1,015 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2023
    1. Among these was a declaration of sentiments, to be regarded as the basis of a grand movement for attaining all the civil, social, political and religious rights of woman.

      What were these sentiments? I am curious about how they constructed and pushed forth with their views and points. Fedrick Douglas mentioned that some of these women read their greivances; I have a question for these women. Were any of the sentiments more important than the others, and why?

    2. Many who have at last made the discovery that negroes have some rights as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be convinced that woman is entitled to any.

      So basically a black woman had to fight for her rights because she is black AND because she is a woman? A black woman had two barriers that held them from being treated like a decent human being, and not one or the other. Of course there were other circumstances and disadvantages but race and gender were big at this time.

    1. Based on yesterday's discussion at Dan Allosso's Book Club, we don't include defense spending into the consumer price index for calculating inflation or other market indicators. What other things (communal goods) aren't included into these measures, but which potentially should be to take into account the balance of governmental spending versus individual spending. It seems unfair that individual sectors, particularly those like defense contracting which are capitalistic in nature, but which are living on governmental rent extraction, should be free from the vagaries of inflation?

      Throwing them into the basket may create broader stability for the broader system and act as a brake via feedback mechanisms which would push those corporations to work for the broader economic good, particularly when they're taking such a large piece of the overall pie.

      Similarly how might we adjust corporate tax rates with respect to the level of inflation to prevent corporate price gouging during times of inflation which seems to be seen in the current 2023 economic climate. Workers have seen some small gains in salary since the pandemic, but inflationary pressures have dramatically eaten into these taking the gains and then some back into corporate coffers. The FED can increase interest rates to effect some change, but this doesn't change corporate price gouging in any way, tax or other policies will be necessary to do this.

  2. Mar 2023
    1. San/sand (? what is the correct word?) box invented with a hinge which moves forward allowing one to more easily thumb through the slips in their box.

    1. Die schiere Menge sprengt die Möglichkeiten der Buchpublikation, die komplexe, vieldimensionale Struktur einer vernetzten Informationsbasis ist im Druck nicht nachzubilden, und schließlich fügt sich die Dynamik eines stetig wachsenden und auch stetig zu korrigierenden Materials nicht in den starren Rhythmus der Buchproduktion, in der jede erweiterte und korrigierte Neuauflage mit unübersehbarem Aufwand verbunden ist. Eine Buchpublikation könnte stets nur die Momentaufnahme einer solchen Datenbank, reduziert auf eine bestimmte Perspektive, bieten. Auch das kann hin und wieder sehr nützlich sein, aber dadurch wird das Problem der Publikation des Gesamtmaterials nicht gelöst.

      Google translation:

      The sheer quantity exceeds the possibilities of book publication, the complex, multidimensional structure of a networked information base cannot be reproduced in print, and finally the dynamic of a constantly growing and constantly correcting material does not fit into the rigid rhythm of book production, in which each expanded and corrected new edition is associated with an incalculable amount of effort. A book publication could only offer a snapshot of such a database, reduced to a specific perspective. This too can be very useful from time to time, but it does not solve the problem of publishing the entire material.


      While the writing criticism of "dumping out one's zettelkasten" into a paper, journal article, chapter, book, etc. has been reasonably frequent in the 20th century, often as a means of attempting to create a linear book-bound context in a local neighborhood of ideas, are there other more complex networks of ideas which we're not communicating because they don't neatly fit into linear narrative forms? Is it possible that there is a non-linear form(s) based on network theory in which more complex ideas ought to better be embedded for understanding?

      Some of Niklas Luhmann's writing may show some of this complexity and local or even regional circularity, but perhaps it's a necessary means of communication to get these ideas across as they can't be placed into linear forms.

      One can analogize this to Lie groups and algebras in which our reading and thinking experiences are limited only to local regions which appear on smaller scales to be Euclidean, when, in fact, looking at larger portions of the region become dramatically non-Euclidean. How are we to appropriately relate these more complex ideas?

      What are the second and third order effects of this phenomenon?

      An example of this sort of non-linear examination can be seen in attempting to translate the complexity inherent in the Wb (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) into a simple, linear dictionary of the Egyptian language. While the simplicity can be handy on one level, the complexity of transforming the entirety of the complexity of the network of potential meanings is tremendously difficult.

    2. questions:

      • What were the exact sizes of the slips? Had they been standardized at the time?
    1. Oxford English Dictionary first attests 'commonplace' (from the Latin 'locus communis') asnoun in 1531 and a verb in 1656; 'excerpt' (from the Latin 'excerpere') as a verb in 1536 and anoun in 1656.

      The split between the ideas of commonplace book and zettelkasten may stem from the time period of the Anglicization of the first. If Gessner was just forming the tenets of a zettelkasten practice in 1548 and the name following(?) [what was the first use of zettelkasten?] while the word commonplace was entering English in 1531 using a book format, then the two traditions would likely have been splitting from that point forward in their different areas.

    1. How do we make them ‘‘benefit humanity as a whole’’ when humanity itself can’t agree on basic facts, much less core ethics and civic values?
    2. ‘‘I think it lets us be more thoughtful and more deliberate about safety issues,’’ Altman says. ‘‘Part of our strategy is: Gradual change in the world is better than sudden change.’’

      What are the long term effects of fast breaking changes and gradual changes for evolved entities?

    1. Note-taking techniques I: The index card method<br /> by Raul Pacheco-Vega

      What does his full collection look like? Does he have a larger filing cabinet or boxes or are they all smaller modular boxes?

      How does he handle the variety of sizes here? Particularly the differences between 4 x 6 and 5 x 8 as it sounds like he may use them similarly outside of their size difference.

    1. The Language Master<br /> BBC - Michel Thomas<br /> [English CC]<br /> [Leg. PT-BR]

      Michel Thomas is one of the most brilliant language teachers in the world. His usual clients are movie stars and business leaders. This programme takes him to a Sixth Form College in London to work with school pupils, to test his claim that he can teach anyone a language in a week - with no reading, writing or homework. The film also explores his personal history - as a hero of the French Resistance during WW II.

      The Michel Thomas method involves: - slow build up of words, phrases, natural grammar - forced production of the language through practice - positive interaction - patience - no stress - no judgement - encouragement - constant evidence of progress

      How does "understanding" of the language evolve out of this method? It's more like revelation rather than understanding...

      This method appears much more atomic than that of SSiW (Aran Jones), but some of this is down to the fact that there's a live person who is able to unjudgementally prompt one with pieces which they've missed. The teacher has the context whereas the taped instructors do not. Presumably this sort of interpersonal prompting and context isn't necessarily required, but it can help to better lower the learner's stress and potentially speed up the learning process. It would require some standardization to set up a specific experiment to test between these two modes to tease this data out.

      Reference key: [[Levy1997]]<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

    1. The earliest time of composition of any of these fragmentswas, so far as we can judge, 1929. The date at which the latestdatable fragment was written was August 1948. By far thegreatest number came from typescripts which were dictated from1945- 1948

      Based on the dating provided by Anscombe and von Wright, Wittgenstein's zettelkasten slips dated from 1929 to 1948.


      for reference LW's dates were 1889-1951


      Supposing that the notes preceded the typescripts and not the other way around as Anscombe and von Wright indicate, the majority of the notes were turned into written work (typescripts) which were dictated from 1945-1948.

      What was LW's process? Note taking, arranging/outlining, and then dictation followed by editing? Dictating would have been easier/faster certainly if he'd already written down his cards and could simply read from them to a secretary.

    2. . They were for the most partcut from extensive typescripts of his, other copies of which stillexist. Some few were cut from typescripts which we have notbeen able to trace and which it is likely that he destroyed but forthe bits that he put in the box.

      In Zettel, the editors indicate that many of Wittgenstein's zettels "were for the most part cut from extensive typescripts of his, other copies of which still exist." Perhaps not knowing of the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions, they may have mistook the notes in his zettelkasten as having originated in his typescripts rather than them having originated as notes which then later made it into his typescripts!

      What in particular about the originals may have made them think it was typescript to zettel?

    1. Scott Scheper has popularized a numbering scheme based on Wikipedia's Outline of Academic Disciplines.

      It's not just me who's noticed this.

      Interesting that for someone propounding Luhmann's zettelkasten system that Scheper has done this. Was it because he did it himself and then didn't want to change (likely) or because he spent time seeing others' problems with Luhmann's numbering system and designed a better way (less likely)?

    1. Protocols often mediate evolving relationships, especially ones with a natural adversarial element and endemic potential for conflict. These relationships often involve agents with long-term memories, creating an evolving historical context the protocol must handle. How do protocols accomplish such complex mediation?

      I like the Underlay solution to conflicting information, which is that all old and new versions are retained and the individual must set constraints and filters to determine 'truth'. May not be useful for more technical applications. It does however point to the fact that there will be bias, perhaps it's about making the bias transparent — favouring first truth or more prolific or higher status, etc?

      One gap I don't know how to solve is the continued making of meaning that condenses vast quantities of discussion and thinking data into a symbolic representation like squishing a concertina that can be built on in the future in a very constructivist way. How can computers do this in the sticky way humans do?

    2. How do protocols mutate, and what are the limits on the mutability of a protocol beyond which it begins to lose coherence, identity, and utility?

      Initial hunch is that this is related to 'good protocols' and 'bad protocols'.

      Reminds me of Deep Laziness, where structure preserving figures are indefatigable?

      Would also look at 'play'. Perhaps this is a feature of good vs bad protocols? If play can overlap with protocols then mutation might happen to satisfy continuation desire by augmenting to enable continued challenge (as skill improves so complexity continues — challenge and skill as the axes for Flow) see Good Business

      Would need it to become more embodied over time? (see Problem of Embodiment in the Sociology of Knowledge letter)

    3. What is the structural relationship between small-p protocols, in the sense of specific atomic behaviors like handshakes, and big-P protocols in the sense of entire behavior complexes, such as the one governing diplomatic relations among countries?

      maybe come back to this - would this be dialectical? - would it be anthropologically traceable? - would attributing behavioural expressions to some underlying value systems be too hermeneutical?

      easiest answer for now might be that small-p could be used as an archetype to explain big-P, but it would be a story or myth to help understand, like Zizek's toilet joke?

    4. emergence of a good protocol is the recognition and diffusion of good solutions that are also easy to imitate
      • do all protocols emerge or can some be designed?
      • are solutions kind of like patterns?
      • is there a difference in quality that can be assumed about designed or emergent solutions?

      side note: relates to "How to meme your data" idea. In that it is easily reproducible and iterable, maybe overlaps with composable

      potential link to Stigmergy too?

    1. All my final notes are in one folder. They are named using the zettelkasten method (YYYYMMDDhhmm). I also have an MOC (Map Of Content) folder.

      I'm curious what benefit, if any, you get out of the YYYYMMDDhhmm title format other than a simple date ordered listing of files?

    1. In short, in the absence of legal tender laws, the seller will not accept anything but money of certain value (good money), but the existence of legal tender laws will cause the buyer to offer only money with the lowest commodity value (bad money), as the creditor must accept such money at face value.

