I wonder if others use the sense making features of a note card system to think through their voting decisions? This seems an interesting and useful exercise which Paxson has done.

relatable to: https://hypothes.is/a/wIyvtm0oEeyNypNtc--Clw

https://www.indxd.ink/

A digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional).

It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.

This could potentially be used by those who have analog zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>sgtstretch </span> in @Gaby @pimoore so a good friend of mine makes [INDXD](https://www.indxd.ink/) which is for indexing analog notebooks and being able to find things. I don't personally use it, but I know @patrickrhone has written about it before. (<time class='dt-published'>10/27/2022 17:59:32</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.explainpaper.com/

Another in a growing line of research tools for processing and making sense of research literature including Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, Semantic Scholar, etc.

Functionality includes the ability to highlight sections of research papers with natural language processing to explain what those sections mean. There's also a "chat" that allows you to ask questions about the paper which will attempt to return reasonable answers, which is an artificial intelligence sort of means of having an artificial "conversation with the text".

cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

Gregory is not interested in cultural activities.

https://natto.dev/invite/nHQEKx_T

Demo page for Tools for Thought Rocks!

https://www.val.town/

Val Town is a collaborative notebook for APIs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/ComputationalMedium

https://www.supermind.design/database

https://www.scrintal.com/

Registered 2022-09-07

https://web.archive.org/web/20161201164608/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6286/adam-phillips-the-art-of-nonfiction-no-7-adam-phillips

Another example to link to: https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w

If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. —Leslie Lamport.“Thinking Above the Code.” Lecture presented at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Research, July 15, 2014. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/leslie-lamport-thinking-code/. Timestamp: 03:26

Link to:<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rvisgFDXEe2s-SuJJGw3cA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w

Note that the spoken quote is different from the written quote.

Lamport, Leslie. “Thinking Above the Code.” Lecture presented at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Research, July 15, 2014. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/leslie-lamport-thinking-code/.

Presentation slides presumably available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/leslie_lamport.pdf

see also: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-need-specs/

https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/

History of Philosophy: Summarized & Visualized

This could be thought of as a form of digital, single-project zettelkasten dedicated to philosophy. It's got people, sources, and ideas which are cross linked in a Luhmann-sense (without numbering) though not in a topical index-sense. Interestingly it has not only a spatial interface and shows spatial relationships between people and ideas over time using a timeline, but it also indicates—using colored links—the ideas of disagreement/contrast/refutation and agreement/similarity/expansion.

What other (digital) tools of thought provide these sorts of visualization affordances?

https://lu.ma/tftrocks-oct22

Pol Baladas https://batou.xyz<br /> Fermat<br /> https://fermat.ws/<br /> https://app.fermat.ws/

I'm a [[TiddlyWiki Maximalist]]. —Boris Mann

Paul Shen https://twitter.com/_paulshen<br /> Natto<br /> https://natto.dev

Natto https://natto.dev<br /> built by Paul Shen https://twitter.com/_paulshen

https://fermat.ws/<br /> https://app.fermat.ws/

The point of putting the Trivium in front of the Quadrivium is that the student is first taught the use of the "tools of learning" before they are then taught how to apply them to broad subjects as a means of learning how to learn.

https://app.sane.fyi/space/ida-ida-josefiina-75044

machine translation (Google):

But regardless of whether the Zettelkasten resulted in a book, a work, or a thought cloud with varying degrees of precipitation - it is always more than the whole whose parts it has collected. Because there are always other texts in it than those that emerged from it.

There's something romantic about the analogy of a zettelkasten with a thought cloud which may have varying degrees of precipitation.

Link to other analogies: - ruminant machines - the disappointment of porn - others?

https://www.betaworks.com/media

https://glasp.co/

Glasp is a recent entrant to the social web highlighting and note taking space.

https://www.folia.com/iannotate/

This annotation application appears to be only for iOS platforms only at the moment.

https://cosma.graphlab.fr/<br /> https://cosma.graphlab.fr/en/

When did this come out?

Appears to be a visualization tool for knowledge work. They recommend it for use with Zettlr, but it looks like it would work with other text based tools. Point it at markdown files to create graphs apparently.

