- Sep 2022
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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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?
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geohot.github.io geohot.github.io
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Before asking the question, how do I build AGI, you first must ask the question, what would I recognize as AGI?
Wrong. Here, I'll show you:
Forget about AGI for a moment. Instead, pretend we're talking about pecan pie. Most people probably can't answer the question, "What would I recognize as a pecan pie?" (or a sandwich). And yet thousands of people are able to make (and thousands more people are able to enjoy) pecan pie all the time—probably every day.
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mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
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The Field Notes journal serves as RAM, the index cards as HDD, metaphorically speaking...(brain is CPU).
Den analogizes their note taking system to computing on 2010-11-11 8:43 PM.
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In combination with SCA, CERICoffers freedom from the transmission model of learning, where theprofessor lectures and the students regurgitate. SCA can help buildlearning communities that increase students’ agency and power inconstructing knowledge, realizing something closer to a constructivistlearning ideal. Thus, SCA generates a unique opportunity to makeclassrooms more equitable by subverting the historicallymarginalizing higher education practices centered on the professor.
Here's some justification for the prior statement on equity, but it comes after instead of before. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/SHEFJjM6Ee2Gru-y0d_1lg)
While there is some foundation to the claim given, it would need more support. The sage on the stage may be becoming outmoded with other potential models, but removing it altogether does remove some pieces which may help to support neurodiverse learners who work better via oral transmission rather than using literate modes (eg. dyslexia).
Who is to say that it's "just" sage on the stage lecturing and regurgitation? Why couldn't these same analytical practices be aimed at lectures, interviews, or other oral modes of presentation which will occur during thesis research? (Think anthropology and sociology research which may have much more significant oral aspects.)
Certainly some of these methods can create new levels of agency on the part of the learner/researcher. Has anyone designed experiments to measure this sort of agency growth?
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Critical reading methods, such asCERIC, make hidden expectations of doctoral programs explicit.
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)?
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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dl-acm-org.revproxy.brown.edu dl-acm-org.revproxy.brown.edu
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In fact, every timeone combines and recordsfacts in accordance withestablished logical process-es, the creative aspect ofthinking is concerned onlywith the selection of thedata and the process to beemployed, and the manip-ulation thereafter is repeti-tive in nature and hence afit matter to be relegatedto the machines
I am not sure if I agree with this statement, since for every discipline, the details of manipulating the data, refining, and creatively thinking may be vastly different. Can one really confidently declare that after the selection of data, the manner of thinking and manipulation of specific data can be generalized?
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www.connectedtext.com www.connectedtext.com
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I have found that the "size of a thought" is usually not much larger than 500 words. Nicholson Baker, who has written an essay on "The Size of Thoughts" thinks that "most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product." Mine are a lot smaller. It takes between 50 and 500 words for me to express one thought or one idea (or perhaps better a fragment of a thought or an idea, because thoughts and ideas usually are compounds of such fragments). See also Steven Berlin Johnson on his experiences with an electronic outliner, called Devonthink: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html.
What is the size of a single thought?
500 words is about the size of a typical blog post. It's also about the size of a minimum recommended post for SEO purposes.
Nice to see his link to Steven Johnson here as I think this is where I've seen similar thoughts recently myself.
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Joey Cofone: Are there laws to creativity?
Joey Cofone, author of the upcoming book The Laws of Creativity, is selling the idea of "float" (in comparison to Mihaly Csikzentmihaly's "flow"), which is ostensibly similar to Barbara Oakley's diffuse thinking framework, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's flâneur framing, and a dose of the Zeigarnik effect.
I'm concerned that this book will be broadly prescriptive without any founding on any of the extant research, literature, or science of the past. I'll think more highly of it if it were to quote/reference something like Merton and Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science.
Following on the above:
David Allen (of GTD fame) indicates that one should close all open loops to free up working memory, but leaving some open for active thought, follow up, and potential future insight creation can be a useful pattern too. (2022-09-09 9:05 AM)
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Priya Mohan: Design Thinking Strategies to solve complex problems in STEM
DICE Discover Ideate Create Evaluate
Mostly this was a tour through the DICE framing while using Obsidian for STEM.
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- Aug 2022
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www.ft.com www.ft.com
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Harford, T. (2021, May 6). What magic teaches us about misinformation. https://www.ft.com/content/5cea69f0-7d44-424e-a121-78a21564ca35
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link.springer.com link.springer.com
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The discussion above implies that a new explanation or theory can only be justified if it is seen as different from, and possibly opposed to, established knowledge. Without such differentiation, there is no way of determining whether it illuminates things better than previous research. The detection of unexpected difference – of tensions in the empirics or how they are interpreted – indicates the need for new research.
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Second-order thinking is more deliberate. It is thinking in terms of interactions and time, understanding that despite our intentions our interventions often cause harm. Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.
Second-order thinking
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A studentshould learn not to be alarmed by conflicting evidence, con-troversial views, and the mass of detailed information. H eshould rather seek to learn how to deal with them.
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Local file Local file
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Mortimer Adler (another independent scholar). “My train of thought greiout of my life just the way a leaf or a branch grows our of a tree.” His thinking and writing occurred as a regular part of his life. In one of his book;Thinking and Working on the Waterfront, he wrote:My writing is'done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fieldswhile waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Now and then I take aday off to “put myself in order." I go through the notes, pick and discard.The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have somethingto chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentiousas it sounds.
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have really rapidly moving creatures and rapidly thinking creatures, which is a form of movement
Ward in the context of Rare Earth hypothesis says this. An intriguing notion seeing thinking as a form of (deliberate) movement. How is this meant / to be understood? Chemically, in terms of what it requires in an animal (ie us)? The remark is made in the context of the need for oxygen for complex life to be possible. (based on David Catling Univ of Washington) after all. Or environmentally/contextually, as both deliberate physical movement and brain activity are response to outside impulses?
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lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
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Every book I read is also broken up and digested on these cards, which are all loosely by themed.
Holiday analogizes his reading and note taking practice as a means of digesting books into his note card collection.
Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/OZ2r9rOfEeu9oFPzd3bMlw - Reader's Digest as a popular example
How do the ideas of "digesting books" and "ruminant machines" relate to the psychology phenomenon of diffuse thinking over time?
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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Don't shit where you need to critically think, as the old saying goes.
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render.betaworks.com render.betaworks.com
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to networked commonplace books
Alright Jerry, you got me, I'm in!
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stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com
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It's a great way to test various limits. When you think about this even more, it's a little mind-bending, as we're trying to impose a global clock ("who is the most up to date") on a system that inherently doesn't have a global clock. When we scale time down to nanoseconds, this affects us in the real world of today: a light-nanosecond is not very far.
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happiful.com happiful.com
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In Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, the word “thinkering” was coined, linking the way we create and understand concepts in our mind with “tinkering”.
https://happiful.com/what-is-thinkering/
thinkering<br /> a portmanteau of thinking and tinkering<br /> It describes the sort of mindful thinking and exploration one does when interacting with objects using one's hands.
quoted here as first appearing in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient
link to: Barbara Oakley and ideas of diffuse thinking
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- Jul 2022
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Is anyone practicing sketchnotes like patterns in their notes?
I've noticed that u/khimtan has a more visual stye of note taking with respect to their cards, but is anyone else doing this sort of visualization-based type of note taking in the vein of sketchnotes or r/sketchnoting? I've read books by Mike Rohde and Emily Mills and tinkered around in the space, but haven't actively added it to my practice tacitly. For those who do, do you have any suggestions/tips? I suspect that even simple drollery-esque images on cards would help with the memory/recall aspects. This may go even further for those with more visual-based modes of thinking and memory.
For those interested in more, as well as some intro videos, here are some of my digital notes: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=sketchnotes
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wc63sw/is_anyone_practicing_sketchnotes_like_patterns_in/
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Sounds like his philosophy fit may have fit in with the broader prosperity gospel space, Napoleon Hill, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, et al. Potentially worth looking into. Also related to the self-help movements and the New Thought philosophies.
fascinating that he wrote a book Copywriting and Direct Marketing. This may also tie him into the theses of Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy?
Link to: https://hyp.is/E4I_qgvCEe2rQO9iXvaTgA/www.goodreads.com/author/show/257221.Robert_Collier
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- Peter Fenelon Collier
- visualization
- Robert Collier
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- Norman Vincent Peale
- faith
- Collier's Weekly
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- copywriting
- capitalism
- abundance
- Rhonda Byrne
- Napoleon Hill
- prosperity gospel
- Kevin Phillips
- positive thinking
- Billy Graham
- psychology
- American Theocracy
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www.persuasion.community www.persuasion.community
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You have three options:Continue fighting fires with hordes of firefighters (in this analogy, fact-checkers).Focus on the arsonists (the people spreading the misinformation) by alerting the town they're the ones starting the fire (banning or labeling them).Clear the kindling and dry brush (teach people to spot lies, think critically, and ask questions).Right now, we do a lot of #1. We do a little bit of #2. We do almost none of #3, which is probably the most important and the most difficult. I’d propose three strategies for addressing misinformation by teaching people to ask questions and spot lies.