      During the coronavirus pandemic, many vendors facing inflation began to pass along the 3% (or more) credit card processing fees to their customers. Previously many credit card companies would penalize vendors for doing this (and possibly cut them off). This fee was considered "the cost of doing business".

      Some vendors prior to the pandemic would provide cash discounts on large orders because they could circumvent these fees.

      Does this affect (harm) inflation? Is it a form of Gresham's law at play here? What effect does this have on credit card companies? Are they so integral to the system that it doesn't affect them, but instead the customers using their legal tender?

  3. Feb 2023
    1. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics.

      How does this book speak with respect to Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire?

    1. What screenwriting books recommend note cards for drafting/outlining? Do any go beyond the general outlining advice?

      What is the overlap of this sort of writing practice with comedians who had a practice of writing jokes on index cards? (Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Diller, etc.?

    1. Not sure I completely follow the logic of the debate between Sascha and taurusnoises (Bob Doto) here. I'll have to look closer.

      Perhaps mapping out the 1-1 distinctions between the digital and the analog here would be helpful. What structures would be needed to make them 1-1?

    1. Folgezettel

      Do folgezettel in combination with an index help to prevent over-indexing behaviors? Or the scaling problem of categorization in a personal knowledge management space?

      Where do subject headings within a zettelkasten dovetail with the index? Where do they help relieve the idea of heavy indexing or tagging? How are the neighborhoods of ideas involved in keeping a sense of closeness while still allowing density of ideas and information?

      Having digital search views into small portions of neighborhoods like gxabbo suggested can be a fantastic affordance. see: https://hypothes.is/a/W2vqGLYxEe2qredYNyNu1A

      For example, consider an anthropology student who intends to spend a lifetime in the subject and its many sub-areas. If they begin smartly tagging things with anthropology as they start, eventually the value of the category, any tags, or ideas within their index will eventually grow without bound to the point that the meaning or value as a search affordance within their zettelkasten (digital or analog) will be utterly useless. Let's say they fix part of the issue by sub-categorizing pieces into cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, etc. This problem is fine while they're in undergraduate or graduate school for a bit, but eventually as they specialize, these areas too will become overwhelming in terms of search and the search results. This problem can continue ad-infinitum for areas and sub areas. So how can one solve it?

      Is a living and concatenating index the solution? The index can have anthropology with sub-areas listed with pointers to the beginnings of threads of thought in these areas which will eventually create neighborhoods of these related ideas.

      The solution is far easier when the ideas are done top-down after-the-fact like in the Dewey Decimal System when the broad areas are preknown and pre-delineated. But in a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten, things grow from the bottom up and thus present different difficulties from a scaling up perspective.

      How do we classify first, second, and third order effects which emerge out of the complexity of a zettelkasten? - Sparse indexing can be a useful long term affordance in the second or third order space. - Combinatorial creativity and ideas of serendipity emerge out of at least the third order. - Using ZK for writing is a second order affordance - Storage is a first order affordance - Memory is a first order affordance (related to storage) - Productivity is a second+ order (because solely spending the time to save and store ideas is a drag at the first order and doesn't show value until retrieval at a later date). - Poor organization can be non-affordance or deterrent which results in a scrap heap - lack of a reason why can be a non-affordance or deterrence as well - cross reference this list and continue on with other pieces and affordances

    1. sentries were not well-paid nor were they properly outfitted, subject to the extreme cold of the steppe and in constant contact with Mongol and Manchu raiders. It is small wonder that given the opportunity to defect or turn in the other direction while raiders crossed the border they did so.

      Did many of them defect or perhaps just die from the conditions?

    1. level 2A_Dull_SignificanceOp · 2 hr. agoYes! When I run across a comment on a book I haven’t read yet but seems interesting I make a little card with the comment and book title2ReplyGive AwardShareReportSaveFollowlevel 2taurusnoises · 2 hr. agoObsidianSo, you keep the titles of books you want to read organized in folgezettel (you give them an alphanumeric ID?) among your ZK notes? That's really interesting!

      I've done something like this when I think a particular reference(s) can answer a question related to a train of thought. But I keep cards of unread sources at the front of my sources section so that it's easier to pull it out frequently to prioritize and decide what I should be reading or working on next. These will then have links to the open questions I've noted, so that I can go back to those sections either as I'm reading/writing or to add those ideas into the appropriate folgezettel. These sorts of small amounts of work documented briefly can add up quickly over time. Source cards with indications of multiple open questions that might be answered is sometimes a good measure of desire to read, though other factors can also be at play.

      That to-read pile of bibliographic source notes (a mini antilibrary) is akin to walking into a party and surveying a room. I may be aware of some of the people I haven't met yet and the conversations we might have, but if there are interesting questions I know I want to ask of specific ones or conversations I already know I want to have, it can be more productive to visit those first.

      This sort of practice has been particularly helpful for times when I want to double check someone's sources or an original context, but don't have the time to do it immediately, don't want to break another extended train of thought, have to wait on materials, or may have to make a trip to consult physical materials that are singular or rare. For quick consultative reading, this can be a boon when I know I don't want or need to read an entire work, but skimming a chapter or a few pages for a close reading of a particular passage. I'll often keep a pile of these sorts of sources at hand so that I can make a short trip to a library, pick them up, find what I need and move on without having to recreate large portions of context to get the thing done because I've already laid most of the groundwork.

    1. Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library

      One of Ronald Reagan's Index cards with four bullet-pointed one-liners has the annotation "(over)" written on the bottom which indicates that he wrote on both sides of his cards.

      If he was keeping these in clear plastic sheets in a binder, this would have been easy to see the opposite sides.

      Were all of his cards double-sided? This particular example seems to be a list of one liners which may have been used in the same speech (or timeframe) and thus served solely as a reminder of the jokes to be told.

    1. Hesiod’s depictionof humans in the myth of Prometheus and Pandora. We consider theimplications of this myth for the Greek view of society and particularly of

      women and gender roles.

      If my perception of mythology and orality is correct, can we look at Indigenous stories, myth, and knowledge and draw parallels from their knowledge about women and gender to similar stories in the Western canon which have lost linkage to their narratives? What would this show us potentially about Western mythology and gender studies?

    1. “Writing a thesis,”Eco wrote, “requires a student to organize ideas and data, towork methodically, and to build an ‘object’ that in principlewill serve others. In reality, the research experience mattersmore than the topic.”

      Where does the learning portion of education morph into research? Where is the dividing line?

    1. Can a language model be transgressive without intentionality?
    2. “...it can be very useful for coming up with ideas out of thin air, essentially. All you need is a little bit of seed text, maybe some notes on a story you've been thinking about or random bits of inspiration and you can hit a button that gives you nearly infinite story ideas.”- Eugenia Triantafyllou

      Eugenia Triantafyllou is talking about crutches for creativity and inspiration, but seems to miss the value of collecting interesting tidbits along the road of life that one can use later. Instead, the emphasis here becomes one of relying on an artificial intelligence doing it for you at the "hit of a button". If this is the case, then why not just let the artificial intelligence do all the work for you?

      This is the area where the cultural loss of mnemonics used in orality or even the simple commonplace book will make us easier prey for (over-)reliance on technology.


      Is serendipity really serendipity if it's programmed for you?

    1. Wer sich also solch einen hölzernen Lebenspartner aufzieht, wird nach einigen Jahren immer interessantere Antworten auf seine Fragen bekommen …

      google translate:

      So if you raise such a wooden life partner, you will get more and more interesting answers to your questions after a few years...

      I love the idea of rearing a zettelkasten as a "wooden life partner".

    1. One of the problems in approaching quantum gravity is the choice for how to best represent it mathematically. Most of quantum mechanics is algebraic in nature but gravity has a geometry component which is important. (restatement)


      This is similar to the early 20th century problem of how to best represent quantum mechanics: as differential equations or using group theory/Lie algebras?

      This prompts the question: what other potential representations might also work?

      Could it be better understood/represented using Algebraic geometry or algebraic topology as perspectives?

      [handwritten notes from 2023-02-02]

    1. Zettelkasten and the big picture .t3_10xqd30._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      This question calls to mind that I haven't seen the word consilience in this space at all. Search pulls up only one post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zg80qc/comprehensible_texts_productivity_and_again/

      Where does consilience sit with respect to the use of a zettelkasten?

    2. Rookie question: Part of my knowledge database is based on the Zettelkasten method, i.e. I have concept-oriented, atomic notes that are linked to each other. I don't, however, however use IDs and neither the Folgezettel method.

      Example of someone (u/HerrRey) who defines zettelkasten as "concept oriented, atomic notes that are linked to each other", but who doesn't use or exclude "IDs or the folgezettel method". Interestingly they feel like they're not getting the "big picture" of their work.

      Is there an affordance in these missing pieces that prevents them from seeing the big picture because of what they're missing? Is it just neurodiversity? Are they not creating outputs which connect the small to the big, and thus missing it that way?

    1. Zettelkasten can be described as a collection of conceptual maps in a written format.

      What are the connections between zettelkasten and conceptual maps?

      How are they different/similar to Tony Buzan's mind maps?

    1. What signals are available to participants,and how are they compiled into estimates of rank? Their modelassumes that knowledge of rank is noisy, but not (statistically) biased.While we can build more-sophisticated models of the biases in ourjudgments, however, Kawakatsu et al.’s (1) success highlights thevirtues of simplicity. It is possible, for example, that, even if the sig-nals are not accurate at first, we might act to make them so.

      In the fraternity and other social spaces, how does one correct for a "bad first date", a botched meeting, or a lone bad day? Does statistical thermodynamics as a model provide clues? How would rank be determined here in an unbiased way? What about individual chemical affinities and how chemical interactions change and/or bias the samples?

    2. they must be visible enough to provide commonexpectations.

      Useful ranks versus unuseful ranks... list them. What factors separate them and why?

      For ranks to provide useful outcomes, they must be visible and their underlying factors should be transparent.

    1. Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that theirbrutality was in no way unusual by the standards of their time, buttheir democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented.

      If the theory in Colin Woodard's American Nations is applicable here, where would these pirates/proto-democratic practitioners have gotten their ideals from to have infected the larger group? What did their social networks look like such that they evolved this way? Was there some common source (written/oral) that they may have used 20-50 years earlier that created their own generation?

  4. Jan 2023
    1. Goethe's Maxims and Reflections represents a commonplace book of sorts.

      Who numbered the maxims though? Was it Goethe or someone after him?

      (stray note on a slip of paper dated 2022-10-27)

    1. There are severalpoints at which my analysis breaks with conventional understandingsof the period.

      Given the breaks with conventional understandings, is there underlying evidence to support them? We should watch out for the indication of these conventional understandings, his indication of breaks, and the evidence.

    2. It was Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery) who first developed the idea thatEuropean slave plantations in the New World were, in effect, the first factories; theidea of a “pre-racial” North Atlantic proletariat, in which these same techniques ofmechanization, surveillance, and discipline were applied to workers on ships, waselaborated by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (The Many-Headed Hydra).

      What sort of influence did these sorts of philosophy have on educational practices of their day and how do they reflect on our current educational milieu?

    3. the Enlightenment project, one now seen inrevolutionary quarters as a false dream of liberation that has insteadunleashed unspeakable cruelty upon the world

      Was the Enlightenment a false dream of liberation which has really unleashed an unspeakable cruelty upon the world?