This looks like the sort of standards based tool that would allow greater flexibility when using various data stores that we talk about in Friends of the Link.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Arthur Perret </span> in And you, what are you doing? (<time class='dt-published'>08/31/2022 02:40:03</time>)</cite></small>

@flancian

https://tana.inc/

Tinderbox really is a fantastic name for a note taking / personal knowledge management system. Just the idea makes me want to paint flames on the sides of my physical card index. https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

syndication link

In "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" (1952), C. Wright Mills talks about his methods for note taking, thinking, and analysis in what he calls "sociological imagination". This is a sociologists' framing of their own research and analysis practice and thus bears a sociological related name. While he talks more about the thinking, outlining, and writing process rather than the mechanical portion of how he takes notes or what he uses, he's extending significantly on the ideas and methods that Sönke Ahrens describes in How to Take Smart Notes (2017), though obviously he's doing it 65 years earlier. It would seem obvious that the specific methods (using either files, note cards, notebooks, etc.) were a bit more commonplace for his time and context, so he spent more of his time on the finer and tougher portions of the note making and thinking processes which are often the more difficult parts once one is past the "easy" mechanics.

While Mills doesn't delineate the steps or materials of his method of note taking the way Beatrice Webb, Langlois & Seignobos, Johannes Erich Heyde, Antonin Sertillanges, or many others have done before or Umberto Eco, Robert Greene/Ryan Holiday, Sönke Ahrens, or Dan Allosso since, he does focus more on the softer portions of his thinking methods and their desired outcomes and provides personal examples of how it works and what his expected outcomes are. Much like Niklas Luhmann describes in Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981), Mills is focusing on the thinking processes and outcomes, but in a more accessible way and with some additional depth.

Because the paper is rather short, but specific in its ideas and methods, those who finish the broad strokes of Ahrens' book and methods and find themselves somewhat confused will more than profit from the discussion here in Mills. Those looking for a stronger "crash course" might find that the first seven chapters of Allosso along with this discussion in Mills is a straighter and shorter path.

While Mills doesn't delineate his specific method in terms of physical tools, he does broadly refer to "files" which can be thought of as a zettelkasten (slip box) or card index traditions. Scant evidence in the piece indicates that he's talking about physical file folders and sheets of paper rather than slips or index cards, but this is generally irrelevant to the broader process of thinking or writing. Once can easily replace the instances of the English word "file" with the German concept of zettelkasten and not be confused.

One will note that this paper was written as a manuscript in April 1952 and was later distributed for classroom use in 1955, meaning that some of these methods were being distributed from professor to students. The piece was later revised and included as an appendix to Mill's text The Sociological Imagination which was first published in 1959.

Because there aren't specifics about Mills' note structure indicated here, we can't determine if his system was like that of Niklas Luhmann, but given the historical record one could suppose that it was closer to the commonplace tradition using slips or sheets. One thing becomes more clear however that between the popularity of Webb's work and this (which was reprinted in 2000 with a 40th anniversary edition), these methods were widespread in the mid-twentieth century and specifically in the field of sociology.

Above and beyond most of these sorts of treatises on note taking method, Mills does spend more time on the thinking portions of the practice and delineates eleven different practices that one can focus on as they actively read/think and take notes as well as afterwards for creating content or writing.

My full notes on the article can be found at https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0138200b4bfcde2757a137d61cd65cb8

The Technique of Controversy: Principles of Dynamic Logic by Boris B. Bogoslovsky https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technique_of_Controversy/P-rgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en

What was Dewey's contribution here?

The Gospel of Technology by C. E. Ayers https://archive.org/details/americanphilosop00kall/page/24/mode/2up

We could use more of this in the current tools for thought space. Given neurodiversity, having a smorgasbord of options from which to choose from and then to be able to pick and choose or experiment on what works for you in particular seems to be the best route forward.

A description of the problem.

Also missing are concrete examples and modeling of behavior for students to see and follow.

Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

(link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

(Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

Joseph Harris' text Rewriting: How to do things with texts (2006) sounds like a solid follow on text to the ideas found in Sönke Ahrens (2017) or Dan Allosso (2022).

https://www.re-collect.ai/

Are some of the critical reading methods they're framing here similar to or some of the type found at Project Zero (https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines)?

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?