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bafybeicuq2jxzrw7omddwzohl5szkqv6ayjiubjy3uopjh5c3cghxq6yoe.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeicuq2jxzrw7omddwzohl5szkqv6ayjiubjy3uopjh5c3cghxq6yoe.ipfs.dweb.link
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My interest goes yet further, to the metaphysical ground of cognition andmental processes and how they reflect on existence, meaning and value. There is anobvious and unavoidable strange loop (Hofstadter, 2013) here: the cognitive think-ing agent trying to make sense of these same sense-making processes that bring forthboth her as a subject and the objects of her observation while these are being broughtforth.
!- key insight : making sense of making sense is a strange loop! * This sentence deeply resonates
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x28newblog.wordpress.com x28newblog.wordpress.com
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“Associations among concepts is thinking” (p. 43)
A book with this sentence is just the sort that I'm after.
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most people need to talk out an idea in order to think about it2.
D. J. Levitin, The organized mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload. New York, N.Y: Dutton, 2014. #books/wanttoread
A general truism in my experience, but I'm curious what else Levitin has to say on this subject.
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www.judithragir.org www.judithragir.org
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Dogen is constantly and repeatedly trying to knock us off our intellectual center and interrupt our thinking. He does not confirm any one solid view of so-called reality. He doesn’t want us to get stuck to one side or the other in the dynamic pivoting of life’s opposite. Do not cling to the absolute or the relative truth. They dynamically and mutually work with each other. Dogen would describe this interaction as “The Whole Works.”
This is a nice way to describe this process...."repeatedly trying to knock us out of our intellectual center and interrupt our (one sided) thinking."
We should observe this inherent property of our thinknig process, its one-sided nature.
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marshallk.com marshallk.com
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Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and learned about what he calls Symphonic Thinking, or the ability to find connections between seemingly disparate entities, as a key thinking pattern for the future of work,
Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind lays out an idea he call's "Symphonic Thinking" which is a practice of finding connections between unrelated ideas. He suggests that this practice is an important key to the future of work.
Link this to other incarnations of this pattern in history: - Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts - Niklas Luhmann - linked zettelkasten - Marshall Kirkpatrick - triangle thinking - Dan Pink - symphonic thinking - etc...
Dan Pink A Whole New Mind #books/wanttoread
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- Jun 2022
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twitter.com twitter.com
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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:
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Y’all, imagine Spielberg’s Sailor Moon pic.twitter.com/xZ1DEsbLTy
— Matty Illustration (@MN_illustration) June 30, 2022
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pz.harvard.edu pz.harvard.edu
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Explore more Thinking Routines at pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines
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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?
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Local file Local file
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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?
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the time you sit down tomake progress on something, all the work to gather and organize thesource material needs to already be done. We can’t expectourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. Ilearned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine thatsystematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of ourawareness.
By writing down and collecting ideas slowly over time, working on them in small fits and spurts, when one finally comes to do the final work on their writing project or other work, the pieces only need minor shaping to take their final form. This process allows for a much greater level of serendipity, creativity, and potential sustained genius of connecting ideas across time to take shape in a final piece.
How does this relate to diffuse thinking? How can slow diffuse thinking be leveraged into this process?
Writing down fleeting notes while walking around can be valuable as one's ideas brew slowly in the mind (diffuse thinking) in combination with active combinatorial creativity, thus a form of Llullan combinatorial diffusion.
Many business books seem so shallow and often only have one real insight which is repeated multiple times, perhaps to drive the point home or perhaps just to have enough filler to seem being worth the purchase of a book.
Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is an example of this, though it shows a different form of genius in expanding the idea from a variety of perspectives so that eventually everyone will absorb the broader idea which is distilled to great effect into the title.
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the Cathedral Effect.2Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves inpowerfully shapes our thinking
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.
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Tharp calls her approach “the box.”
In The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has creative inspiration and note taking practice which she calls "the box" in which she organizes “notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me”. She also calls her linking of ideas within her box method "the art of scratching" (chapter 6).
related: combinatorial creativity triangle thinking
[[Twyla Tharp]] [[The Creative Habit]] #books/wanttoread
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Perhaps the most immediate benefit of capturing content outsideour heads is that we escape what I call the “reactivity loop”—thehamster wheel of urgency, outrage, and sensationalism thatcharacterizes so much of the Internet. The moment you firstencounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means. Youneed to set it aside and gain some objectivity.
Not sure I agree wholly with
The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means
Sometimes your fleeting reactions are incredibly useful upon first encounter as they won't return as easily. However this is also a space where setting things aside for diffuse thinking apparatus to work can be highly useful.
Either way, one should always return to ideas in their notebook for future processing.
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We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8
Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman, “The Science of ‘Inside Out,’” New York Times, July 3, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-inside-out.html.
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- emotion
- Twyla Tharp
- writing process
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- zettelkasten
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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https://hybridpedagogy.org/ethical-online-learning/
An interesting perspective on ethical and supportive online learning. More questions and explorations than answers, but then framing is a majority of the battle.
I'm generally in agreement with much of the discussion here.
This was a fabulous piece for "thinking against". Thanks Sean Michael Morris, and Lora Taub.
I definitely got far more out of it by reading and annotating than I ever would in its original keynote presentation version.
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behavioralscientist.org behavioralscientist.org
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To solve creative problems with TRIZ, there are three elements you need to know: It’s been solved before.There are consistent patterns of solutions.Solving contradictions creates breakthrough innovation
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TRIZ (a Russian acronym for the ‘Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”). Through TRIZ, Altshuller was now able to demonstrate the science behind creative innovation, not only paving the way for new breakthroughs in technology but establishing a framework of immense value to countless other fields.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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This touched a nerve this week: “thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do” (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust)
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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?
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thrivingonoverload.com thrivingonoverload.com
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Marshall’s method for connecting which he calls Triangle Thinking (26:41)
Marshall Kirkpatrick describes a method of taking three ostensibly random ideas and attempting to view each from the others' perspectives as a way to create new ideas by linking them together.
This method is quite similar to that of Raymond Llull as described in Frances Yate's The Art of Memory (UChicago Press, 1966), though there Llull was memorizing and combinatorially permuting 20 or more ideas at a time. It's also quite similar to the sort of meditative practice found in the lectio divina, though there ideas are generally limited to religious ones for contemplation.
https://content.blubrry.com/thrivingonoverload/THRIVING_013_Marshall_Kirkpatrick.mp3#t=1559,1745
Other examples: - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22combinatorial+creativity%22 - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22Llullan%20combinatorial%20arts%22
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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If Luhmann’s notebox system was not dynamic and fluid and not one of pure order, either, how can one think of Luhmann’s notebox system? In my experience using an Antinet Zettelkasten, I find it to be more organic in nature. Like nature, it has simple laws and fundamental rules by which it operates (like the laws of thermodynamics in physics); yet, it’s also subject to arbitrary decisions. We know this because in describing it, Luhmann uses the word arbitrary to describe its arbitrary internal branching. We can infer that arbitrary, means something that was decided by Luhmann outside of some external and strict criteria (i.e., strict schemes like the Dewey Decimal Classification). (12)12 This arbitrary, random structure contributes to one of its most distinctive aspects of the system–the aspect of surprises. Because of its unique structure, the Antinet is noted as “a surprise generator,” and a system that develops “a creativity of its own.” (13)
There's some magical thinking involved here. While the system has some arbitrary internal branching, the surprises come from the system's perfect memory that the human user doesn't have. This makes it appear that the system creates its own creativity, but it is really the combinatorics of the perfect memory system with use over time.
Link to: serendipity of systems based on auto-complete
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the human brain is an energy hog like and you can learn a lot about a lot of our uh biases and problems from the kinds of shortcuts that the brain takes 00:06:41 in the name of energy conservation well it looks like estimating group consensus is one of those shortcuts right because all it's equal your brain tends to assume that the loudest voices repeated 00:06:53 the most are the majority and and i think about that i think wow that doesn't seem like a good a good shortcut at all but i guess if you go back and f through evolution and when most of our time was spent and like 00:07:05 seeing like the dumbar number kind of you know groups it probably it obviously had to work well enough right to just be here with us but now when you think about with social media 00:07:18 and these massive imaginary communities like nations where you're never going to meet more than a tiny tiny percentage of the people in your group that shortcut becomes problematic um and 00:07:31 we can talk about it like i mean social media in particular makes it very very easy to distort perceived group consensus
This is the key problem that makes current social media dangerous, it can be easily gamed due to this evolutionary shortcut of the brain, the fast system of biases aka Daniel Kahneman's research.
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- May 2022
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Local file Local file
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new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to seewhether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, andpeople will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a
Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (Boston: Birkhäuser Boston, 1997), 202.
Richard Feynman indicated in an interview that he kept a dozen of his favorite problems at the top of his mind. As he encountered new results and tricks, he tried applying them to those problems in hopes of either solving them or in coming up with new ideas. Over time by random but combinatorial chance, solutions or ideas would present themselves as ideas were juxtaposed.
One would suspect that Feynman hadn't actually read Raymond Llull, but this technique sounds very similar to the Llullan combinatorial arts from centuries earlier, albeit in a much more simplified form.
Can we find evidence of Feynman having read or interacted with Llull? Was it independently created or was he influenced?