    1. Woit does provide problems, but they are all at the back of the book. It would have been better to see them between chapters. That provides a natural break in the material and gives the student a quick check on his understanding.

      Homework problems are pedagogical devices and many (most) authors place them in the text near where they would be profitably be done. They also provide a useful break in the text to prompt more novice students to actually perform them at the end of a section.

      More advanced students, however, should have caught on eventually at the need to work out examples for themselves which are presented in a textbook, but they should also be seeking out additional problems where ever they appear in the text, not to mention seeing out any outside additional problems, making up their own, and exploring any additional questions these pose.

      In mathematics textbooks this working of problems, expanding on them and seeking out new ones is often a large part of what is lurking behind the sometimes nebulous sounding idea of "mathematical sophistication". The rest of that equation typically includes experience with the various methods and means of proofs and some basic background in logic.

    1. 个人学习可能取决于他人行为的主张突出了将学习环境视为一个涉及多个互动参与者的系统的重要性
    1. Once you somehow got your idea, there’s the task of placing and connecting your idea to your collection of existing ideas. What kind of connection am I looking for? What relationships are worthy of calling a connection? Do any connections work, or do some work better than others? Should I categorize the connections?

      Most only get so far as, what could/should I connect this to and don't get any farther.

      Some good questions for mulling over here though.

    1. https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15625

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZklLt80wqg

      Looking at three broad ideas with examples of each to follow: - signals - patterns - pattern making, pattern breaking

      Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

      Jane Kent for witchcraft

      250 years with ~200,000 trial transcripts

      Can be viewed as: - storytelling, - history - information process of signals

      All the best trials include the words "Covent Garden".

      Example: 1163. Emma Smith and Corfe indictment for stealing.

      19:45 Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process. (book)

      Prozhito: large-scale archive of Russian (and Soviet) diaries; 1900s - 2000s

      How do people understand the act of diary-writing?

      Diaries are:

      Leo Tolstoy

      a convenient way to evaluate the self

      Franz Kafka

      a means to see, with reassuring clarity [...] the changes which you constantly suffer.

      Virginia Woolf'

      a kindly blankfaced old confidante

      Diary entries in five categories - spirit - routine - literary - material form (talking about the diary itself) - interpersonal (people sharing diaries)

      Are there specific periods in which these emerge or how do they fluctuate? How would these change between and over cultures?

      The pattern of talking about diaries in this study are relatively stable over the century.

      pre-print available of DeDeo's work here

      Pattern making, pattern breaking

      Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution

      • transcripts of debates in the constituent assembly

      the idea of revolution through tedium and boredom is fascinating.

      speeches broken into combinations of patterns using topic modeling

      (what would this look like on commonplace book and zettelkasten corpora?)

      emergent patterns from one speech to the next (information theory) question of novelty - hi novelty versus low novelty as predictors of leaders and followers

      Robespierre bringing in novel ideas

      How do you differentiate Robespierre versus a Muppet (like Animal)? What is the level of following after novelty?

      Four parts (2x2 grid) - high novelty, high imitation (novelty with ideas that stick) - high novelty, low imitation (new ideas ignored) - low novelty, high imitation - low novelty, low imitation (discussion killers)

      Could one analyze television scripts over time to determine the good/bad, when they'll "jump the shark"?

    1. a common technique in natural language processing is to operationalize certain semantic concepts (e.g., "synonym") in terms of syntactic structure (two words that tend to occur nearby in a sentence are more likely to be synonyms, etc). This is what word2vec does.

      Can I use some of these sorts of methods with respect to corpus linguistics over time to better identified calcified words or archaic phrases that stick with the language, but are heavily limited to narrower(ing) contexts?

    1. All that remained was the small matter of actually writing the chapter. I don’t do this in Obsidian: I think it would be asking for trouble to mix notes and their end-products in the same place.

      I've not seen this explicitly laid out as advice before though in most contexts people's note taking spaces have historically been divorced from their writing spaces for publication because slips and notes are usually kept physically separate from the working spaces or finished parts, but Richard Carter specifically separates the digital spaces in which he takes his notes and then uses them for creating end products. While he could both take notes in Obsidian, his tool of choice for notes, as well as write his finished pieces there, he actively changes contexts to use a different digital app to compose his notes into final pieces.

      What affordances does this context shift provide? <br /> - blank slate may encourage reworking and expansion of original notes - is there a blank slate effect and what would it entail? - potentially moves the piece into a longer format space or tool which provides additional writing, formatting or other affordances (which? there don't seem to be any in this case aside from a potential "distraction free mode" which may tend to force one to focus only on the piece at hand rather than the thousands of other pieces (notes) hiding within the app)

      What affordances does this remove?<br /> - He's forced to repeat himself (cut & paste / DRY violation)

      Is it easier or harder (from a time/effort perspective) to provide citations with such a workflow? Carter does indicate that for him:

      Having links to original sources in my outline makes the compilation of references for the chapter far easier than it used to be.

    1. I wonder if we forget that the sea cucumber is a living creature.

      Are animals inherently subordinate? Why or why not? (Because this phrase seems silly to input)

    2. humans know more about the surface of Mars than the ocean floor.

      Is this why we have more art that alludes to space than the deep sea? If so, why are we more willing to travel via sea rather than space?

    1. One even better plan is to get regular library index cards and, afterthe lecture is fairly well learned, transfer the points underlined to them, onecard to a lecture. These cards can be carried about and studied at oddmoments. One is enabled by their use to get the perspective view of thelecture which brings out the sense of values which one loses when onestudies the notes in their mass of detail only. With the skeleton in mindone has little difficulty in recalling the details .

      Here again he comes close to some of the methods and ideas of having flashcards for spaced repetition, but isn't explicitly aware of the words or techniques. Note that he also doesn't use the word flashcard. When was the word first used?

      Rewriting things as flashcards also tends to be a part of the spaced repetition itself.

      By cutting the notes up he's specifically decontextualizing them so as to make one's memory be better tested in coming up with the solutions/answers as they are more likely to appear on a test, decontextualized from the original lecture.

    1. To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

      I'm not sure I like that Graeber waves away the question "why play?" here. I don't think there's an equivalency to the "why life?" question.

      It will take some additional thinking to build something up to refute this idea however.

    2. Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?
    1. For some scholars, it is critical thatthis new Warburg obsessively kept tabs on antisemitic incidents on the Easternfront, scribbling down aphorisms and thoughts on scraps of paper and storingthem in Zettelkasten that are now searchable.

      Apparently Aby Warburg "obsessively kept" notes on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front in his zettelkasten.


      This piece looks at Warburg's Jewish identity as supported or not by the contents of his zettelkasten, thus placing it in the use of zettelkasten or card index as autobiography.


      Might one's notes reflect who they were as a means of creating both their identity while alive as well as revealing it once they've passed on? Might the use of historical method provide its own historical method to be taken up on a meta basis after one's death?

    1. May 19, 2004 #1 Hello everyone here at the forum. I want to thank everyone here for all of the helpful and informative advice on GTD. I am a beginner in the field of GTD and wish to give back some of what I have received. What is posted below is not much of tips-and-tricks I found it very helpful in understanding GTD. The paragraphs posted below are from the book Lila, by Robert Pirsig. Some of you may have read the book and some may have not. It’s an outstanding read on philosophy. Robert Pirsig wrote his philosophy using what David Allen does, basically getting everything out of his head. I found Robert Pirsigs writing on it fascinating and it gave me a wider perspective in using GTD. I hope you all enjoy it, and by all means check out the book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Thanks everyone. arthur

      Arthur introduces the topic of Robert Pirsig and slips into the GTD conversation on 2004-05-19.

      Was this a precursor link to the Pile of Index Cards in 2006?

      Note that there doesn't seem to be any discussion of any of the methods with respect to direct knowledge management until the very end in which arthur returns almost four months later to describe a 4 x 6" card index with various topics he's using for filing away his knowledge on cards. He's essentially recreated the index card based commonplace book suggested by Robert Pirsig in Lila.

    1. Thanks to funding from the Gertrud-und-AlexanderBöhlig Stiftung, it was possible to inspect the content of the boxes, and to re-establish the original order of the lexicographical slips and their internal hierarchical structure.

      What was the nature of the hierarchical structure of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten?

      Some of the structure may be understandable by the nature of the digital database.

    1. Our analytical groups are: aurochs, birds, bison, caprids, cervids, fish, horses, mammoths, rhinos. Because of exceptionally low numbers we exclude snakes and wolverines. We also omitted sequences associated with apparent human depictions, or images in which such were part, in order to treat these separately at a later date.

      Given the regular seasonality of most animal rutting and parturition, how is it that the human animal evolved to have a more year-round mating season?

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIfH-iSGa5M

      2021-05-12

      Dr. Hanan Harif started out as a Geniza scholar but is now a biographer of Shlomo Dov Goitein.

      In the 1920s Goitein published his only play Pulcellina about a Jewish woman who was burned at the stake in France in 1171.

      Had a friendship with Levi Billig (1897-1936)

      You know very well the verse on Tabari that says: 'You wrote history with such zeal that you have become history yourself.' Although in your modesty you would deny it, we suggest that his couplet applies to yourself as well." —Norman Stillman to S.D. Goitein in letter dated 1977-07-20

      Norman Stillman was a student of Goitein.


      What has Hanan Harif written on Goitein? Any material on his Geniza research and his note cards? He addressed some note card material in the Q&A, but nothing direct or specific.

      Goitein's Mediterranean Society project was from 1967-1988 with the last volume published three years after his death. The entirety of the project was undertaken at University of Pennsylvania.

      The India Book, India Traders was published in 2007 (posthumously) as a collaboration with M.A. Friedman.

      Goitein wrote My Life as a Scholar in 1970, which may have some methodological clues about his work and his card index.

      He also left his diaries to the National Library of Israel as well and these may also have some clues.

      His bibliography is somewhere around 800 publications according to Harif, including his magnum opus.

      Harif shows a small card index at 1:15:20 of one of Goitein's collaborators (and later rival) Professor Eliasto (unsure of this name, can't find direct reference?). Harif indicates that the boxes are in the archives where he's at (https://www.nli.org.il/en/discover/archives/archives-list ? though I don't see a reasonable name/materials there, so perhaps it's at his home at Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

    1. About twenty thousand of those cards are 3 × 5 inches and seven thousand 5 × 8 inches.

      Goitein's zettelkasten is comprised of about 20,000 3 x 5" index cards and 7,000 5 x 8" index cards.

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/TEiQ5H1rEe2_Amfzi4XXmg

      While not directly confirmed (yet), due to the seeming correspondence of the number of cards and their corpus descriptions, it's likely that the 20,000 3 x 5" cards were his notes covering individual topics while the 7,000 5 x 8" cards were his notes and descriptions of a single fragment from the Cairo Geniza.

    2. The number is even more impressive when one realizes that both sides of many of the cardshave been written on.

      Goitein broke the frequent admonishment of many note takers to "write only on one side" of his cards.

      Oded Zinger doesn't mention how many of his 27,000 index cards are double-sided, but one might presume that it is a large proportion.

      How many were written on both sides?