!- salient : collaboration - the key point of the internet, or what was then called the "intergalactic network" was collaboration at scale to solve global challenges - The Most Important things are done by groups of people

https://twitter.com/Extended_Brain/status/1563703042125340680

Replying to @DannyHatcher. 1. Competition among apps makes them add unnecessary bells and whistles. 2. Trying to be all: GTD, ZK, Sticky Notes, proj mgmt, collaboration, workflow 3. Plugins are good for developers, bad for users https://t.co/4fbQ2nwdYd

— Extended Brain (@Extended_Brain) August 28, 2022

Part two sounds a lot like zettelkasten overreach https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

Part one is similar to the issue competing software companies have in attempting to check all the boxes on a supposed list of features without thinking about what their tool is used for in practice. (Isn't there a name for this specific phenomenon besides "mission creep"?)

This calls for a perspective shift: that "random Python program" is your browser.

Look at this lovely explicit phrase "chain of thought" here!

This is not a well attested viewpoint from my research, but obviously happens, and Heyde calls out personal experience to underline his point.

Where is he going to place the work of creating this chain of thought? Will it be at the "traditional" writing (arranging) part of the process, or will the chain be created as one goes a la Luhmann's ultimate practice?!

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

In the context of use

https://ncase.me/nutshell/

For those interested in the ideas of annotations, inline footnotes, expandable text, additional context, stretch text, hovercards, etc., Nicky Case has recently released a new project called Nutshell (https://ncase.me/nutshell/) which has some fun user interface as well as code with which to play.

https://www.betaworks.com/event/render-tools-for-thinking

Video: <br /> https://vimeo.com/739652984

https://myhub.ai/

https://render.plexus.earth/

https://www.springer.com/series/6159/books

Information Science and Knowledge Management Series of texts from Springer

Feels like there's more here if we delve a bit deeper...

https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/life/2022/08/04/pen-and-paper/

comment on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc

https://www.tana.inc/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/uc-berkeley-school-of-information/id194966956

Van Acker, Wouter, and Pieter Uyttenhove, eds. Analogous Spaces: Conference Reader. Ghent University. University library, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-770404.

https://betaworkss-fabulous-project.webflow.io/event/render-tools-for-thinking

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo63098990.html Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind by Ayelet Even-Ezra

Mentioned during Tinderbox Meetup: https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tagging-meetup-saturday-august-7/4841

They apparently discussed the book last week. (May be able to find the video of the discussion)

https://forum.toolsforthought.io/

Looking a bit sparse lately, but perhaps some interesting earlier content to sift through.

!- similar to : Gyuri Lajos idea of tacit awareness !- implications : thought sans image !- refer : Gyuri Lajos https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343523812_Augmenting_Tacit_Awareness_Accepting_our_responsibility_for_how_we_shape_our_tools When one becomes cognizant of thought sans image, then one realizes the relative construction of one's social identity and that offers a freedom to take on another one * therefore, realization of thought sans image opens the door to authentic transformation

!- question : thought sans image * If, as Weaver suggests, thought sans image is a primordial encounter which brings forth both the thinker and the world thought by the thinker, then this has strong similiarities to a spiritual awakening or enlightenment experience.

!- definition : human takeover * The ability for an individual to dynamically govern and author one's own personware. * The takeover gives us agency, rather than victimhood * the takeover can be triggered through realization of the difference between the thought sans image state and the conditioning into the symbolosphere

!- question : spiritual enlightenment and personware * An interesting question is: "How does enlightenment impact the personware? " * Obviously, enlightenment cannot be an act of removing the personware. Language once learned cannot simply be meditated away. * Does the act of enlightenment then make the personware dramatically known to the individual as if it were indeed like a suit that we are wearing and not our fundamental nature? * Does enlightenment allow us to get more in contact with the prelinguistic and prepersonal

!- follow up : David Bohm's ideas on thinking and thoughts * Thinking implies the present tense because it is an act we can only do in the present * When the present act of thinking is finished, it leaves traces in our consciousness * Those traces we refer to as "thoughts" * Thoughts act automatically - this is quite a pithy observation. We become thought automatons because once the thought is associated with all the other ideas, it alters the entire network of other thoughts on its own * "Thinking beyond the image of thought" may mean penetrating the existing automatized associations of thoughts with one that is quite novel and does not necessarily fit in, so is disruptive and can bring about a paradigm shift. * Read the reference to gain clarity

!- Insight : thought sans image * the symbolically constructed personware continually validates itself * The living, spontaneous, present human INTERbeing can generate something new * "Thinking beyond the image of thought" may mean penetrating the existing automatized associations of thoughts with one that is quite novel and does not necessarily fit in, so is disruptive and can bring about a paradigm shift.