I had an example of this on 2022-05-28 in Dan Allosso's book club on Equality in the closing minutes where a bit of inspiration hit me to combine the ideas of memes, evolution, and Indigenous knowledge and storytelling to our current political situation. Several of them are problems and ideas I've been working with over years or months, and they came together all at once to present a surprising and useful new combination. #examples
Link this also to the idea of diffuse thinking as a means of solving problems. One can combine the idea of diffuse thinking with combinatorial creativity to super-charge one's problem solving and idea generation capacity this way. What would one call this combination? It definitely needs a name. Llullan combinatorial diffusion, perhaps? To some extent Llull was doing this already as part of his practice, it's just that he didn't know or write explicitly about the diffuse thinking portion (to my knowledge), though this doesn't mean that he wasn't the beneficiary of it in actual practice, particularly when it's known that many of his time practiced lectio divina and meditated on their ideas. Alternately meditating on ideas and then "walking away" from them will by force cause diffuse thinking to be triggered.
Are there people for whom diffuse thinking doesn't work from a physiological perspective? What type of neurodiversity does this cause?
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Sharpen Our Unique Perspectives
Perhaps better: Provide fodder for thinking and creating?
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- thinking tools
- combinatorial creativity
- cross-disciplinary studies
- meditation
- Llullan combinatorial diffusion
- diffuse thinking
- psychology
- cognitive neuropsychology
- Llullan combinatorial arts
- creative process
- flâneur
- quotes
- neurodiversity
- Feynman's 12 Favorite Problems
- lectio divina
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via3.hypothes.is via3.hypothes.is
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“ Communication is . . . autopoietic insofar as it can only beproduced in a recursive relationship to other communications, that is to say, only in anetwork, to the reproduction of which each individual communication contributes.”42
- Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , 82f.
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lu.ma lu.ma
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Tools for Thought Rocks!
Related to talking rocks (for me), but also completely opposite to talking and thinking rocks altogether.
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“Combinatory play,” said Einstein, “seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”
excellent quote
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www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
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When you say “Élan vital!” it feels like you know why your hand moves. You have a little causal diagram in your head that says:But actually you know nothing you didn’t know before. You don’t know, say, whether your hand will generate heat or absorb heat, unless you have observed the fact already; if not, you won’t be able to predict it in advance. Your curiosity feels sated, but it hasn’t been fed. Since you can say “Why? Élan vital!” to any possible observation, it is equally good at explaining all outcomes, a disguised hypothesis of maximum entropy, et cetera.
This reminds me of Feynman's observation:"It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird."
Sometimes knowing a name stops our curiosity to push our understanding further because we cheat ourselves into thinking that we know more than the mere name. This is a fallacy.
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multidimensional.link multidimensional.link✶1
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Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room, in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service - from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly. That's systems thinking.
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- Apr 2022
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www.connectedpapers.com www.connectedpapers.com
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https://www.connectedpapers.com/
See also: - Research Rabbit - Open Knowledge Maps
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Another visual-mapping tool is Open Knowledge Maps, a service offered by a Vienna-based not-for-profit organization of the same name. It was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly-communication researcher at Graz University of Technology in Austria.
https://openknowledgemaps.org/
Open Knowledge maps is a visual literature search tool that is based on keywords rather than on a paper's title, author, or DOI. The service was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly communication researcher at Graz University of Technology.
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The way technologies like fMRI are applied is aproduct of our brainbound orientation; it has not seemed odd or unusual toexamine the individual brain on its own, unconnected to others.
In part because of modalities of studying the brain using methods like fMRI where the images are of an individual's head, we focus too much and too exclusively on single brains bound to individuals rather than on brains working in concert.
Greater flexibilities in tools and methods should help do studies of humans working in concert.
Link this to the anecdote:
I recall a radiology test within a medical school setting in which students were asked to diagnose an x-ray of a human patient's skull. Most either guessed small hairline fractures in the skull or that there was nothing wrong with the patient.
Can you diagnose the patient?
Almost all the students failed the question, and worse felt like idiots when the answer was revealed: the patient must be dead because the spinal column and the rest of the body are not attached. Compare:
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the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.
"Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.
Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.
It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.
The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.
Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17
Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.
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solo thinking isrooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitivescientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind ofinternalized conversation. Our brains evolved to think with people: to teachthem, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought isexquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all isthe presence of other people. As a consequence, when we think socially, wethink differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.
People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.
This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.
I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).
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the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process
great quote
How can social annotation practices take advantage of these sorts of active learning processes? What might be done in a flipped classroom setting to get students to use social annotation on a text prior to a lecture and have the questions and ideas from these sessions brought into the lecture space for discussion, argument, and expansion?
Tags
- active learning
- anatomy
- discussion sections
- individuals vs. groups
- social encoding advantage
- radiology
- annotation for learning
- orality and memory
- quotes
- flipped classrooms
- lone genius myth
- social animals
- individualism
- conversations with the text
- thinking
- thinking tools
- x-rays
- networked thinking
- orality
- active reading
- thinking with peers
- skulls
- fMRI
- definitions
- evolution
- social annotation
- orality vs. literacy
- annotations
- cognitive bias
Annotators
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Local file Local file
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A filing system is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic (at any point of timeor space, one can always insert a new card); in contradistinction with the sequen-tial irreversibility of the pages of the notebook and of the book, its interiormobility allows for permanent reordering (for, even if there is no narrative conclu-sion of a diary, there is a last page of the notebook on which it is written: its pagesare numbered, like days on a calendar).
Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.
link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten
Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?
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akkartik.name akkartik.name
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I want an hour of reward
marktani asks (not unreasonably):
what is an hour of reward?
Kartik's response[1] is adequate, I feel.
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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2. What influence does annotating with an audience have on how you annotate? My annotations and notes generally are fragile things, tentative formulations, or shortened formulations that have meaning because of what they point to (in my network of notes and thoughts), not so much because of their wording. Likewise my notes and notions read differently than my blog posts. Because my blog posts have an audience, my notes/notions are half of the internal dialogue with myself. Were I to annotate in the knowledge that it would be public, I would write very differently, it would be more a performance, less probing forwards in my thoughts. I remember that publicly shared bookmarks with notes in Delicious already had that effect for me. Do you annotate differently in public view, self censoring or self editing?
To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.
Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).
Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.
There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw
There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.
All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.
Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Krapp argues that, despite its ‘respectablelineage’, the card index generally ‘figures only as an anonymous,furtive factor in text generation, acknowledged – all the way into thetwentieth century – merely as a memory crutch’ (361).2 A keyreason for this is due to the fact that the ‘enlightened scholar isexpected to produce innovative thought’ (361); knowledgeproduction, and any prostheses involved in it, ‘became and remaineda private matter’ (361).
'Memory crutch' implies a physical human failing that needs assistance rather than a phrase like aide-mémoire that doesn't draw that same attention.
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- Mar 2022
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nesslabs.com nesslabs.com
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Beyond cognitive biases and preconceived opinions, common sense is based on linear thinking. “I experience A, therefore I can directly explain it by B.”
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Networked thinking is an explorative approach to problem-solving, whose aim is to consider the complex interactions between nodes and connections in a given problem space. Instead of considering a particular problem in isolation to discover a pre-existing solution, networked thinking encourages non-linear, second-order reflection in order to let a new idea emerge.
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ourworldindata.org ourworldindata.org
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The Future is Vast: Longtermism’s perspective on humanity’s past, present, and futureIf we manage to avoid a large catastrophe, we are living at the early beginnings of human historyby Max RoserMarch 15, 2022The point of this text is not to predict how many people will ever live. What I learned from writing this post is that our future is potentially very, very big. This is what I try to convey here.If we keep each other safe – and protect ourselves from the risks that nature and we ourselves pose – we are only at the beginning of human history.
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The study’s authors suggest that this discrepancy may emerge fromdifferences in boys’ and girls’ experience: boys are more likely to play withspatially oriented toys and video games, they note, and may become morecomfortable making spatial gestures as a result. Another study, this oneconducted with four-year-olds, reported that children who were encouraged togesture got better at rotating mental objects, another task that draws heavily onspatial-thinking skills. Girls in this experiment were especially likely to benefitfrom being prompted to gesture.
The gender-based disparity of spatial thinking skills between boys and girls may result from the fact that at an early age boys are more likely to play with spatially oriented toys and video games. Encouraging girls to do more spatial gesturing at an earlier age can dramatically close this spatial thinking gap.
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People who are fluent in sign language, as Cooke is, have beenfound to have an enhanced ability to process visual and spatial information. Suchsuperior performance is exhibited by hearing people who know sign language, aswell as by the hearing impaired—suggesting that it is the repeated use of astructured system of meaning-bearing gestures that helps improve spatialthinking.
Evidence indicates that those who are have experience or fluency in sign language (both hearing and non-hearing) have increased visual-spatial intelligence and reasoning. Practice using gesturing directly improves spatial thinking.
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“penetrative thinking.” This is the capacity to visualize and reason about theinterior of a three-dimensional object from what can be seen on its surface—acritical skill in geology, and one with which many students struggle.
Penetrative thinking is the ability to abstractly consider and internally visualize or theorize about the inside of a three dimensional object based on what can be seen on its surface.
Penetrative thinking can be useful in areas like geology and anatomy.
Improvements in penetrative thinking can be exercised, encouraged, and improved by using gestures.