    1. the city of Khirbet Qeiyafa, radiocarbon dated to the end ofthe 11th and the beginning of the 10th century BCE, existed during theperiod to which the biblical tradition attributes this battle. The question thenarises if and how the excavation at Khirbet Qeiyafa contributes to ourunderstanding of this tradition.

      Since Khirbet Qeiyafa is radiocarbon dated to the end of the 11th and beginning of the 10th century BCE in a location where the biblical tradition situates the battle between David and Goliath, how might its excavation contribute to our knowledge of this time period and these events?

  5. Dec 2022
    1. Humphreys, James E. Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory. Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 9.0. Springer, 1972. is one of the first Springer texts in my collection which has a Luhmann-esque sort of numbering system in its table of contents. Surely there must be earlier others though?

    1. “what surprised you when you got into X”, “what do people often misunderstand”, “what are most important problems in your field”

      Questions to ask to a domain expert from a completely new field to you

    1. He filled the library at Vivarium with texts onthese subjects and transformed the production of manuscripts in hisscriptorium by developing proper standards and methods forcopying. As one of the few notable scholars of his period,Cassiodorus played a vital role in the survival of classical culture inItaly, saving books from the smoking ruins of Roman libraries,preserving and reproducing them

      What exactly were the standards created for copying manuscripts by Cassiodorus at the scriptorium at Vivarium?

    1. I came to this page after reading the "About the Author (The Second Right Answer)" page of Roger von Oech's "A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative" which was mentioned by Kevin Bowers in his discussion with John Vervaeke titled "Principles & Methods for Achieving a Flow State | Voices w/ Vervaeke | John Vervaeke & Kevin Bowers".

      von Oech stated that

      I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the twentieth century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the last man to know everything. From him, I learned that it's good to be a generalist, and that looking at the Big Picture helps to keep you flexible.

      This was a surprising reference since Bowers stated that the book was written for helping entrepreneurs become more creative; the book seems more widely applicable based on the examples and exercises given in the first 20 pages.

      Cassirer appears to bridge between the continental and analytic traditions in philosophy. Cassirer's touching on mathematics, aesthetics, and ethics reminds me of - John Vervaeke's work - ie, the process of relevance realization and his neo platonic, transformational reading of ancient texts - Forrest Landry work - ie, his magnum opus "An Immanent Metaphysics" which he purports to be pointing to a foundation between ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Recently, IDM (Immanent Domain Metaphysics) made more sense to me when I attempted to translat the 3 axioms and 3 modalities into language from category theory

      The following seem important and related somehow: 1. the symbolic process 2. the process of abstraction 3. the process of representation

      Maybe these are related to the means by which one can can transcend their current self? ie, is it through particular symbolic practices that one can more easily shed one identity and acquire another?

      Also, are 1., 2., and 3. different aspects of the same thing/event?

    1. A pesar de que la variante moderna fue creada por Luhmann, las "máquinas de pensamiento" y otros métodos de tomar notas similares se originan en el siglo XVII.

      I've now seen a handful of (all online) sources quote a 17th Century origin for similar note taking methods. What exactly are they referring to specifically? What are these sources? None seem to be footnoted.

    1. My main purpose here is to suggest ways we can apply these 'components' to what we have for learners already or to suggest ways the components can completely supplant the older paths. For example, there is a suggestion that we can change layers of management and have a better system. My question will be this: How?

    1. Musk appears to be betting that the spectacle is worth it. He’s probably correct in thinking that large swaths of the world will not deem his leadership a failure either because they are ideologically aligned with him or they simply don’t care and aren’t seeing any changes to their corner of the Twitterverse.

      How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

      The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

      Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

    1. for settling in a finite number of steps, whether a relevant object hasproperty P.Relatedly, the answer to a question Q is effectively decidable ifand only if there is an algorithm which gives the answer, again by adeterministic computation, in a finite number of steps.

      Missing highlight from preceding page:

      A property \( P \) is effectively decidible if and only if there is an algorithm (a finite set of instructions for a deterministic computation) ...

      Isn't this related to the idea of left & right adjoints in category theory? iirc, there was something about the "canonical construction" of something X being the best solution to a particular problem Y (which had another framing like, "Problem Y is the most difficult problem for which X is a solution")

      Different thought: the Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondance connects intuitionistic logic, typed lambda calculus, and cartesian closed categories.

  6. Nov 2022
    1. Our familiarity with these elements makes the overall story seem plausible, even—or perhaps especially—when facts and evidence are in short supply.

      Storytelling tropes play into our system one heuristics and cognitive biases by riding on the tailcoats of familiar story plotlines we've come to know and trust.

      What are the ways out of this trap? Creating lists of tropes which should trigger our system one reactions to switch into system two thinking patterns? Can we train ourselves away from these types of misinformation?

    1. What if instead of addressing individual pieces of misinformation reactively, we instead discussed the underpinnings — preemptively?

      Perhaps we might more profitably undermine misinformation by dismantling the underlying tropes the underpin them?

    1. http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/meaningless.pdf Paper that argues cluster time series subsequences is "meaningless". tl;dr: radically different distributions end up converging to translations of basic sine or trig functions. Wonder if constructing a simplicial complex does anything?

      Note that one researcher changed the algorithm to produce potentially meaningful results

    1. https://www.evernote.com/shard/s204/client/snv?noteGuid=5b7828b7-c4f9-4242-b62f-788eeb44c76e&noteKey=34f69bfeebbb6bca&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs204%2Fsh%2F5b7828b7-c4f9-4242-b62f-788eeb44c76e%2F34f69bfeebbb6bca&title=Powerful%252C%2Bnon-judgmental%2Bquestions

      Powerful, non-judgmental questions

      • If you had to guess, what would have to be true for you to...?
      • If you did know...
      • (on tangent) ...and how does that relate to you?
      • What's not allowing you to...?
      • What prevents you from asking…?
      • Do you want to go into this?
      • What's your criteria for saying yes?
      • What would have you say yes?
      • What are the things we're lacking?
      • What's the scary question that you're not asking?
      • What are the qualities you want for [being, action, process, etc.]?
      • How would you behave if you were the best in the world at what you do?

      I'm starting a list of powerful, non-judgmental questions for coaching or just relationships in general. Here's the starting batch https://t.co/ktsYVxkQna pic.twitter.com/Dq1zQnWqAS

      — Tiago Forte (@fortelabs) January 15, 2019
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      These questions and similar ones (work this out) could be interesting prompts to be included on a syllabus or as starts for an annotated syllabus. (eg: What do you want to get out of this class? What do you already know about these areas? How can we expand on what you know? What would you like to explore?, etc.)

    1. In 1971, Eno co-formed the glam and art rock band Roxy Music. He had a chance meeting with saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, which led to him joining the band. Eno later said: "If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now".[24]

      How does idea density influence the rate of creativity?

      What are the thermodynamics of creativity? I've probably got enough material for a significant book chapter if not perhaps a book on this topic.

      May need a more public friendly name. Burning Creativity?

    2. In 1964, after earning four O-levels, including one in art and maths, Eno had developed an interest in art and music and had no interest in a "conventional job".[12]

      When did the definition of a so-called "conventional job" emerge? Presumably after the start of the industrial revolution when people began moving from traditional crafts, home work, farm work, and other general subsistence work.

      What defines a non-conventional job? Does it subsume caring work? What does David Graeber have to say about this in Bullshit Jobs?

    1. Testing if Google Chrome can make annotations on this Auto Hotkey documentation page.

      It (and Brave) can't make highlights or annotations for some reason. The prompt doesn't appear when text is highlighted, why is this? Is there a way to force the prompt to appear?

    1. Kevin Flowers Nov 7th at 12:50 PM# Question about repliesForgive me a bit if this is the wrong place to ask, but is the feature of having Hypothes.is list replies somewhere on the roadmap?  I checked the github issues with "label:enhancement" but nothing matches what I'm wondering aboutI could be missing something obvious, but when I search my username in https://hypothes.is/users, none of the replies I've made on other people's public annotations show up# Use casesSometimes people have insightful observations and references they provide, so I tend to reply to those annotations with tags that I use to sort through (eg, tags like "to read", "how to", "tutorial", and so forth)I also tend to make comments on what the OP's annotation made me think of at the time of reading it which is exemplified in the attached screenshotimage.png 9 repliesMichael DiRoberts  7 days ago@Kevin Flowers You’re right, the Activity Page (https://hypothes.is) doesn’t show replies. The Notebook, which will be built out more with time, does.https://web.hypothes.is/help/how-to-preview-the-hypothesis-notebook/HypothesisHow to Preview the Hypothesis Notebook : HypothesisHypothesis has released an early preview of Notebook, which enables you to view, search for, and filter annotations. While this tool is available in both the LMS and web apps, it is designed to bring much-needed functionality to our LMS users. This initial release contains some basic features we have planned to include in the […]Est. reading time2 minutes1Michael DiRoberts  7 days agoI hope Notebook solves the issue for you! For now it’s going to work on private groups and not the Public group (due to it having a limit of 5,000 annotations), though that may change in the future.Michael DiRoberts  7 days agoIf you’re comfortable using APIs then you might check out our API as well: https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api-reference/v1/.You can find replies by looking at rows that contain references.Kevin Flowers  7 days agoOh, the Notebook seems like a neat tool, I'll have to share that with some friendsKevin Flowers  7 days agoThe issue for my own PKM (personal knowledge management) stack is that I couple Hypothes.is with an Obsidian [1] plugin that imports my annotations into my local file system.  Atm, I think the plugin only references the Activity Page to import annotations, so it looks like I'll have to play around with the API you mentioned if I want to grab my replies (along with their parent replies & annotations)[1] Obsidian is a notetaking software similar to Roam & Logseq; it just adds a pretty GUI on top of .md files which are stored locallyMichael DiRoberts  7 days agoNote that the Obsidian plugin wasn’t made by us, so I’m not familiar with how it works. It’s a little weird to me that it would work over the activity page and not use our API, however.Brian Cordan Young  7 days ago@Kevin Flowers Do you have, or have you considered, blogging about your use of Hypothesis as a part of a PKM?I’m still not a regular user of Hypothesis because it doesn’t fit in to my current info consumption well enough. That said I love learning how others do fit it in.(Obsidian is really great too) (edited) Kevin Flowers  7 days ago@Michael DiRoberts ah, you're right, thanks for mentioning that.   Looks like it requires one to generate an API token in order to pull highlights, so it must be using the Hypothes.is API in some way.  Sadly, I'm not familiar enough with general software development design (or JavaScript/TypeScript), and the source code for obsidian-hypothesis-plugin doesn't have enough high level comments for me to parse what any given file does.  It'll probably be cumbersome and somewhat painful, but I'll probably learn more by just building something from scratch@Brian Cordan Young Huh, I hadn't considered that until you mentioned it.   Recently developed some interest in building something with JavaScript (probably with the Next.js framework), so a blog might be just the project I've been looking forGitHubobsidian-hypothesis-plugin/src at master · weichenw/obsidian-hypothesis-pluginAn Obsidian.md plugin that syncs highlights from Hypothesis. - obsidian-hypothesis-plugin/src at master · weichenw/obsidian-hypothesis-plugin (150 kB)https://github.com/weichenw/obsidian-hypothesis-plugin/tree/master/srcMichael DiRoberts  7 days agoJust in case, or for others in the future, you can generate a Hypothesis API token here: https://hypothes.is/account/developer1

      This is a post I made on the Slack public channel asking about whether or not Hypothes.is indexes replies. A tech support membered confirmed this is true.