!- key insight : can an individual reshape the contours of their social situations instead of being shaped by them? * This realization would open up the door to authentic inner transformation * This is an important way to describe the discovery of personal empowerment and agency via realization of the bare human spirit, the "thought sans image"

!- Insight : thought sans image * If we recognize our intrinsic bare human spirit, it opens up possibilities to leave our identity behind like a suit we can take off * Nothing is socially predestined and in that recognition, there is a new-found freedom to replace our current personware

!- key insight : thought sans image !- definition : thought sans image * human beings are NOT defined by what they are thinking, perceiving or saying as mediated by social symbolic systems * They are also NOT defined by their own narratives or language itself - the symbolosphere is culturally imposed upon the bare human being * That primordial nature is described as the bare human spirit, the preindividual, being-as-becoming (Simondon) * Many spiritual traditions guide practitioners to experience this primordial state, the nondual state, stripped of all cultural embellishments * David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) calls this state thought sans image based on the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze and 4E theory of cognition

• People first computing
• people centered computing
• Interpersonal Computing
• https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
• https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Engelbart/Engelbart_AugmentIntellect.html

!- example : strange loop * the thinking mind that tries to analyze itself is the epitome of a strange loop!

!- question : unsupported thought * Exactly what is an unsupported thought?

!- question : intrinsically unsupported * This needs a lot of unpacking to understand * How does one validate the claim that when thinking thinks about its own process, it is unsupported? * What does it mean to claim that it is open ended? * What are the two problems and why do they together make up the freedom of the mind?

Beatrice Webb analogized the card index (or note taking using slips of paper) as serving the function of a scientific tool for sociologists the way that chemists use blow pipes and balances or physicists use the prism or electroscope. These tools all help the researcher examine small constituent parts and then situate them in other orderings to provide insight into the subject areas.

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/25/figure-it-out/

A book with this sentence is just the sort that I'm after.

https://triz.org/principles/

http://www.tricki.org/

archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20220326200254/http://www.tricki.org/

a Wiki-style site with a large store of useful mathematical problem-solving techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

TRIZ (/ˈtriːz/; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadatch), literally: "theory of inventive problem solving " is “the next evolutionary step in creating an organized and systematic approach to problem solving. The development and improvement of products and technologies according to TRIZ are guided by the objective Laws of Engineering System Evolution. TRIZ Problem Solving Tools and Methods are based on them.” In another description, TRIZ is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature".

It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science-fiction author Genrich Altshuller (1926-1998) and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as the theory of inventive problem solving, and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1857/zettelkasten-work-literature-driven-and-problem-driven

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1857/zettelkasten-work-literature-driven-and-problem-driven

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

Kidd, Alison. “The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 186–91. CHI ’94. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 1994. https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191740.

If these are the types of things that are interesting, you might also try a shared bibliography that a handful of readers/researchers share and contribute to: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought

Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.

Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.

How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

The trending topics on Twitter can be used as a form of juxtaposition of random ideas which could be brought together to make new and interesting things.

Here's but one example of someone practicing just this:

Y’all, imagine Spielberg’s Sailor Moon pic.twitter.com/xZ1DEsbLTy

— Matty Illustration (@MN_illustration) June 30, 2022

cc: https://twitter.com/marshallk

https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.

via https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf

• E- excited
• W- worrisome
• N - need to know
• S - stance or suggestion for moving forward

These could be used as a simple set of rules for thumb for evaluating and expanding on ideas in note taking or social annotation settings.

Compare these with the suggestions of Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. Which is better? More comprehensive? Are there any ideas missing in a broader conceptualization? Is there a better acronymization or analogy for such a technique?

Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ

How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?

What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.

This entire chapter thus far (to the end of this section at minimum) sounds like it would have been better motivating material.

It also has a more touchy-feely and less concrete nature which puts in the self-help category and not so much in the tools for thought space.

Dan Charnas, Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2016)

mise-en-place is an example of a means of thinking externally with one's environment

link to - similar ideas in Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind

Our surroundings can have a profound effect on our thinking.

Want to read: Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 2 (2007): 174–86, https://doi.org/10.1086/519146.