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Research demonstrates that gesture can enhance our memory by reinforcing thespoken word with visual and motor cues.
Research shows that gesture can impact our memories by helping to associate speech with visual cues.
References for this?
Link this to the idea that our visual memories are much stronger than our verbal ones.
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Researchers who study embodiedcognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and conveytheir thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of the hands and therest of the body. Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; theycarry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch.
Embodied cognition is a theory in psychology that a the mind is shaped by entire body of an organism. The mind is not only attached to the body, but the body influences the mind. Movement of the body doesn't just amplify one's spoke language, for humans, but it helps to create cognitive and communicative functions that language cannot, and these extend not only to viewers, but the communicator themself.
Tags
- anatomy
- spatial relationships
- pedagogy
- visualizations
- visual memory
- embodied cognition
- gender disparities
- spatial thinking
- symbolic gestures
- penetrative thinking
- gestures
- pedagogical devices
- thinking
- geology
- networked thinking
- associative memory
- psychology
- visual thinking
- spatial fluency
- child development
- gender bias
- spatialization
- communication
- sign language
Annotators
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www.eff.org www.eff.org
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Also like most people, we are not experts on military strategy or international diplomacy.
Interesting question: should non-experts debate a topic they care about?
Pros: Thinking more and consuming less, valuing the topic by talking about it, maybe morals are personal and can be debated by everyone? Cons: Easy to overstate confidence and be misinformed, supporting existing views may be more useful overall.
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Local file Local file
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“Noteson paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporaryphysics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make itpossible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbookof neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions inthis book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internalprocesses are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinelyconcerned with what enables human beings to perform the
spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.)
Does Neil Levy go into anything on orality with respect to this topic? Check: Levy, Neil. 2011. “Neuroethics and the Extended Mind.” In Judy Illes and B. J. Sahakian (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, 285–94, Oxford University Press
Link this to P.M. Forni's question about how I think about mathematics and my answer relating to scaffolding or the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Link this to the 9/8 zettel quote from Luhmann about writing being thinking.
Compare the ideas of visual thinking (visualizations) and a visualization of one's thinking being instantiated in writing along with the Feynman quote about the writing being the thinking. What ways are they similar or different? Is there a gradation in which one subsumes the other?
What does Annie Murphy Paul have to say on this topic in The Extended Mind?
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RichardFeynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted tointerview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said howdelighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’sthinking.”“No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinkingprocess. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on thepaper.”“Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but therecord of it is still here.”“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work onpaper, and this is the paper.”[33]
Genius: The Life And Science of Richard Feynman,” James Gleick, Pantheon Books, 1992 (see pg. 409).
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The educational psychologist Kirsti Lonka compared the readingapproach of unusually successful doctoral candidates and studentswith those who were much less successful. One difference stood outas critical: The ability to think beyond the given frames of a text(Lonka 2003, 155f).
In comparison to less successful students unusually successful doctoral students have the ability to think beyond the frames of a given text.
Kirsti Lonka 2003, 155f
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- Feb 2022
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www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d9aeT3RsbZ95cHgHw/meaning-of-words-an-exercise-for-active-thinking
Active thinking for building mental models can be a good thing.
Sadly this article seems to do a lot of faffing about. Not sure what I'm really supposed to take from it....
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Learnings: - It's easy to assume people in the past didn't care or were stupid. But people do things for a reason. Not understanding the reason for how things are is a missed learning opportunity, and very likely leads to unintended consequences. - Similar to having a valid strong opinion, one must understand why things are as they are before changing them (except if the goal is only signaling).
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Something about Scrivener elicits a lot of strong feelings from people who have used it, both positive and negative. It has a growing community of writers who swear by it, and a parallel community that is tired of hearing all the Scrivener-heads raving about their magic tool.
Scrivener and its community are an example of a tool for thought being thought of as a magical tool potentially without people thinking about what the tool is doing that makes things so dramatically different.
This article is written in 2017 just before the expansion of the zettelkasten craze in various social media spaces.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“Good manners can replace intellect by providing a set of memorized responses to almost every situation in life,” he wrote. “Memorized responses eliminate the need for thought. Thought is not a very worthwhile pastime anyway. Thinking allows the brain, an inert and mushy organ, to exert unfair domination over more sturdy and active body parts.”
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Local file Local file
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Conversely, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage bydeliberately keeping unanswered questions in our mind. We canruminate about them, even when we do something that has nothingto do with work and ideally does not require our full attention. Lettingthoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains theopportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisinglyproductive way. While we have a walk or a shower or clean thehouse, the brain cannot help but play around with the last unsolvedproblem it came across. And that is why we so often find the answerto a question in rather casual situations.
One can use the Zeigarnik effect to their advantage by keeping specific unanswered questions in their mind so that it can use the diffuse thinking effect to solve them while doing other activities like walking, doing the dishes, etc.
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Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existingpreconception, which then can be transformed during further inquiresand can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically,that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle
(Gadamer 2004).
All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.
Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."
While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Glenn Youngkin, the newly elected governor of Virginia, created a tip line that parents can use to report teachers whose classes cover “inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory.”
Critical thinking can provoke people into "divisive" considerations. Such a tip line makes it pretty easy to disrupt any attempt to 'teach kids to think [critically]'
Just one or two such efforts aren't too worrisome, but this might portend a broad change in the mission of education, from humanistic flourishing to the production of a compliant populace.
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yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com
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Jetelina, K. (2022, January 13). State of Affairs: Pediatrics and Omicron [Substack newsletter]. Your Local Epidemiologist. https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-pediatrics-and-omicron
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every.to every.to
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I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to know that there are certain activities that help create that space, and it’s been widely commented upon. Doing the dishes, walking the dog, cleaning the house – you need to be doing something.For me, pruning trees in our olive grove is perfect. It takes a little bit of attention, but not that much attention.
This is related to the idea of diffuse thinking caused by taking breaks or doing things that don't require extreme concentration. Flaneuring... walking, etc.
You want an activity that requires a little bit of attention but not too much attention. Doing dishes, walking, errands, etc. are good examples.
Relate this to the
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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It should be recognized that these basic note types are very different than the digital garden framing of 📤 (seedbox), 🌱 (seedling), 🪴 (sapling), 🌲 (evergreen), etc. which are another measure of the growth and expansion of not just one particular idea but potentially multiple ideas over time. These are a project management sort of tool for focusing on the growth of ideas. Within some tools, one might also use graph views and interconnectedness as means of charting this same sort of growth.
Sönke Ahrens' framing of fleeting note, literature note, and permanent note are a value assignation to the types of each of these notes with respect to generating new ideas and writing.
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github.com github.com
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https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis
Analyse the structure of your Obsidian graph using various analysis techniques
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www.obsidianroundup.org www.obsidianroundup.org
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As much as I automate things, though,none of my thinking is done by a tool.Even with plugins like Graph Analysis, I never feel like I'm being presented with emergent connections — tho this is what the plugin is intended for, and I believe it works for other people.
At what point could digital tools be said to be thinking? Do they need to be generative? It certainly needs to be on the other side of serendipitously juxtaposing two interesting ideas. One can juxtapose millions of ideas, it's the selection of a tiny subset of these as "better" or more interesting than the others and then building off of that that constitutes this sort of generative thought.
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- Jan 2022
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words.jamoe.org words.jamoe.org
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We might stumble across the above unanswered HQ&A note. Giving us a starting point can use it as a springboard to make the research and writing process faster. That's all part of achieving more with less by using yesterday's momentum.
Remembering and being able to more quickly recall prior contexts allows our thinking to build momentum.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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I could quote Luhmann on this as well, who thought that "without writing one cannot think," But there is nothing peculiarly "Luhmannian" about this idea. Isaac Asimov is said to have said "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers." And, to give one other example, E. B. White (of "Strunk and White" fame) claimed that "writing is one way to go about thinking." In other words, writing is thinking. And since I do almost all my significant writing in ConnectedText these days, it might be called my "writing environment."
Various quotes along the lines of "writing is thinking".
What is the equivalent in oral societies? Memory is thinking?
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markmcelroy.com markmcelroy.com
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“How might gay people who are seeking spiritual support, instead of rushing toward new opportunities and avoiding fights, be better served by disrupting the groups they’re already in?”
Found Reflections
- Like #Lit/poetry/found, this is #my/thinking/reflection/found
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uni-bielefeld.de uni-bielefeld.de
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in Luhmann’s mind theprocess of writing things down enables disciplined thinking in the first place: “Underlying the filing tech-nique is the experience that without writing, there is no thinking.”22
- Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8g (my translation).
The act of taking notes helps to focus the mind and one's concentration. This facilitates better and deeper thinking. While he erases oral cultures and those who used mnemonic techniques, Niklas Luhmann said, "without writing, there is no thinking."
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libguides.norquest.ca libguides.norquest.ca
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Fulton-Lyne, L. (n.d.). Research Guides: Misinformation: Misinformation Course. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://libguides.norquest.ca/fakenews/course
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Here, the card index func-tions as a ‘thinking machine’,67 and becomes the best communication partner for learned men.68
From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.
Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?
How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?
From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?
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drive.google.com drive.google.com
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An incredibly short, but dense essay on annotating books, but one which doesn't go into the same sort of detail as he gets in his book length treatment in How to Read a Book.