      However, Obsidian's Hypothes.is plugin does pull replies. It should be noted that default settings don't capture updates to the annotations or tags.

    1. Robert Amsler is a retired computational lexicology, computational linguist, information scientist. His P.D. was from UT-Austin in 1980. His primary work was in the area of understanding how machine-readable dictionaries could be used to create a taxonomy of dictionary word senses (which served as the motivation for the creation of WordNet) and in understanding how lexicon can be extracted from text corpora. He also invented a new technique in citation analysis that bears his name. His work is mentioned in Wikipedia articles on Machine-Readable dictionary, Computational lexicology, Bibliographic coupling, and Text mining. He currently lives in Vienna, VA and reads email at robert.amsler at utexas. edu. He is currenly interested in chronological studies of vocabulary, esp. computer terms.

      https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Amsler

      Apparently follow my blog. :)

      Makes me wonder how we might better process and semantically parse peoples' personal notes, particularly when they're atomic and cross-linked?

    1. it became clear that Fermat's Last Theorem could be proven as a corollary of a limited form of the modularity theorem (unproven at the time and then known as the "Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture"). The modularity theorem involved elliptic curves, which was also Wiles's own specialist area.[15][16]

      Elliptical curves are also use in Ed25519 which are purportedly more robust to side channel attacks. Could there been some useful insight from Wiles and the modularity theorem?

    1. I am not particularly strict about how I organize these. The point is to be able to find them again, which I can whether it's noted in the source or as a more detailed claim.

      Konik cites Raccoon Nation on PBS which indicates that a racoon's most heightened sense is it's sense of touch, a sense which is increased when the hands are wet or under water.

      Is this tied into the popular stories of raccoons which presumably like to "wash their food?" Is it really their sense of touch and affordances which come from that that presses this impression?

    1. It’s a basic question—what are children and young people in school for?
    2. Although Rousseau had an influence on a handful of European educators, itwould be misleading to imply that the impact on education of these new ideasabout learning through discovery was, at the time, profound.

      Did Rousseau have an influence on Maria Montessori? Where was the origin of her philosophy?

    1. Knowing what the four questions are is not enough. Youmust remember to ask them as you read.
    2. Weare on record as holding that unlimited educational opportunity-or, speaking practically, educational opportunity thatis limited only by individual desire, ability, and need-is themost valuable service that society can provide for its members.

      This broadly applies to both oral and literate societies.

      Desire, ability, and need are all tough measures however... each one losing a portion of the population along the way.

      How can we maintain high proportions across all these variables?

    1. evolution of my processes.

      A note taking practice is almost always an evolving process with a variety of different pressures and variables in how it takes form.

      List out these variables and pressures.

    2. How do you make sure you don’t lose track of cards? I don’t make sure I don’t lose track of cards. As I said above and as some of the people below talk about, one of the joys of the system is when you surprise yourself, when you rediscover, when you find the perfect card while you were looking for something else.

      Oppenheimer doesn't keep track of specific cards (he didn't discuss how he files them, other than loosely together, potentially for specific projects) and finds that this creates a greater amount of surprise for him when searching for ideas within his system.

      Missing here is any sort of topic or subject headings.... double check this as it's a key to most systems.

    3. And improving the quality and quantity of material available to your brain when you sit down to create something—that is why we implement The Notecard System.

      Increasing the quantity and quality of ideas and materials one has at their disposal when one desires to create something new is one of the reasons for having a note taking system.

      memory, learning, sense making, improving understanding, improved creativity, and others are also at play... any others? we should have a comprehensive list eventually.

    4. “People always say of great athletes that they have a sixth sense,” Malcolm Gladwell says in Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. “But it’s not a sixth sense. It’s memory.” Gladwell then analogizes James’ exacting memory to Simon’s. In the way James has precise recall of basketball game situations, Simon has it of sounds and songs. “Simon’s memory is prodigious,” Gladwell says. “There were thousands of songs in his head. And thousands more bits of songs—components—which appeared to have been broken down and stacked like cordwood in his imagination.”

      In Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell comments on the prodigious memories of both Paul Simon with respect to sounds and Lebron James with respect to basketball game play.

      Where these sorts of situational memories built and exercised over time or were they natural gifts? Or perhaps natural gifts that were also finely tuned over time?

    1. e. T. F. T.

      What is this editor's actual name?

      My first guess is "Tools for Thought", but that can't be right. 🤣

    Tags

    Annotators

  7. Oct 2022
    1. It is possible this Miscellany collection was assembled by Schutz as part of his own research as an historian, as well as the letters and documents collected as autographs for his interest as a collector;

      https://catalog.huntington.org/record=b1792186

      Is it possible that this miscellany collection is of a zettelkasten nature?

      Found via a search of the Huntington Library for Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten

    1. He had a separate bibliographical file,kept in six scantily filled drawers in his coat closet, and it is obvious

      that he used it little in later years. His author-title entries usually went into the main file, after the appropriate subject index cards.

      This is a curious pattern and not often seen. Apparently it was Paxson's practice to place his author-title entries into his main file following the related subject index cards instead of in a completely separate bibliographical file. He did apparently have one comprised of six scantily filled drawers which he kept in his coat closet, but it was little used in his later years.


      What benefits might this relay? It certainly more directly relates the sources closer in physical proximity within one's collection to the notes to which they relate. This might be of particular beneficial use in a topical system where all of one's notes relating to a particular subject are close physically rather than being linked or cross referenced as they were in Luhmann's example.

      A particular color of cards may help in this regard to more easily find these sources.


      Also keep in mind that Paxson's system was topical-chronological, so there may also be reasons for doing this that fit into his chronological scheme. Was he filing them in sections so that the publication dates of the sources fit into this scheme as well? This may take direct review to better known and understand his practice.

    1. Turner's sectionalism essays are collected in The Significance of Sections in American History, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1933. Turner's sectionalism thesis had almost as much influence among historians as his frontier thesis, but never became widely known to the general public as did the frontier thesis. He argued that different ethnocultural groups had distinct settlement patterns, and this revealed itself in politics, economics and society.

      Was sectionalism discussed or mentioned in Colin Woodard's American Nations (2011) as part of an underlying piece of his thesis about American history? It seems applicable.

    1. for as Dialectic will have shown all branches oflearning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledgeis one.

      How did we shift from inter-related subjects and "one knowledge" of rhetoric in the Middle Ages to such strict departmentalization in the academy to only now be moving back toward multi-disciplinary research?

    1. Émile flew offthe shelves in 18th-century Paris. In fact, booksellers found it more profitable torent it out by the hour than to sell it. Ultimately the excitement got too much forthe authorities and Émile was banned in Paris and burned in Geneva

      Émile: or On Education was so popular that it was rented out by the hour for additional profit instead of being sold outright. [summary]


      When did book rental in education spaces become a business model? What has it looked like historically?

    2. Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.

      Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?

      What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?

    3. Learning became firmly subject centred rather than child centred.

      What would schooling look like if it had been historically developed as child-centered rather than subject-centered.

    4. Out of our cleverness has emerged something almost more importantthan the cleverness itself. Out of it has come learning about how to share ideasand pass down skills and knowledge. Out of it has come education.

      Gary Thomas posits that it's our cleverness which birthed education. Isn't it more likely our extreme ability to mimic others which is more likely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective?

      Were early peoples really "teaching" each other how to make primitive hand axes? Or did we first start out by closely mimicking our neighbors?

    1. For her online book clubs, Maggie Delano defines four broad types of notes as a template for users to have a common language: - terms - propositions (arguments, claims) - questions - sources (references which support the above three types)

      I'm fairly sure in a separate context, I've heard that these were broadly lifted from her reading of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a book. (reference? an early session of Dan Allosso's Obsidian Book club?)

      These become the backbone of breaking down a book and using them to have a conversation with the author.

    1. I would put creativity into three buckets. If we define creativity as coming up with something novel or new for a purpose, then I think what AI systems are quite good at the moment is interpolation and extrapolation.

      Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, classifies creativity in three ways: interpolation, extrapolation, and "true invention". He defines the first two traditionally, but gives a more vague description of the third. What exactly is "true invention"?

      How can one invent without any catalyst at all? How can one invent outside of a problem's solution space? outside of the adjacent possible? Does this truly exist? Or doesn't it based on definition.

    1. Wheredoes meaning come from?
    2. Intellectual readiness involves a minimumlevel of visual perception such that the child can take in andremember an entire word and the letters that combine to formit. Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly andto use several sentences in correct order.

      Just as predictive means may be used on the level of letters, words, and even whole sentences within information theory at the level of specific languages, does early orality sophistication in children help them to become predictive readers at earlier ages?

      How could one go about testing this, particularly in a broad, neurodiverse group?

    3. The Activity and Art of Reading 15 If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself.

      What effect might this have on the learning process of purely oral cultures?

    1. It is hard to imagine how we would have experienced 9/11 in the era of Facebook and Twitter, but the pandemic provides a suggestive example.

      Questons

    1. Index cards for commonplacing?

      I know that Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have talked about their commonplace methods using index cards before, and Mortimer J. Adler et al. used index cards with commonplacing methods in their Great Books/Syntopicon project, but is anyone else using this method? Where or from whom did you learn/hear about using index cards? What benefits do you feel you're getting over a journal or notebook-based method? Mortimer J. Adler smoking a pipe amidst a sea of index cards in boxes with 102 topic labels (examples: Law, World, Love, Life, Being, Sin, Art, Citizen, Change, etc.)

    1. Max Raisin (1881–1957),reflected that lessons often devolved into ‘reading several events with dates out of alittle notebook’ (Raisin, 1952: 147; Hertzman, 1985: 83-8).

      Max Raisin indicated that Gotthard Deutsch read several events with dates out of a little notebook during lectures. Was this really a notebook or possibly a small stack/deck of index cards? The could certainly be easily mistaken....

      Check these references

    2. The index frames a figure who may at first glanceseem a curious or even comedic caricature of a certain positivist historical tradition, butone who also imparted to his students a sense of the magnitude of Jewish history, andwho straddled a mechanical pursuit of individual ‘facts’ with a certain attention to novelmethods and visions of comprehensively encyclopedic information.

      From where did Deutsch learn his zettelkasten method? And when? Bernheim's influential Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889) was published long after Deutsch entered seminary in October 1876 and 9 years before he received his Ph.D. in history in1881.

      One must potentially posit that the zettelkasten method was being passed along in (at least history circles) long before Bernheim's publication.

      I'm hoping that Lustig isn't referring to zettelkasten when he says "novel methods", as they weren't novel, even at that time. Deutsch certainly wasn't the first to have comprehensive encyclopedic visions, as Zettelkasten practitioner Konrad Gessner preceded him by several centuries.

      I'm starting to severely question Lustig's familiarity with these particular traditions....

    1. Adams H. B. (1886) Methods of Historical Study. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University.

      Where does this fit with respect to the zettelkasten tradition and Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos?

