level developer, I never took personal notes. For the "now" period, if I had 4 topics on my mind it was a lot, and that was well within my capacity to keep track of. For longer term keeping, either it was useful technical information for _other_ developers as well and I shoved it in a shared wiki, or it was information about how the feature we're working on is evolving as we work on it, in which case it made sense to keep it recorded in a ticket or document. At that point, there was very little left that was valuable to write down but didn't go into some other shared document bucket. But once my role changed to one where I am now also responsible for the work of other people, that's when things changed and where I needed a note taking system. It might be a very simple topic and we might have talked about it yesterday, but I have n things I'm working on, plus x team member's and their individual n things, plus things that are upcoming that need to be ready for the team to work on.
RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
> Anyone sharing a picture of their graph, or who even pretends to navigate/look at the graph as a graph in any useful way, is definitely a bullshitter. Yep. Graphs are not "scalable" unless the visual elements are meaningful in themselves; they are mostly for "feeling-good-about-oneself" --- "look at all the notes I took and linked!".
drcode 5y ago
When I created my own Roam clone from scratch, I completely left out the "knowledge graph". I agree it's a failed idea. My clone is optimized for terminal usage, since the clunky javascript UI is the other flaw of Roam.
historia_novae 5y ago
This reminds me story: during my first (failed) PhD attempt, I had a supervisor working on a knowledge graph system for education. Great! I was doing something very similar, except I had an algorithm for presenting it in a linear way. So I shared my concern that students will not be able to understand and make use of a graph representation. Like almost everything I said in the following years, it was immediately dismissed and I quickly stopped trying to work on this with that guy. Fast forward 2-3 years later, I ask about a student that was somewhat working on that project with this supervisor, he replied "oh, I stopped working on that, it doesn't work, student are confused by the graph!" In the meantime, I've also read a paper in another field that said users don't understand graph representation. I still think that graphs can be useful for knowledge management, but it has to stay an implementation details not shown to the user.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  This is very interesting! Is there any public content available for further reading on your (or similar) approaches? I would be keen to try it in my Obsidian KG if so

Macha 5y ago

Yeah, the three things I get out of Obsidian compared to my previous approach of a generic text editor + folder of markdown are: 1. As you mention, I can just shove a todo in a note and then I have a note to query all of these so I can make sure I'm following up on things I should be. For me todo systems came and went but it took integrating at the point I'm keeping records when most "todo" items come in for one to stick. 2. Embedding can be kind of handy. I think there's more places I can use it, but I do it so I can e.g. embed my discussion of a ticket in both my 1:1 notes when reporting to more senior leaders, and also my personal log of what I did that day. It's not like a lifechanging moment but it makes me appear more professional and prepared when I'm not going "Hold on a moment, let me pull that up waits for JIRA to load", or having to search for files to open them up as I'd closed them down to avoid tab overload. 3. Templates. I have some e.g. for standup, for 1:1s with specific people, for a daily/weekly note (which includes some recurring todos in the template, to link back to point 1) --- For the graphing features, yeah, I take a lot of notes, and a lot of them are leaf nodes apart from a few highly connected ones, and those tend to be stuff like "Weekly XYZ meeting agenda", rather than anything enlightening. Having a leaf node each for each ticket I'm tracking in my system or each day's standup is going to make any diagram an absolute mess. However, the other thing I do use Obisidian for is my tabletop game sessions. These tend to have much more "stable" entities (Player character X, location Y, Maguffin Z). While I don't personally use the graph there, it at least looks much more sensible there to the extent that I could maybe imagine it makes sense for people using the tool in a creative writing/research context. People find mind maps valuable too, even if that never did it for me, so I can imagine people inclined in that way would appreciate basically hyperlinked mind maps. --- For the point on whether such a structured note taking system is useful at all, I think it really depends on "Does the number of distinct items you need to keep track of exceed your mental organisational capacity to keep track of them?". When I was just a mid level developer, I never took personal notes. For the "now" period, if I had 4 topics on my mind it was a lot, and that was well within my capacity to keep track of. For longer term keeping, either it was useful technical information for _other_ developers as well and I shoved it in a shared wiki, or it was information about how the feature we're working on is evolving as we work on it, in which case it made sense to keep it recorded in a ticket or document. At that point, there was very little left that was valuable to write down but didn't go into some other shared document bucket. But once my role changed to one where I am now also responsible for the work of other people, that's when things changed and where I needed a note taking system. It might be a very simple topic and we might have talked about it yesterday, but I have n things I'm working on, plus x team member's and their individual n things, plus things that are upcoming that need to be ready for the team to work on.

RyEgswuCsn 5y ago

> Anyone sharing a picture of their graph, or who even pretends to navigate/look at the graph as a graph in any useful way, is definitely a bullshitter. Yep. Graphs are not "scalable" unless the visual elements are meaningful in themselves; they are mostly for "feeling-good-about-oneself" --- "look at all the notes I took and linked!".

drcode 5y ago

When I created my own Roam clone from scratch, I completely left out the "knowledge graph". I agree it's a failed idea. My clone is optimized for terminal usage, since the clunky javascript UI is the other flaw of Roam.

historia_novae 5y ago

This reminds me story: during my first (failed) PhD attempt, I had a supervisor working on a knowledge graph system for education. Great! I was doing something very similar, except I had an algorithm for presenting it in a linear way. So I shared my concern that students will not be able to understand and make use of a graph representation. Like almost everything I said in the following years, it was immediately dismissed and I quickly stopped trying to work on this with that guy. Fast forward 2-3 years later, I ask about a student that was somewhat working on that project with this supervisor, he replied "oh, I stopped working on that, it doesn't work, student are confused by the graph!" In the meantime, I've also read a paper in another field that said users don't understand graph representation. I still think that graphs can be useful for knowledge management, but it has to stay an implementation details not shown to the user.

ethanbond 5y ago
This is very interesting! Is there any public content available for further reading on your (or similar) approaches? I would be keen to try it in my Obsidian KG if so