Missing here is the social aspect of annotating a book. In fact, he actively recommends against loaning one's annotated books for fear of losing the details and value in them.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Tvjf0buc8
graph thinking
- intuitive
- speed, agility
- adaptability
; graph thinking : focuses on relationships to turn data into information and uses patterns to find meaning
property graph data model
- relationships (connectors with verbs which can have properties)
- nodes (have names and can have properties)
Examples:
- Purchase recommendations for products in real time
- Fraud detection
Use for dependency analysis
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mitsloan.mit.edu mitsloan.mit.edu
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Study: Digital literacy doesn’t stop the spread of misinformation. (n.d.). MIT Sloan. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-digital-literacy-doesnt-stop-spread-misinformation
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www.noemamag.com www.noemamag.com
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In ancient Greek, noēma means “thinking” or the “object of thought.” And that is our intention: to delve deeply into the critical issues transforming the world today, at length and with historical context, in order to illuminate new pathways of thought in a way not possible through the immediacy of daily media.
What a great title for an online publication.
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Annotators
URL
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- Dec 2021
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Santos, H. C., Meyer, M., & Chabris, C. (2021). Reports of the Death of Expertise May Be Exaggerated: Limits on Knowledge Resistance in Health and Medicine. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6wy53
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theconversation.com theconversation.com
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Schmid, P., & Lewandowsky, S. (n.d.). Tackling COVID disinformation with empathy and conversation. The Conversation. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from http://theconversation.com/tackling-covid-disinformation-with-empathy-and-conversation-173013
Tags
- scientific knowledge
- science
- conspiracy theory
- exposure
- anti-vaccine
- social media
- risk
- COVID denial
- conversation
- critical thinking
- Germany
- vaccine
- COVID-19
- far-right
- empathy
- lang:en
- motivational interviewing
- social distancing
- infodemic
- compliance
- misinformation
- is:webpage
- disinformation
- communication
- research
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onlinelibrary.wiley.com onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580
Tags
- information processing
- representational scheme
- memory
- representational language
- generalizability
- causal reasoning
- unfamiliar circumstance
- lang:en
- human thought
- dual system of thinking
- knowledge
- pattern recognition
- is:article
- cognitive science
- sophisticated associative model
- predictability
Annotators
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- Nov 2021
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miro.com miro.com
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A Theory of Change and Systems Thinking
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www.cold-takes.com www.cold-takes.com
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Karnofsky suggests that the cost/benefit ratio of how we typically think of reading may not be as simple as we intuitively expect i.e. we think that 'more time' = 'more understanding'.
If you're simply reading to inform yourself about a topic, it may be worth reading a couple of book reviews, and listening to an interview or two, rather than invest the significant amount of time necessary to really engage with the book.
A few hours of skimming and reviews/interviews may get you to 25% understanding and retention, which in many cases may be more than enough for your needs of being basically informed on the topic. Compared to the 50 - 100 hours necessary for a deep, analytical engagement with the text, that would only get you to 50% understanding and retention.
That being said, if your goal is to develop expertise, both Karnofsky and Adler ('How to read a book') suggest that you need a deep engagement with multiple texts.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics.
The inability to think holistically is the problem.
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unix.stackexchange.com unix.stackexchange.com
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Okay thank you. I'll need to do some thinking then on how to apply that to things like git config --global core.editor
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- Oct 2021
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www.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org
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Lagnado, D. A. (2022). Explaining the evidence: How the mind investigates the world. Cambridge University Press.
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pigontracks.substack.com pigontracks.substack.com
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Teach pluralism before practice. For me, the foundation of systems work is that there is no one right way to respond to complexity.
.systems thinking
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bildung.royscholten.nl bildung.royscholten.nl
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What I'm interested in is doing this with visual artefacts as source material. What does visual pkm look like? Journaling, scrapbooking, collecting and the like. The most obvious tool is the sketchbook. How does a sketchbook work?
It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.
The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.
For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw
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www.cbc.ca www.cbc.ca
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Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place
“Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”
The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).
The Design Problem
Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.
(Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)
The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.
- Figure 1: The Design Problem
- Figure 2: A Country
- Figure 3: The World
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Education and job hiring should be integrated.
Systemic Problems
The problem is systemic. How do you deal with the problem when the system is off the table when it comes to the design problem?
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Annotators
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karenmcgrane.com karenmcgrane.com
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COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
Adaptive Content
COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems.
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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O’Brien, T. C., Palmer, R., & Albarracin, D. (2021). Misplaced trust: When trust in science fosters belief in pseudoscience and the benefits of critical evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 96, 104184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104184
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www.climatechangecommunication.org www.climatechangecommunication.org
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The Conspiracy Theory Handbook | Center For Climate Change Communication. (n.d.). Retrieved March 3, 2021, from https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/conspiracy-theory-handbook/
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- Sep 2021
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Motz, B., Fyfe, E., & Guba, T. P. (2021). Learning to Call Bullsh*t via Induction: Categorization Training Improves Critical Thinking Performance. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/65qfj
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/brain-mind-cognition.html
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Joel Chan</span> in on Twitter: "@RoamBookClub next book? Extended Mind draws on distributed cognition, which is a powerful theoretical perspective for understanding #toolsforthought and #BASB" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>09/14/2021 10:01:01</time>)</cite></small>
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Our efforts at education and training, as well as management and leadership, are aimed principally at promoting brain-bound thinking.
In many areas of human life including education and business, we limit ourselves too heavily by too exclusively promoting and preferring brain-bound thinking. If we could begin to re-center our external thinking as many oral and indigenous cultures have, we might be able to go further and farther.
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One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.
Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.
How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?
Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?
At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?
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Turning a mental representation into shapes and lines on a page helped them to elucidate more fully what they already knew while revealing with ruthless rigor what they did not yet comprehend.
The modality shift of putting ideas onto a page like this is similar to the idea behind the Feynman technique.
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Moving mental contents out of our heads and onto the space of a sketch pad or whiteboard allows us to inspect it with our senses, a cognitive bonus that the psychologist Daniel Reisberg calls “the detachment gain.”
Moving ideas from our heads into the real world, whether written or potentially using other modalities, can provide a detachment gain, by which we're able to extend those ideas by drawing, sketching, or otherwise using them.
How might we use the idea of detachment gain to better effect in our pedagogy? I've heard anecdotal evidence of the benefit of modality shifts in many spaces including creating sketchnotes.
While some sketchnotes don't make sense to those who weren't present for the original talk, perhaps they're incredibly useful methods for those who are doing the modality shifts from hearing/seeing into writing/drawing.
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Continual engagement with the mental rigors of modern life coincided in many parts of the world with improving nutrition, rising living conditions and reduced exposure to pathogens. These factors produced a century-long climb in average I.Q. scores — a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, the political philosopher who identified it.
The Flynn effect is the substantial and sustained increase in intelligence test scores over most of the twentieth century.
Research seems to indicate that the effect is environmentally caused: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674
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The result has not been a gratifying bulking up of our neural “muscle.” On the contrary, all the mental effort we’ve mustered over the past year has left many of us feeling depleted and distracted, unequal to the tasks that never stop arriving in our inboxes. When the work we’re putting in doesn’t produce the advertised rewards, we’re inclined to find fault with ourselves. Maybe we’re insufficiently gritty; maybe, we think, we’re just not smart enough. But this interpretation is incorrect.
We've been gaslighting ourselves about how our brains work. It's not a muscle, having "grit", and many of our attempts at productivity are completely wrong.
Tags
- neuroscience
- outgroup
- thinking out loud
- modality shifts
- read
- group cohesion
- models
- sketchnotes
- Feynman Technique
- Flynn effect
- social thinking
- detachment gain
- in-group
- George Orwell
- environment
- gaslighting
- personbyte
- tools for thought
- thinking
- nature vs. nurture
- groupthink
- orality
- extended mind
- drawing
- IQ
- psychology
- Hypothes.is
- visual thinking
- argumentative theory of reasoning
- cognitive bias
- pedagogy
Annotators
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www.basicbooks.com www.basicbooks.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Annie Murphy Paul</span> in Opinion | How to Think Outside Your Brain - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>09/13/2021 19:58:53</time>)</cite></small>
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/
A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.
I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.
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For better or worse, our brains seem activated by conflict.
How might we use the fact that are brains are activated by conflict to potentially make the social media space better (healthier)?
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While the material about just how darn embodied our brains are might have been something of a bummer for someone as uncomfortable being bodied as I am, the material about how much our brains like narratives was just what I wanted to read.
How might we compare/contrast the ideas behind this with Alex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories?
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How to Use These Ideas
I love that he's not only externalized his thoughts from the book as annotations/notes and then synthesized them into a longer essay, but he's further expanded and externalized them by thinking about how to put them to use!
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To use your brain well, get out of your brain. Paul calls this offloading. To think well, she says, “we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world” (243).
This is certainly what is happening in the commonplace book tradition and even more explicitly in the zettelkasten tradition.
What other methods of offloading exist besides writing and speaking? Hand gestures? Dance? What hidden modalities of offloading might indigenous societies use that Western culture might not be cognizant of?
Often journaling or writing in a diary is a often a means of offloading the psychological cruft of one's day to be able to start afresh.