    2. It may seem a curious relic of positivistic history, but closer examination allows us to interrogate the materiality of scholarly labor.

      Given the time period (1859-1921), what was the potential influence, if any, on Deutsch and his methods by historical methods writers and the evolution of the science of history by Ernst Bernheim or Seignobos/Langlois from that same period?

    3. Indeed, Deutsch’s index is massive but middling, especially when placed alongside those of Niklas Luhmann, Paul Otlet, or Gershom Scholem.

      Curious how Deutsch's 70,000 facts would be middling compared to Luhmann's 90,000? - How many years did Deutsch maintain and collect his version?<br /> - How many publications did he contribute to? - Was his also used for teaching?

      Otlet didn't create his collection alone did he? Wasn't it a massive group effort?

      Check into Gershom Scholem's collection and use. I've not come across his work in this space.

    4. Does Deutsch’s index constitute a great unwritten work of history, as some have claimed, or are the cards ultimately useless ‘chips from his workshop’?

      From his bibliography, it appears that Deutsch was a prolific writer and teacher, so how will Lustig (or others he mentions) make the case that his card index was useless "chips from his workshop"? Certainly he used them in writing his books, articles, and newspaper articles? He also was listed as a significant contributor to an encyclopedia as well.

      It'd be interesting to look at the record to see if he taught with them the way Roland Barthes was known to have done.

    1. https://forums.nanowrimo.org/t/linking-up-zettelkasten-or-card-index-method-writers/433719

      Looking for writers who are using an index card-based, Zettelkasten (German translation: slip box), or fichier boîte method for writing. Both traditional methods in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Ende, Anne Lamott, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, or Robert Pirsig as well as Niklas Luhmann-esque methods (perhaps better for non-fiction) are fine.

      Commonplace book practitioners are also welcome.

      How many index cards will it take you to get to 50,000 words? (Reminder: It’s easier to write a few sentences or an index card at a time than focusing on thousands of words a day…)

    1. The nature of physics problem-solvingBelow are 29 sets of questions that students and physicists need to ask themselves during the research process. The answers at each step allow them to make the 29 decisions needed to solve a physics problem. (Adapted from reference 33. A. M. Price et al., CBE—Life Sci. Edu. 20, ar43 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-12-0276.)A. Selection and planning1. What is important in the field? Where is the field heading? Are there advances in the field that open new possibilities?2. Are there opportunities that fit the physicist’s expertise? Are there gaps in the field that need solving or opportunities to challenge the status quo and question assumptions in the field? Given experts’ capabilities, are there opportunities particularly accessible to them?3. What are the goals, design criteria, or requirements of the problem solution? What is the scope of the problem? What will be the criteria on which the solution is evaluated?4. What are the important underlying features or concepts that apply? Which available information is relevant to solving the problem and why? To better identify the important information, create a suitable representation of core ideas.5. Which predictive frameworks should be used? Decide on the appropriate level of mechanism and structure that the framework needs to be most useful for the problem at hand.6. How can the problem be narrowed? Formulate specific questions and hypotheses to make the problem more tractable.7. What are related problems or work that have been seen before? What aspects of their problem-solving process and solutions might be useful?8. What are some potential solutions? (This decision is based on experience and the results of decisions 3 and 4.)9. Is the problem plausibly solvable? Is the solution worth pursuing given the difficulties, constraints, risks, and uncertainties?Decisions 10–15 establish the specifics needed to solve the problem.10. What approximations or simplifications are appropriate?11. How can the research problem be decomposed into subproblems? Subproblems are independently solvable pieces with their own subgoals.12. Which areas of a problem are particularly difficult or uncertain in the solving process? What are acceptable levels of uncertainty with which to proceed at various stages?13. What information is needed to solve the problem? What approach will be sufficient to test and distinguish between potential solutions?14. Which among the many competing considerations should be prioritized? Considerations could include the following: What are the most important or most difficult? What are the time, materials, and cost constraints?15. How can necessary information be obtained? Options include designing and conducting experiments, making observations, talking to experts, consulting the literature, performing calculations, building models, and using simulations. Plans also involve setting milestones and metrics for evaluating progress and considering possible alternative outcomes and paths that may arise during the problem-solving process.B. Analysis and conclusions16. Which calculations and data analysis should be done? How should they be carried out?17. What is the best way to represent and organize available information to provide clarity and insights?18. Is information valid, reliable, and believable? Is the interpretation unbiased?19. How does information compare with predictions? As new information is collected, how does it compare with expected results based on the predictive framework?20. If a result is different from expected, how should one follow up? Does a potential anomaly fit within the acceptable range of predictive frameworks, given their limitations and underlying assumptions and approximations?21. What are appropriate, justifiable conclusions based on the data?22. What is the best solution from the candidate solutions? To narrow down the list, decide which of those solutions are consistent with all available information, and which can be rejected. Determine what refinements need to be made to the candidate solutions. For this decision, which should be made repeatedly throughout the problem-solving process, the candidate list need not be narrowed down to a single solution.23. Are previous decisions about simplifications and predictive frameworks still appropriate in light of new information? Does the chosen predictive framework need to be modified?24. Is the physicist’s relevant knowledge and the current information they have sufficient? Is more information needed, and if so, what is it? Does some information need to be verified?25. How well is the problem-solving approach working? Does it need to be modified? A physicist should reflect on their strategy by evaluating progress toward the solution and possibly revising their goals.26. How good is the chosen solution? After selecting one from the candidate solutions and reflecting on it, does it make sense and pass discipline-specific tests for solutions to the problem? How might it fail?Decisions 27–29 are about the significance of the work and how to communicate the results.27. What are the broader implications of the results? Over what range of contexts does the solution apply? What outstanding problems in the field might it solve? What novel predictions can it enable? How and why might the solution be seen as interesting to a broader community?28. Who is the audience for the work? What are the audience’s important characteristics?29. What is the best way to present the work to have it understood and to have its correctness and importance appreciated? How can a compelling story be made of the work?
    2. why is there so little correlation between students’ performance in their physics courses and their ability to do physics research?
    3. The experts often noted that research breakthroughs came from recognizing the significance of some additional information that other researchers had overlooked.

      Breakthroughs in problem solving and basic research often come from recognizing the significance of overlooked information.


      How is this additional information gleaned in these cases? Through combinatorial creativity, chance, other? Can methods for pushing these sorts of additional information be created in the problem solving process?

    1. Thesis to bear out (only tangentially related to this particular text):

      Part of the reason that index card files didn't catch on, especially in America, was that they didn't have a solid/concrete name by which they went. The generic term card index subsumed so much in relation to library card catalogues or rolodexes which had very specific functions and individualized names. Other cultures had more descriptive names like zettelkasten or fichier boîte which, while potentially bland within their languages, had more specific names for what they were.

    2. For the second time Goutor mentions using different size cards for different note types, but doesn't specifically advise for it or provide a reason. Perhaps his advice for consistency and card size applies only to cards of particular types? (p28)

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/XPphjkNZEe2s3i9VV4qt1g


      Incidentally he also specifically mentions 7x9" cards here too. How frequently used were these as a standard?

    3. As is common in the tradition of the zettelkasten, Goutor advises "that each note-card should contain only one item of information, whether a quotation, a summary, or anything else". (p28) He ascribes this requirement to his earlier need for clarity. (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/SfWFwENIEe2KfGMbR5n7Qg)

      He indicates that while it may seem wasteful to have only one item on each card that the savings in time, efficiency in handling, classification, and retrieval will more than compensate for the small waste.

      This sort of small local waste being compensated for by a larger global savings and efficiency can be seen in the design of the shipping container industry as discussed in Mark Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 2008). Was this the exact sort of efficiency mentioned by Ahrens'? (Compare at https://hypothes.is/a/t4i32IXoEeyF2n9jQxu6BA)

    4. Goutor defines self-help notes as notes which one would use to refresh their memory about what remains to be done or researched, problems that remain to be solved, or information which is needed to be researched or found. (p26) These are akin in some sense to what I call "open questions". He also indicates that these notes might be triggered by one's daily activities or occasional musings which relate to one's project but occur outside of its active pursuit. In this sense, they have a similar feel to the idea of Ahrens' fleeting notes, but in Goutor's practice they aren't defined as occurring while one is doing active reading or research.

      He suggests that one keeps these notes in a separate area so that they might be systematically and regularly visited for review, further research, or answering as the opportunities to do so present themselves. Once the questions have been answered and appropriate notes updated or added, these self-help notes can be discarded.

    1. Mosca backs up histhesis with this assertion: It's the power of organization thatenables the minority always to rule. There are organizedminorities and they run things and men. There are unorganizedmajorities and they are run.

      In a democracy, is it not just rule by majority, but rule by the most organized that ends up dominating the society?

      Perhaps C. Wright Mills' work on the elite has some answers?

      The Republican party's use of organization to create gerrymandering is a clear example of using extreme organization to create minority rule. Cross reference: Slay the Dragon in which this issue is laid out with the mention of using a tiny amount of money to careful gerrymander maps to provide outsized influences and then top-down outlines to imprint broad ideas from a central location onto smaller individual constituencies (state and local).

    1. I saw this ad for Storyteller Tactics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiybhKcA3ZV/?hl=en. The pitchman indicates that he distilled down a pile of about 25 books into a deck of informative cards which writers can use in their craft. Rather than sell it as a stand alone book, it's a set of cards (in digital format too) that they're selling for a order of magnitude more than they could have gotten for a book format.

      They're advertising for a product from https://pipdecks.com/. They're essentially selling custom zettelkasten collections of cards for niche topics! Who else is going to sell sets of cards like this? Anyone else seen examples of zettelkasten-like products like this?

  8. Sep 2022
    1. Unemployed workers are much more likelyto fall into poverty in countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan,compared with countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland.

      Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

      Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

      What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

    2. David Brady and colleagues have shown this to be empirically the case across29 rich democracies. The authors focused on four major risks of poverty—loweducation, single motherhood, young adults heading a household, and unem-ployment. They found that although the prevalence of these risks in the UnitedStates is actually below the average in other countries, the rate of poverty inthe United States is the highest. The reason is that “the penalties for risks inthe United States are the highest of the 29 countries. An individual with allfour risks has an extremely heightened probability of being poor in the UnitedStates.”

      How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

      What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

      Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

    3. What is abnormal about this situation is not that people experience theseevents, but that we have collectively chosen as a society to punish these normallife events so severely

      Why???

    4. One reason for this is that poverty is not something that people wish to ac-knowledge or draw attention to. Rather, it is something that individuals andfamilies would like to go away. As a result, many Americans attempt to concealtheir economic difficulties as much as possible.22 This often involves keeping upappearances and trying to maintain a “normal” lifestyle. Such poverty downthe block may at first appear invisible. Nevertheless, the reach of poverty iswidespread, touching nearly all communities across America.

      Middle Americans, and particularly those in suburbia and rural parts of America that account for the majority of poverty in the country, tend to make their poverty invisible because of the toxic effects of extreme capitalism and keeping up appearances.

      Has this effect risen with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and the idea of "living one's best life"? How about the social effects of television with shows like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" which encourage conspicuous consumption?