This is a whole different area than "thought spaces" but somehow relevant all the same.

cross reference this with Annie Murphy Paul's thinking with built spaces

Did Forte find this source on his own or borrow from Annie Murphy Paul? Likely the later given his reliance on other small bits which overlap.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-thought.html

Note the title "Tool for Thought" here. It does come five years after Howard Rheingold's book of a similar name.

Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.

I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.

Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.

If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6OmqXCsYt8

It's often said that, 'The hand is the visible part of our brain.'

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroban

https://thebrain.com/

Initially came across this via Jerry Michalski who has an extensive personal mind map of over 24 years (as of fall 2021).

https://thrivingonoverload.com/episodes/

This podcast looks interesting and relevant to the tools for thought space.

https://twitter.com/augmented_CI

The words "beyond", "hierarchical", and "archaic" are all designed to marginalize prior thought and tools which all work, and are likely upon which this broader idea is built. This is a potentially toxic means of creating "power over" this prior art rather than a more open spirit of "power with".

This wording seems quite profound.

It means that by creating a personification of our tools, we can more easily communicate with them.

Do people personify their computers? I remember in the late 80s and early 90s computer workstations, especially in university settings, having personified names.

Link this to the personification of rocks w.r.t. talking rocks and oral traditions.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/KosdVt1qEeykU2dTuVZT3Q

1. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Zweiter Teil, II. Ethische Methodenlehre, 1st Section, §50: “He is the midwife of his thoughts,” on the teacher-student relationship.

1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
2. Ibid., 320.

in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

The public Indyweb is eminently designed as a public space for holding deep, continuous, asynchronous conversations with provenance. That is, if the partcipant consents to public conversation, ideas can be publicly tracked. Whoever reads your public ideas can be traced.and this paper trail is immutably stored, allowing anyone to see the evolution of ideas in real time.

In theory, this does away with the need for patents and copyrights, as all ideas are traceable to the contributors and each contribution is also known. This allows for the system to embed crowdsourced microfunding, supporting the best (upvoted) ideas to surface.

Participants in the public Indyweb ecosystem are called Indyviduals and each has their own private data hub called an Indyhub. Since Indyweb is interpersonal computing, each person is the center of their indyweb universe. Through the discoverability built into the Indyweb, anything of immediate salience is surfaced to your private hub. No applications can use your data unless you give exact permission on which data to use and how it shall be used. Each user sets the condition for their data usage. Instead of a user's data stored in silos of servers all over the web as is current practice, any data you generate, in conversation, media or data files is immediately accessible on your own Indyhub.

Indyweb supports symmathesy, the exchange of ideas based on an appropriate epistemological model that reflects how human INTERbeings learn as a dynamic interplay between individual and collective learning. Furthermore, all data that participants choose to share is immutably stored on content addressable web3 storage forever. It is not concentrated on any server but the data is stored on the entire IPFS network:

"IPFS works through content adddressibility. It is a peer-to-peer (p2p) storage network. Content is accessible through peers located anywhere in the world, that might relay information, store it, or do both. IPFS knows how to find what you ask for using its content address rather than its location.

There are three fundamental principles to understanding IPFS:

Unique identification via content addressing Content linking via directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) Content discovery via distributed hash tables (DHTs)" (Source: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/how-ipfs-works/)

The privacy, scalability, discoverability, public immutability and provenance of the public Indyweb makes it ideal for supporting hyperconversations that emerge tomorrows collectively emergent solutions. It is based on the principles of thought augmentation developed by computer industry pioneers such as Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson who many decades earlier in their prescience foresaw the need for computing tools to augment thought and provide the ability to form Network Improvement Communities (NIC) to solve a new generation of complex human challenges.

Arrangement and organization definitely have their place and can be helpful. However they may also tend to become too rigid to the point that one's thinking begins to lack creativity and invention. Where is the space for the Llullist arts of combinatorial thought here?

F*ck! I've been scooped!

Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)

The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.

Active reading to the extreme!

What a clever innovation building on the ideas of the art of memory and Raymond Llull's combinatoric arts!

Does this hit all of the areas of Bloom's Taxonomy? I suspect that it does.

How could it be tied more directly into an active reading, annotating, and note taking practice?

Saving the entire story for context, but primarily for this Marshall McLuhan-esque quote:

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

I want to know the source of the quote.

Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?