This is some of the philosophy behind creating so-called "morning pages".
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Social learning does not mean learning without tension or argument. In “Thinking with Peers”, Paul shows that argument and conflict are useful ways to focus attention and strengthen ideas, so long as the arguing is done with a certain amount of openness to new ideas. She approvingly quotes Stanford Business School professor Robert Sutton’s formula for productive conflict: “People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” The brain, it seems, likes conflict. Or, at least, conflict helps strengthen attention.
I wonder how this may be leveraged with those who are using Hypothes.is for conversations in the margins in classrooms?
cc: @remikalir, @jeremydean, @nateangell
Could teachers specifically sow contention into their conversations? Cross reference the idea of a devil's advocate.
I love the aphorism:
“People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” — Robert Sutton, Stanford Buisness School professor's formula for productive conflict
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I wondered about something outside the scope of her book, which is neurodivergence. The Embodied Mind looks at a wide range of studies that all seem to search for the qualities, behaviors, and tendencies of a typical mind. The typical mind, like the typical body, is a statistical figment, an abstraction from tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of individual minds and bodies, each atypical in its own way. What happens, for instance, to the extended mind of someone with significant physical limitations? (Stephen Hawking seems to have extended his mind pretty well.) A fascinating sequel to Paul’s book might be something along the lines of Oliver Sacks’s writings, a study of neurodivergence, atypicality, and what they can tell us about how we live, learn, and work. As fascinating as the similarities between brains are the differences.
Looking at neurodivergence within this framing can be an important extension.
We're definitely not all the same and some of the differences and research on them can potentially help us all.
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Small motions are so important that Paul devotes an entire chapter to the value of gestures. “Gestures,” she says, “don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch” (69). Gestures strengthen our ability to give form to thoughts, they increase the effectiveness of communication, they help groups understand each other, they create and direct attention.
This likely underlies some of the thoughts I've had about dance and movement and which are touched on by indigenous cultures as documented in Lynne Kelly's work.
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Brains don’t think as well in bodies sitting still as they do in bodies performing some sort of low-intensity motion. We know this intuitively — think of how many people, for instance, say they get their best ideas while walking — and yet so many classrooms and workplaces are designed to inihibit movement, designed on the premise that people think best while sitting still. Low-intensity movement improves attention and focus (as anybody who has used fidget toys during meetings knows), and yet we not only don’t design for it, we punish it. “Parents and teachers often believe they have to get kids to stop moving around before they can focus and get down to work,” Paul writes. But “a more constructive approach would be to allow kids to move around so that they can focus” (49).
Another example of encouraging walking to think
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Cathie LeBlanc</span> in Cathie LeBlanc on Twitter: "@ChrisAldrich @AndySylvester99 @finiteeyes wrote a summary of a new book you might be interested in: https://t.co/Eor8pRBgkz" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>09/13/2021 08:53:46</time>)</cite></small>
I'd also heard about this book last week via Joel Chan's tweet: https://twitter.com/JoelChan86/status/1433798115807711237
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>@RoamBookClub next book? Extended Mind draws on distributed cognition, which is a powerful theoretical perspective for understanding #toolsforthought and #BASB https://t.co/CJixnXajw3
— Joel Chan is synthesizing knowledge (@JoelChan86) September 3, 2021
Tags
- read
- morning pages
- mnemonic pedagogy
- learning
- Annie Murphy Paul
- neurodivergence
- speaking
- zettelkasten
- thinking spaces
- productive conflict
- extended mind
- offloading
- commonplace books
- walking
- open questions
- flâneur
- digital pedagogy
- annotations
- dance
- mnemotechniques
- pedagogy
- neuroscience
- nature
- indigenous cultures
- devil's advocate
- memory
- journaling
- conflict
- writing
- social media
- gestures
- tools for thought
- thinking
- storytelling
- movement
- psychology
- Lynne Kelly
- AnnoConvo
- thinking with peers
- history
- Hypothes.is
Annotators
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refind.com refind.com
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We hear a lot about how amazing the brain is, but the lesser-known scientific story from the past 20 years is how much researchers have learned about the brain’s limits. These limits are not a matter of individual differences in intelligence; they are common to all our brains. They’re a product of the brain’s status as a biological organ, one that evolved to do things that are very different from what we ask of it in our complex, knowledge-centric modern world.Drawing on the resources of the extended mind allows the brain to “overachieve,” to do more than would be possible on its own. In fact, we can think of experts among us as those people who have mastered the art of thinking outside the brain. Research shows that top performers don’t do it all in their heads; they achieve their superior results by integrating internal and external resources.When we intentionally cultivate the capacity to think outside the brain, a new world of possibility opens up; we gain access to reserves of intuition, memory, attention, and motivation that are not available to the naked brain. In order to think the intelligent, informed, original thoughts we’re capable of, we can’t rely on the brain alone. We have to think outside the brain.
This vindicates the idea of [[Zettelkasten]], if I need to be an expert, I need to think outside the brain, I really cried when I read that line, I mean even I can feel like after externalizing my thinking, I can connect seemingly different concepts with one another.
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refind.com refind.com
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We in the West are used to thinking of the mind and the body as separate. But a burgeoning field called “embodied cognition” is demonstrating that thinking is actually a full-body experience. This is true in a few different ways.First, the internal sensations of the body—our “gut feelings”—guide our perceptions and our reactions. When we learn to tune in to these inner signals, we can use them to make sounder decisions, and even to connect more effectively with other people.Second, the movements our bodies make affect the way we think. We’ve come to believe that serious thinking entails sitting still, but research shows that moving—walking, exercising, acting things out—enhances our mental processes in ways that don’t happen when we’re sitting down.Third, a specific kind of movement—the gestures we make with our hands—extends our thinking by capturing and expressing concepts that we can’t yet put into words. Research shows that our most advanced, most cutting-edge ideas often show up first in the motions of our hands—motions that we then use to inform and construct a verbal account of what we’re thinking.It’s common in our culture to compare the brain to a computer, but this is a deeply flawed analogy. A laptop operates the same whether it is open on a desk in an office or on a bench in a park. But human brains aren’t like that—they are exquisitely sensitive to context. One of the most fertile and fruitful places to “think with” is nature. That’s because, over eons of evolution, our brains were tuned to the kind of sensory information available in the natural world. Spending time in a hard-edged, highly designed, built environment drains our mental resources, while spending time in nature actually replenishes them. We can also deliberately arrange the interior spaces we occupy in ways that extend our thinking. Research shows that it’s especially important that we feel a sense of control and ownership over the space in which we do our learning or working. It’s also important to incorporate into these spaces cues of identity—that is, objects or symbols of who you are, what you’re doing in that space—and also cues of belonging—objects or symbols that represent your membership in a group that’s meaningful to you.
I feel like maybe I should start thinking in the nature and I also feel like I need to design my environment in such a way that it facilitates thinking
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More than 20 years ago, two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers wrote a journal article that opened with a question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Now, that question would seem to have an obvious answer, right? The mind stops at the head. It’s contained within the skull. But Clark and Chalmers maintained that this assumption—as common as it is—is wrong. The mind, they said, takes elements from outside the head and draws them into the thinking process. These mental “extensions” allow us to think in ways our brains couldn’t manage on their own. They called this phenomenon “the extended mind.”
This is certainly true, a lot of things that we see and come across affect our thinking and is also highlights that some seemingly obvious answers are wrong when seen in a superficial manner, every question needs to be thought deeply.
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lu.ma lu.ma
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https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou
Boris Mann has created a lu.ma community for Tools for Thought!
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URL
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Inasaridze, K. (2021). Cognitive restructuring. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/82pwz
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scripting.com scripting.com
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The press is full of reports that President Biden screwed up the pullout from Afghanistan. But none of the people saying he did it wrong say what he should have done instead.
I've noticed this phenomenon as well. When criticizing public policy, writers should be required to write down their alternate plans and then go at least one or two levels deep as to the knock on effects that their decisions are likely to have.
It's easy to criticize, but it's much harder to do the actual work and thinking to actually do something else.
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fs.blog fs.blog
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“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” —Fran Lebowitz
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- Aug 2021
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www.learningscientists.org www.learningscientists.org
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GUEST POST: HOT or NOT – How to Develop Critical Thinking.
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Analytical thinking takes something apart, system thinking understands what the thing is a part of.Analytical Thinking identifies the properties and behaviors of the parts taken separately, System Thinking understands the behavior of the bigger whole which the thing is a part of.Analytical Thinking aggregates the understanding of the parts into an understanding of the whole, System Thinking understands the role or function of the thing as a part of the whole.
a) Bu sistemin önemli parçaları nelerdir?
b) Bu parçaları birbirine bağlayan ve birbirine uyumunu sağlayan başlıca süreçler nelerdir?
c) Sistemin gerçekleştirmek istediği amaçlar nelerdir?
Sistem düşüncesi neyin parçası olduğu ile sorgular
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Analytical thinking helps us understand how stuff works, system thinking helps us understand why stuff works the way it does.
Analitik düşünce, sistemin yapısı ile ilgilenip nesnelerin veya olayların nasıl oluştuğunu tanımlamaya çalışırken, Sentez düşüncesi sistemin fonksiyonuna odaklanıp nesnelerin veya olayların niçin meydana geldiğini anlamaya çalışmaktadır.