      More interesting is the fact that most of these suburban and rural poverty stricken portions of the country are in predominantly Republican held strongholds.

      Is there a feedback mechanism that is not only hollowing these areas out, but keeping them in poverty?

    5. In 1990, 15.1 percent of the poor were residingin high- poverty neighborhoods. That figure dropped to 10.3 percent by 2000,rose to 13.6 percent for 2010, and then fell to 11.9 percent for 2015.

      Is there a long term correlation between these rates and political parties? Is there a potential lag time between the two if there is?

    6. three-fourths of Americans will encounterpoverty or near- poverty (150 percent below the official poverty line).4

      Open question:<br /> Why is the word "below" used with numbers like "150 percent below the poverty line" when in fact this number indicates near, but above, poverty based on my reading?

    7. Could the maintenance of these mythsactually be useful for particularly powerful constituencies? Does the contin-uation of these myths serve a purpose or function for other segments of theAmerican population? If so, who and what might that be?
    1. Experiments on Twitter by Bjarke Mønsted and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Southern California indicate that information is transmitted via “complex contagion”: when we are repeatedly exposed to an idea, typically from many sources, we are more likely to adopt and reshare it. This social bias is further amplified by what psychologists call the “mere exposure” effect: when people are repeatedly exposed to the same stimuli, such as certain faces, they grow to like those stimuli more than those they have encountered less often.

      This seems slightly different than the mere-exposure effect that Ahrens (2017) delineated. Are they same/different/related, but contextually different?

    2. In a set of groundbreaking studies in 1932, psychologist Frederic Bartlett told volunteers a Native American legend about a young man who hears war cries and, pursuing them, enters a dreamlike battle that eventually leads to his real death. Bartlett asked the volunteers, who were non-Native, to recall the rather confusing story at increasing intervals, from minutes to years later. He found that as time passed, the rememberers tended to distort the tale's culturally unfamiliar parts such that they were either lost to memory or transformed into more familiar things.

      early study relating to both culture and memory decay

      What does memory decay scale as? Is it different for different levels of "stickiness"?

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2HegcwDRnU

      Makes the argument that note taking is an information system, and if it is, then we can use the research from the corpus of information system (IS) theory to examine how to take better notes.

      He looks at the Wang and Wang 2006 research and applies their framework of "complete, meaningful, unambiguous, and correct" dimensions of data quality to example note areas of study notes, project management notes (or to do lists) and recipes.

      Looks at dimensions of data quality from Mahanti, 2019.


      What is the difference between notes and annotations?

    1. This text fills a gap in the professional literature concerning revision because currently,according to Harris, there is little scholarship on “how to do it” (p. 7).

      I'm curious if this will be an answer to the question I asked in Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output Processes?

    1. I’m not sure how to explain the photograph — that might be a cardfile, not a shoebox. The number of blue lines per card in the Pale Fire passage suggests that John Shade used 6 x 4 cards. It looks like Nabokov in the car has 6 x 4s too.

      What size index cards did Vladimir Nabokov use?

      See also: series of Nabokov photos of him and index cards.

    1. The primary motivation behind categorical reading methods isto dissect each paper's structure and central argument using theabove conceptual model (Figure 1).

      This appears to be the closed definition in the paper for the idea of categorical reading methods. They only provide one example without any comparison or contrast for better contextualization.

      What is a more concrete idea for this particular term?

    2. Not related to this text, but just thinking...

      Writing against a blank page is dreadful and we all wish we would be visited by the muses. But writing against another piece of text can be incredibly fruitful for generating ideas, even if they don't necessarily relate to the text at hand. The text gives us something to latch onto for creating work.

      Try the following exercise:<br /> Write down 20 things that are white.<br /> (Not easy is it?)

      Now write down 20 things in your refrigerator that are white?<br /> (The ideas come a lot easier don't they, even if you couldn't come up with 20.)

      The more specific area helped you anchor your thoughts and give them a positive direction. Annotating against texts in which you're interested does this same sort of anchoring for your brain when you're writing.

      Is there research on this area of concentration with respect to creativity?

    3. More effective structured note-taking systems,such as Cornell Notes or REAP, increase students' critical readingskills, including synthesis, analysis, and evaluation (Ahmad, 2019)

      More effective than what? Just highlighting? What does Ahmad show? Is there a hierarchy of strategies that have been cross tested with larger groups? What effect does a depth and breadth of neurodiverse subjects show, for example?


      This is the my first encounter with REAP.

      REAP is an acronym for Read, Encode, Annotate, Ponder.


      Has anyone done direct research on commonplacing or zettelkasten techniques to show concrete data to compare them with other currently more popular techniques like Cornell notes or REAP?

      Read for potential methods and set up for a potential meta study: Ahmad, S. Z. (2019). Impact of Cornell Notes vs. REAP on EFL secondary school students’ critical reading skills. International Education Studies, 12(10), 60-74

    1. Robert King Merton

      Mario Bunge indicated that he was directly influenced by American Sociologist Robert Merton.

      What particular areas did this include? Serendipity? Note taking practices? Creativity? Systems theory?

    1. It would be very interesting to have information on the methodsof work of the great scholars, particularly those who undertooklong tasks of collection and classification. Some information ofthis kind is to be found in their papers, and occasionally in theircorrespondence. On the methods of Du Cange, see L. Feugfere, Mudesur la vie et les ouvrages de Du Gomge (Paris, 1858, 8vo), pp. 62 sqq_,

      Indeed! I find myself having asked this particular question in a similar setting/context before!!!

    2. of private librarianship which make up the half ofscientific work." ^

      Renan speaks of "these points

      Renan, Feuilles detachees (Detached leaves), p. 103

      Who is Renan and what specifically does this source say?

      It would seem that, like Beatrice Webb, the authors and Renan may all consider this sort of note taking method to have a scientific underpinning.

  9. Aug 2022
    1. What edition of this book did Luhmann have/use?

      His edition will establish a potential lower threshold for the point in his life at which he used it (ie college, law school, other).

      What differences are there between the edition I've read portions of and this 10th edition exist? Did Luhmann's edition have this same outline/contents page in this form? Does my analysis still stand if this changes?

    1. Not to be neglected apart from the keyword is also a short date. This may seem superfluous atfirst glance. Refering to Leibniz’ hand-written bequest, which has been equipped with dates,proves how valuable a date can become.

      What's the story behind Leibniz' hand-written bequest? Apparently it was commonplace enough that it's not explained here.

    1. Correspondingly,the far-reaching studies of language that were carried out under the influence ofCartesian rationalism suffered from a failure to appreciate either the abstractnessof those structures that are “present to the mind” when an utterance is producedor understood, or the length and complexity of the chain of operations that relatethe mental structures expressing the semantic content of the utterance to thephysical realization.

      What are the simple building blocks of thought and speech that make it so complex in aggregate?

    2. And this system of linguistic competenceis qualitatively different from anything that can be described in terms of thetaxonomic methods of structural linguistics, the concepts of S-R psychology,or the notions developed within the mathematical theory of communication orthe theory of simple automata.

      What are the atomic building blocks that would allow stimulus-response psychology to show complex behaviors?

    1. ManuelRodriguez331 · 8 hr. agotaurusnoises wrote on Aug 20, 2022: Technik des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens by Johannes Erich HeydeThe idea of grouping similar notes together with the help of index cards was mainstream knowledge in the 1920'er. Melvil Dewey has invented the decimal classification in 1876 and it was applied to libraries and personal note taking as well.quote: “because for every note there is a systematically related one in the immediate vicinity. [...] A good, scholarly book can grow out of the mere collection of notes — not an ingenious one, indeed" [1]The single cause why it wasn't applied more frequently was because of the limitation of the printing press. In the year 1900 only 100 scholarly journals were available in the world. There was no need to write more manuscripts and teach the art of Scientific Writing to a larger audience.[1] Kuntze, Friedrich: Die Technik der geistigen Arbeit, 1922

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wrytqj/comment/ilax9tc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Index card systems were insanely popular in the early 1900's for note taking and uses of all other sorts (business administration, libraries, etc.). The note taking tradition of the slip box goes back even further in intellectual history with precedents including miscellanies, commonplace books, and florilegia. Konrad Gessner may have been one of the first to have created a method using slips of rearrangeable paper in the 1500s, but this general pattern of excerpting, note taking and writing goes back to antiquity with the concept of locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

      What some intellectual historians are hoping for evidence of in this particular source is a possible origin of the idea of the increased complexity of direct links from one card to another as well as the juxtaposition of ideas which build on each other. Did Luhmann innovate this himself or was this something he read or was in general practice which he picked up? Most examples of zettelkasten outside of Luhmann's until those in the present, could be described reasonably accurately as commonplace books on index cards usually arranged by topic/subject heading/head word (with or without internal indices).

      Perhaps it was Luhmann's familiarity with Aktenzeichen (German administrative "file numbers") prior to his academic work which inspired the dramatically different form his index card-based commonplace took? See: https://hyp.is/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA/www.wikiwand.com/de/Aktenzeichen_(Deutschland)

      Is it possible that he was influenced by Beatrice Webb's ideas on note taking from Appendix C of My Apprenticeship (1924) which was widely influential in the humanities and particularly sociology and anthropology? Would he have been aware of the work of historians Ernst Bernheim followed by Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/DLP52hqFEe2nrIMdrd4U7g) Did Luhmann's law studies expose him to the work of jurist Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) who wrote about his practice in his autobiography and subsequently influenced generations of practitioners including Jean Paul and potentially Hegel?

      There are obviously lots of unanswered questions...

    1. Alternate index card holding furniture for display?<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wffvs4/alternate_index_card_holding_furniture_for_display/

      Separate from boxes for long term card holding storage, does anyone have any suggestions they like for organizing or temporarily displaying cards?

      I've got a couple card tray rack organizers (originally intended for playing cards, but great for zettels) which I generally like.

      Two playing card holders, one with several cards inserted as an example. The holder allows compact display of cards perpendicular to one's table with the ability to see many at one time while working.

      I've also seen Levenger's note card "bleachers" which are similar, but more expensive. - Note Card Bleachers - Portable Note Card Bleachers - Nantucket Bamboo Compact Bleachers

      Levenger index card bleacher for compactly displaying index cards in an array on a desk so that portions are visible but that they don't take up space.

      Does anyone have anything else they like for compact working/displaying aside from laying cards out on tables/desks?

      Do you have other methods for this sort of organization or layout of ideas visually? Corkboards, magnetic whiteboards/walls, other?

    1. https://universitylifecafe.k-state.edu/bookshelf/academicskills/indexcardstudysystem.html

      Natalie Umberger is writing about an "index card study system" in an academic study skills context, but it's an admixture of come ideas from Cornell Notes and using index cards as flashcards.

      The advice to "Review your notes and readings frequently, so the material is 'fresh.' " is a common one (through at least the 1980s to the present), though research on the mere-exposure effect indicates that it's not as valuable as other methods.

      How can we stamp out the misconception that this sort of review is practical?