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Analytical Thinking: breaking things apart in order to understand how stuff works by seeing the whole as a sum of its parts.
Analitik düşünme yöntemi, bütünü parçalarıyla görerek nasıl çalıştığını anlama çabası.
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edwardbetts.com edwardbetts.com
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Now, whenever I have a thought worth capturing, I write it on an index card in either marker pen or biro (depending on the length of the thought), and place in the relevant box. I use index cards for books, blogs, conversations I overhear at the club, memories, etc. They’re in my coat pocket when I fetch the kids from school. I leave them handy in the locker at the swimming pool (where I do much of my best thinking). And I run with them. Sound weird? Well, I’m in good company. Ryan Holiday[116], Anne Lamott[117], Robert Greene[118], Oliver Burkeman[119], Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Nabokov[120] and Ludwig Wittgenstein[121] all use (d) the humble index card to catalogue and organise their thoughts. If you’re serious about embarking on this digital journey, buy a hundred-pack of 127 x 76mm ruled index cards for less than a pound, rescue a shoebox from the attic and stick a few marker-penned notecards on their end to act as dividers. Write a “My Digital Box” label on the top of the shoebox, and you’re off.
apparently a quote from Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money by David Sawyer FCIPR.
Notes about users of index card based commonplace books.
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Local file Local file
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For example, his erasable writing tablet is referenced inW. Blunt, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 70.
What form did Carl Linnaeus' erasable writing tablet take?
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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Effron, D. A., & Raj, M. (2020). Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share. Psychological Science, 31(1), 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619887896
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- Jul 2021
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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u/MushroomPuddle17 days agoGetting started with a commonplace notebook as someone who isn't creative? .t3_ojhwrb ._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; } Hello everyone!I've known about commonplace books for years and always feel a surge of inspiration when I see them but I'm really not creative. I don't know what I'd ever write in one? I don't ever really have any grand ideas or plans. I don't seem to have conversations or read things that necessarily inspire me. I just live a very regular life where nothing really sticks out to me as important. I've tried bullet journals before and had the same issue.Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd really appreciate it.
I'm not sure what you mean by your use of the word "creative". I'm worried that you've seen too many photos of decorative and frilly commonplace books on Instagram and Pinterest. I tend to call most of those "productivity porn" as their users spend hours decorating and not enough collecting and expanding their thoughts, which is really their primary use and value. Usually whatever time they think they're "saving" in having a cpb, they're wasting in decorating it. (Though if decorating is your thing, then have at it...) My commonplace is a (boring to others) location of mostly walls of text. It is chock full of creative ideas, thoughts, and questions though. If you're having trouble with a place to start, try creating a (free) Hypothes.is account and highlighting/annotating everything you read online. (Here's what mine looks like: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, you'll notice that it could be considered a form of searchable digital commonplace book all by itself.) Then once a day/week/month, take the best of the quotes, ideas, highlights, and your notes, replies, questions and put them into your physical or digital commonplace. Build on them, cross link them, expand on them over time. Do some research to start answering any of the questions you came up with. By starting with annotating things you're personally interested in, you'll soon have a collection of things that become highly valuable and useful to you. After a few weeks you'll start seeing something and likely see a change in the way you're reading, writing, and even thinking.
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browninterviews.org browninterviews.org
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The point of Zettelkasten is to digest each thing you read well so you don’t need to go back to look at it again.
I don't agree with this viewpoint. Just like Heraclitus' river, the information in an article or book may not change, but there is a contextual change in the reader, in their thinking, their circumstances, and their time that may give them a different reading or perspective of the same material at later dates.
Of course not all material is actually worth reading more than once either. But for some material a second or third reading may help them create new ideas and new links to prior ideas.
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bzawilski.medium.com bzawilski.medium.com
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the idea is to render very clear the connections between ideas with as little friction as possible.
The goal of note taking and tools for it is to make capturing ideas and creating connections between them as easy and friction free as possible. This allows note taking come closer to actual thinking with better long term retention.
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Carr’s argument is something I resisted for a long time, but his main assertion — that the tools we use to think shape how we think — is hard to ignore.
While this may be Nicholas Carr's statement, it's actually pre-dated significantly by Marshall McLuhann
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hibaiunzueta.com hibaiunzueta.com
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I'm currently building Lotu, a tool for intertwingled thinking. It's a space where you store your ideas as building blocks and then you compose them in arbitrary trails. I'd love to collaborate with adjacent projects.
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elemental.medium.com elemental.medium.com
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I suspect there's a link here to the broader idea of diffuse thinking...
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Cathie </span> in Why Your Brain Needs Idle Time. – My Notes (<time class='dt-published'>07/22/2021 13:32:03</time>)</cite></small>
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https://elemental.medium.com/why-your-brain-needs-idle-time-e5d90b0ef1df
This was exactly what I expected it would be. Down time for diffuse thinking...
Wish they'd included links to studies.
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www.psypost.org www.psypost.org
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New study indicates conspiracy theory believers have less developed critical thinking abilities. (n.d.). Retrieved July 12, 2021, from https://www.psypost.org/2021/07/new-study-indicates-conspiracy-theory-believers-have-less-developed-critical-thinking-ability-61347
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Erlich, A., Garner, C., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). Does Analytic Thinking Insulate Against Pro-Kremlin Disinformation? Evidence from Ukraine [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4yrdj
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brasil.elpais.com brasil.elpais.com
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www.sciencedaily.com www.sciencedaily.com
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Linnaeus had to manage a conflict between the need to bring information into a fixed order for purposes of later retrieval, and the need to permanently integrate new information into that order, says Mueller-Wille. “His solution to this dilemma was to keep information on particular subjects on separate sheets, which could be complemented and reshuffled,” he says.
Carl Linnaeus created a method whereby he kept information on separate sheets of paper which could be reshuffled.
In a commonplace-centric culture, this would have been a fascinating innovation.
Did the cost of paper (velum) trigger part of the innovation to smaller pieces?
Did the de-linearization of data imposed by codices (and previously parchment) open up the way people wrote and thought? Being able to lay out and reorder pages made a more 3 dimensional world. Would have potentially made the world more network-like?
cross-reference McLuhan's idea about our tools shaping us.
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blog.ayjay.org blog.ayjay.org
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Blogging, I want to argue, is a seasoned technology that is ripe for lateral thinking.
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I think it was also Robin Sloan who recently directed my attention to this Wikipedia page on the late Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi, who promoted what he called “Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology”: finding new and unexpected uses for technologies that have been around for a while and therefore (a) have clear patterns of use that you can rely on even when deviating from them, and (b) have decreased in price.
Something interesting about this that I may want to revisit.
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But you know what? Screw it. I need to take my time and develop the necessary ideas properly. If these thoughts never develop in such a way that I can turn them into a book, so be it. If they do so develop and nobody wants to publish it, so be it. (I’ll just make various digital versions.) The point, at this stage in my career, after fifteen published books, is not the publication, it’s the thinking. So let the thinking, in public, commence.
Some interesting thoughts about thinking and writing in public.
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- Jun 2021
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www.open.edu www.open.edu
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The essence of systems thinking and practice is in ‘seeing’ the world in a particular way, because how you ‘see’ things affects the way you approach situations or undertake specific tasks. And how you ‘see’ things is influenced heavily by the culture of the society in which you live and work and by your education and training.
The vedic term is that we all create our own Brahmand ourselves - how we see the world. On a smaller scale how we see the problem. Very often how we see or define the problem will not only impact how we find solutions but also the solution that we find..
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www.mcgill.ca www.mcgill.ca
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Office for Science and Society. “Don’t Fall for the ‘VAERS Scare’ Tactic.” Accessed June 21, 2021. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking-health/dont-fall-vaers-scare-tactic.
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graphql-ruby.org graphql-ruby.org
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However, this request-by-request mindset doesn’t map well to GraphQL because there’s only one controller and the requests that come to it may be very different.
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This leads us to Markovits’s second critique of the aspirational view: The cycle that produces meritocratic inequality severely harms not only the middle class but the very elite who seem to benefit most from it.
What if we look at meritocracy from a game theoretic viewpoint?
Certainly there's an issue that there isn't a cap on meritocratic outputs, so if one wants more wealth, then one needs to "simply" work harder. As a result, in a "keeping up with the Jones'" society that (incorrectly) measures happiness in wealth, everyone is driven to work harder and faster for their piece of the pie.
(How might we create a sort of "set point" to limit the unbounded meritocratic cap? Might this create a happier set point/saddle point on the larger universal graph?)
This effect in combination with the general drive to have "power over" people instead of "power with", etc. in combination with racist policies can create some really horrific effects.
What other compounding effects might there be? This is definitely a larger complexity-based issue.
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We should think about the number of simultaneous connections (peak and average) and the message rate/payload size. I think, the threshold to start thinking about AnyCable (instead of just Action Cable) is somewhere between 500 and 1000 connections on average or 5k-10k during peak hours.
number of simultaneous connections (peak and average)
the message rate/payload size.
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paulgraham.com paulgraham.com
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When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr July/August 2008 in The Atlantic
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Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
This author bio had to have been modified after the publication of this article as The Shallows came out in 2010. I have to suspect that a lot of what appears here was early work and research that heavily influenced his subsequent book.
I remember discussing portions of it with P.M. Forni in preparation of his own book The Thinking Life.
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The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
But are Google's tools really making us more productive thinkers? One might argue that it's attempting to do all the work for us and take out the process of thought all together. We're just rats in a maze hitting a bar to get the food pellet.
What if the end is a picture of us as the people on the space ship at the end of WALL-E? What if it's keeping us from thinking?
What if it's making us more shallow thinkers rather than deep thinkers?
Cross reference P.M. Forni.
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“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
This is the problem however. We can't program humans out of the equation entirely, for what is the general enterprise meant for in the first place?
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Local file Local file
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The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting some-thing--anything--out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something--anything-as a first draft. With that, you have acf>ieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again-top to bottom. The chances are that about now you'll be see-ing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurt-ing, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a . certain problem. Without the drafted version-if it did not exist-you obvi-ously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day-yes, while you sleep-but only if some sort of draft or earlier ver-sion already exists. Until it exists, writ-ing has not really begun."
Some solid advice not only for writing, but even thinking in general. Writing out your thoughts can help to sharpen and improve them.
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copaceticcomics.com copaceticcomics.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>juanjosefernandez</span> in 📚-reading (<time class='dt-published'>06/04/2021 16:32:12</time>)</cite></small>
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Local file Local file
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Though it is often assumedthat mnemonics were used to memorize speeches, the importance of memory to theinventionofspeech was readily apparent to ancient orators—thus the famous praise of memory as athesauruminventorum(Herennium3.16.28). As Cicero writes inDe Oratore, the orator must commit tomemory“the whole past with its storehouse of examples and precedents,”as well as a knowledgeof all laws general and civil, for without such memories, the orator is left speechless (1.17–18).Expanding on Cicero’s point, Quintilian claims that“it is the power of memory alone that bringsbefore us all the store of precedents, laws, rulings, sayings, and facts which the orator must possessin abundance . . . and hold ready for immediate use”(Institutio11.2.1). The art of memory was thusto be used to recollect not only pre-written orations but also knowledge from a variety of sources tobe called upon when constructing new texts, speakingex tempore, or responding to an interlocutor’sarguments.
Too often, this seems to me to be a missing piece that few talk about now. Those posting to the Art of Memory forum are usually talking about the need to memorize for memorization's sake. Rarely are they talking about or noticing the second or third level order changes as the result of an improved memory.
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- May 2021
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interpersonal.stackexchange.com interpersonal.stackexchange.com
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One way to look at your current situation is that you're not paying them enough to tell you the gory details, not that you're not knowledgeable enough.
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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Think of it as a spectrum. Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and tend for years.Gardening sits in the middle. It's the perfect balance of chaos and cultivation.
There's something here that's reminiscent of Craig Mod's essay Post Artifact Books and Publishing.
Reminder to self: revisit this idea.
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crookedtimber.org crookedtimber.org
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“Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”
A great quote and framing from Abigail Echo-Hawk.
This reliance on going to community elders (primarily because they have more knowledge and wisdom) is similar to designing for the commons and working backward. Elders in many indigenous cultures represent the the commons.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to innovate and explore the evolutionary space for better answers, but going slow and fixing things is far more likely to be helpful than moving fast and breaking things as has been the mode for the last fifteen years. Who's watching the long horizon in these scenarios?
This quote and set up deserves some additional thought into the ideas and power structures described by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture
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There’s a way of thinking about data – and about how we use the linked technologies to connect, communicate and organise – that grows out of the seven generations view KSR talks about in TMFTF. It’s something that serves us, and which never stops being of us. It’s not an asset so much as a gift, but not all gifts can be given or received by all people. Once you start thinking of it this way, you can never go back.
Not delineated directly here, but the idea of a seven generations view sounds intriguing.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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The scrapbooks reveal a critical and analytical way of thinking and emphasis on experimental evidence in physics, through which he became one of the early founders and advocates of modern scientific methodology. The more experience and experiments are accumulated during the exploration of nature, the more faltering its theories become. It is always good though not to abandon them instantly. For every hypothesis which used to be good at least serves the purpose of duly summarizing and keeping all phenomena until its own time. One should lay down the conflicting experience separately, until it has accumulated sufficiently to justify the efforts necessary to edifice a new theory. (Lichtenberg: scrapbook JII/1602)
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg used his notebooks as thinking tools with respect to scientific methodology.
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www.tandfonline.com www.tandfonline.com
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Tomljenovic, H., Bubic, A., & Erceg, N. (2020). It just doesn’t feel right – the relevance of emotions and intuition for parental vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccination uptake. Psychology & Health, 35(5), 538–554. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2019.1673894
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content.myemma.com content.myemma.com
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Just because there can be issues with CSS in HTML emails doesn’t mean you should abandon efforts to use it. It all comes down to determining which codes are absolutely needed and how to style them so they can be rendered by email platforms.
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- Apr 2021
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github.com github.com
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The main difference is in the flow of how messages are ultimately sent to devices for output. The standard library Logger logic converts the log entries to strings and then sends the string to the device to be written to a stream. Lumberjack, on the other hand, sends structured data in the form of a Lumberjack::LogEntry to the device and lets the device worry about how to format it. The reason for this flip is to better support structured data logging. Devices (even ones that write to streams) can format the entire payload including non-string objects and tags however they need to.
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www.aeseducation.com www.aeseducation.com
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The four C’s of 21st Century skills are: Critical thinking Creativity Collaboration Communication
Convenient to have these four share an initial. (My perception is that a tendency to emphasize this type of parallelism has been strengthening over the years. At least, I don't recall this practice being common in French when I grew up.)
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boardgamegeek.com boardgamegeek.com
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I tell her that it involves spatial awareness and planning ahead.
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boardgamegeek.com boardgamegeek.com
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Actually, I think your wife's point is quite astute. Once you become very familiar with this game, there is almost too much deep planning in the moves.
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- Mar 2021
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Visible spectrum wrapped to join blue and green in an additive mixture of cyan
the rainbow as a continuous (repeating) circle instead of semicircle
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www.jackfranklin.co.uk www.jackfranklin.co.uk
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Svelte is different in that by default most of your code is only going to run once; a console.log('foo') line in a component will only run when that component is first rendered.
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- difference
- unfortunate defaults
- important point
- Svelte vs. React
- reasonable defaults
- turning things around / doing it differently
- opinion
- trying to doing things the same way you did in a different library/framework (learning new way of thinking about something / overcoming habits/patterns/paradigms you are accustomed to)
- opinionated
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Mutually exclusive categories can be beneficial. If categories appear several places, it's called cross-listing or polyhierarchical. The hierarchy will lose its value if cross-listing appears too often. Cross-listing often appears when working with ambiguous categories that fits more than one place.
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Two of the predominant types of relationships in knowledge-representation systems are predication and the universally quantified conditional.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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The precise semantic interpretation of an atomic formula and an atomic sentence will vary from theory to theory.
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Finally, any approach to evidence-based man-agement should ensure that the practices suit theindustry and functional context. For example,professionals in a biotechnology company would beexpected to follow and use industry-appropriateevidence-based practices that are likely to bemore rigorous and extensive than those adopted bya fashion-clothing company. Such practices includeencouraging or even requiring their employees todo the following four things (seePfeffer & Sutton,2006): (1) demand evidence for statements thatseem implausible; (2) examine the logic or cause-and-effect reasoning between the evidence andthe statement; (3) as needed, encourage experi-mentation to test the confidence of data and val-idity of statements; and (4) continually repeat andbuild on the first three activities to create anevidence-based learning culture that stifles theproduction and spread of bullshit.
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Furthermore, to help encourage and value evi-dence over opinion, managers should be carefulwhom they consult. While they should seek sub-stantive debate about statements and supportingevidence, they should only involve well-informedand value-adding experts. Social media andcrowdsourcing initiatives regularly remind us thatthe wisdom of the crowd is not as judicious as wethink.
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Colleagues throughout the organization, andespecially those in administrative and leadershiproles, should also practice it so that evidence canguide key decisions. This is also true in the areas ofmarketing and sales, which thrive on the creationand circulation of bullshit.
Bill Hicks would have approved of this.
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Research byPennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler,and Fugelsang (2015)suggests that an organiza-tion’s capacity to produce and accept workplacebullshit decreases with the prevalence of andvalue placed on critical thinking in that organiza-tion. They outline how individuals have differentsensitivities to bullshit: Those who have the abilityto stop and think analytically about the substanceof statements are less receptive to bullshit, whilethose with lower cognitive skills and less insightare more receptive.
This is why workplaces must encourage and maintain critical thinking.
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What people think and state depends on how theythink. Thus, it is far more dangerous to assumepeople know what they are talking about than it isto assume they do not
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store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com
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"i dont use this specific thing so this whole pack is irrelevant to me"
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math.stackexchange.com math.stackexchange.com
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An equation is meant to be solved, that is, there are some unknowns. A formula is meant to be evaluated, that is, you replace all variables in it with values and get the value of the formula.
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Unrealistic optimism about future life events: A cautionary note. (n.d.). Retrieved March 4, 2021, from https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2010-22979-001.pdf?auth_token=a25fd4b7f008a50b15fd7b0f1fdb222fc38373f4
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