    1. The system of card indexing was propagated by a French Person called Abb’e Jean Rozier (1734-93). The index is prepared by allotting a separate card to each piece of information. The required information are written on the cards. All cards are of uniform size and are arranged in alphabetical, numerical or geographical order.

      https://www.preservearticles.com/business/what-is-card-indexing-and-explain-its-advantages-and-disadvantages/1740

      This source is questionable in it's sourcing and seems to mix several different methods and systems, so we'll need to treat it with a massive grain of salt.

      It does Mention Abb'e Jean Rozier (1734-93) as a historical figure related to propagating a system of card indexing which is a new name to me and thus worth looking into.

      Is Abb'e here a title? (potentially the French translation of the English abbot which is correctly abbé, so this may have had a typo.)

      The dates of life given would indicate that this is not the balloonist/scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Pil%C3%A2tre_de_Rozier

    1. ZKZur Kenntnisnahme (German: For Information)

      On an acronym search for "what is a ZK?" # Google provides a mini chart of optings including

      ZK for Zur Kenntnisnahme which translates from German as "for information".

      Is this directly related to zettelkasten culturally, or just a broad cultural thing?

  10. Jul 2022
    1. I have been using that system for >15 years pretty successful and taught it to my students in the research and scientific writing courses. It works well in psychology and the social sciences and humanities, but might be of limited use in engineering.

      u/0xKaishakunin I'm curious where you learned your system? And if you know, who taught them? Did you pick it up from book, teachers/professors, other? What age or grade level did you acquire it? How specific was the instruction? Was it described or demonstrated?

    1. But online information has a very weak link to memory.

      Why is memory for online pieces weaker for most?

      Is it the lack of sense of "physical" location for helping to store it? What about the seemingly ephemeral character of online data?

    1. By setting carefully constructed distractors we can train [thelearners] to reason their way through the linguistic and intel-lectual problems posed by the text. (p. xxii). . . in comprehension training we want [the learner] to recognizethe areas of comprehension error (through the distractors) so thathe learns to respond accurately and more maturely to what hereads. (p. xiii)

      30.

      Distractors help students improve their reading skills by reasoning their way to the right answers. Munby (1968) - read more.

    2. Comprehension questions are local rather than general. They focusattention on the message of a particular text and, although they mayrequire the learners to use more generalisable knowledge (like theinterpretation of reference words or modal verbs), this requirementis usually hidden to the learner, and often to the teacher, by themessage-focusing effect of the question.

      29.

      Test to many aspects, making tracking focuses quite difficult. What are other types of reading questions that can benefit students deliberately? What are the benefits of comprehension questions?

    1. During the seventeenth century, this associative view vanished and was replaced by more literallydescriptive views simply of the thing as it exists in itself.

      The associative emblematic worldview prevalent prior to the seventeenth century began to disappear within Western culture as the rise of the early modern period and the beginning of the scientific revolution began to focus on more descriptive modes of thought and representation.


      Have any researchers done specific work on this shift from emblematic to the descriptive? What examples do they show which support this shift? Any particular heavy influences?

      This section cites:<br /> William B. Ashworth, Jr. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westfall, eds #books/wanttoread<br /> which could be a place to start.


      Note that this same shift from associative and emblematic to descriptive and pedantic coincides not only with the rise of the scientific revolution but also with the effects of rising information overload in a post-Gutenberg world as well as the education reforms of Ramus (late 1500s) et al. as well as the beginning of the move away from scholasticism.


      Is there any evidence to support claims that this worldview stemmed from pagan traditions and cultures and not solely the art of memory traditions from ancient Greece? Could it have been pagan traditions which held onto these and they were supplemented and reinforced by ecclesiastical forces which used the Greek traditions?


      Examples of emblematic worldview: - particular colors of flowers meant specific things (red = love, yellow = friendship, etc.) We still have these or remants - Saints had their associative animals and objects - anniversary gifts had associative meanings (paper, silver, gold, etc.) We still have remnants of these things, though most are associated with wealth (gold, silver, platinum anniversaries). When did this tradition actually start? - what were the associative meanings of rabbits, turtles, and other animals which appear frequently in manuscript marginalia? (We have the example of the bee (Latin: apes) which where frequently used this way as being associated with the idea of imitation.) - other broad categories?

    2. This perspective has been called an “emblematic worldview”; it is clearly visible in the iconography ofmedieval and Renaissance art, for example. Plants and animals are not merely specimens, as in modernscience; they represent a huge raft of associated things and ideas.

      Medieval culture had imbued its perspective of the natural world with a variety of emblematic associations. Plants and animals were not simply specimens or organisms in the world but were emblematic representations of ideas which were also associated with them.

      example: peacock / pride

      Did this perspective draw from some of the older possibly pagan forms of orality and mnemonics? Or were the potential associations simply natural ones which (re-?)grew either historically or as the result of the use of the art of memory from antiquity?

    1. Peter Drucker, the distinguished commentator onorganisation and management, has popularised theterm “knowledge worker” to describe the role of agrowing percentage of employees in businessorganisations: “The manual worker is yesterday..,..The basic capital resource, the fundamentalinvestment, but also the cost centre for a developedeconomy is the knowledge worker who puts to work

      what he has learned in systematic education, that is, concepts, ideas and theories, rather than the man who puts to work manual skill or muscle, ” [5]. 5. Drucker, P. F. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices, Harper & Row; New York, 1973.

      Influential management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker helped to popularize the concept of the "knowledge worker" by way of his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (Harper & Row, 1973).


      Who/where is the origin of the neologism/idea of "knowledge worker"?

    1. various bibliographic catalog from the end of the '800 and '900 (from Paul Otlet/Henry La Fontaine Munaneum to Ranganathan faceted classification system passing through Niklas Luhmann, Carl Sagan and many others

      Look into Henry La Fontaine, Mundaneum, Ranganathan's faceted classification system.

      See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification

      What was Carl Sagan's system?

    1. Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.

      Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.

      Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?

      https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/

  11. Jun 2022
    1. "The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office. "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book."

      How might we design better digital reading interfaces that take advantage of a wider range of modes of thinking and reading?

      Certainly adding audio to the text helps to bring in benefits of orality, but what other axes are there besides the obvious spatial benefits?

    2. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension.

      If digital user interfaces and navigational difficulties inhibited reading comprehension in the modern age, what did similar interfaces do to early reading practices?

      What methods do we have to tease out data of these sorts of early practices?

      What about changes in modes of reading (reading out loud vs. reading quietly)?

      I'm reminded of this as a hyperbolic answer, but still the root question may be an apt one:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

    3. How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?
    1. so that your human,fallible, endlessly creative first brain can do what it does best.Imagine. Invent. Innovate. Create.

      Is this really what our brain does best?

      What about on evolutionary timescales? Is this what brains were meant to do?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. But systems of schooling and educational institutions–and much of online learning– are organized in ways that deny their voices matter. My role is to resist those systems and structures to reclaim the spaces of teaching and learning as voice affirming. Voice amplifying.

      Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

      There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

      Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

      Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

      Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)


      My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

    1. So, i started researching where the capitalization of said pronoun came from and was quite stunned to find that it was always capitalized because it always appeared as the first word in a sentence, never stuck in the middle. And then, when it started appearing in the middle, it started getting capitalized out of convention and because people worried that it would get lost in script. Of course, "It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case" (journalist Sydney J. Harris).

      If it's true that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized instead of the more commonly capitalized "you", does this help to underline some of the self-centeredness show by most of the English speaking West?

    1. The second was “makedance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of theso-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship andsubsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profitorganizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL orNBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. Iwanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in thecommercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for theproject, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watchedthem float to the bottom of the Joel box.

      Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?

      How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?

    2. before you can think out of the box, you have tostart with a box

      Can it be?! Twyla Tharp has an entire chapter in her book on creativity that covers a variation of the zettelkasten note taking concept!!!


      Does the phrase "thinking outside of the box" make a tacit nod to the idea of using a card index (or the German zettelkasten) for note taking, sense making, and thinking?

    1. certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.

      Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

      Are we training thinkers or doers?

    1. ZK II: Note 9/8 9/8 Zettelkasten 1 as a cybernetic system Combination of disorder and order, of lump formation and unpredictable combination realized in ad hoc access. Precondition: waiver of fixed order. The upstream differentiation: search aids vs. content; Registers, questions, ideas vs. Existing forms and partly makes superfluous what must be assumed in terms of inner order .

      Niklas Luhmann thought of the zettelkasten as a cybernetic system.

      He considers a precondition of its creation is that it ought to waive any "fixed order", allow for search, and the asking of questions.


      There are only the outlines of brief and scant thoughts here however, which would have required significant amounts of additional context not contained on the card. As a result one would require additional underpinning to understand what Luhmann means here as the card definitively couldn't have been directly or easily reused for future writing beyond the basic sketch outline he provides. What proportion of cards have brief thought sketches like this versus more fully thought out and directly reusable ideas within his system? Does Schmidt provide any guidance here without reading portions of the larger corpus? How does this differ from the guidance of Ahrens?

      (Translation from German to English via Google)

    1. essentially all neuroscientists agree that our understanding of the brain is nowhere near the level that it could be used to guide curriculum development.

      This looks like an interesting question...

  12. May 2022
    1. The use of physical location, even in an imagined environment, as a memory aid likely arose as a result of the fact that so much of the essential information stored in memory can be linked to foraging-type behaviours.

      I've thought this before, and sees like I've possibly read, though not captured it. Is there any solid proof of this fact?

      Rat studies of mazes show this sort of spacial memory, but are there similar learned studies in lower animals? C. elegans, drosophila, slime molds, etc.?

    1. the underprivileged are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held responsible for their dental condition.

      How does this happen?

      Is it the idea of "personal responsibility" and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" philosophy combined with lack of any actual support and/or education?

      There has to be a better phrase or word to define the perverse sort of philosophy espoused by many in the Republican party about this sort of "personal responsibility".

      It feels somewhat akin to the idea of privatize profits and socialize the losses. The social loss is definitely one that is pushed off onto the individual, but who's profiting? Is it really so expensive to fix this problem? Isn't the loss to society and public health akin to the Million Dollar Murray problem?

      Wouldn't each individual's responsibility be better tied to the collective good as well as their own outcomes? How can the two be bound together to improve outcomes for everyone all around?

    1. in human memory they call it external context um so we have 00:35:59 so the external context for instance is the the spatial cues and the other items that are kind of attached to the note right

      Theory: The external context of one's physical surroundings (pen, paper, textures, sounds, smells, etc.) combined with the internal context, the learner's psychological state, mood, etc., comprises a potentially closed system where each part props up the other for the best learning outcomes.

      Do neurodiversity effects help/hinder this process? What if people are missing one or more of these bits of contextualization? What does the literature look like in this space? Research?

    1. A spike in fears about new immigrants and newly emancipated black people reproducing at higher rates than the white population also prompted more opposition to legal abortion.

      Were fears about immigrants and Black people in the late 1800's milieu of evolutionary theory and beginning of eugenics thought influential in the growing debate about abortion?

    1. “I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.” ― Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

      A longer form of the idea:

      The answer to any question about doing something is either HELL YES!, or no.

    1. We reduce risk in the shaping process by solving open questions before we commit the project to a time box.

      We don't give a project to a team that still has rabbit holes or tangled interdependencies.

  13. Apr 2022
    1. don’t realizethat they are exposed

      how does this element relate to steam education/art influence?