1,207 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2024
    1. the third pillar we call Insight

      for - third of four pillars of wellbeing - insight - a curiosity driven knowledge of the self - Youtube - Tukdam talk - An Overview Of CHM’s Work On “Well-Being And Tukdam” - Prof. Richard J. Davidson

      comment - this insight is specifically about the nature of self as a narrative construction imposed upon a constellation of changing thoughts and emotions - when we gain the insight that the solid-appearing self is constructed on emptiness, research shows that this insight sets the stage for wellbeing to emerge

  2. Nov 2024
    1. I'm reminded of poor online friend Jack Baty who can never seem to settle on a PKM approach, oscillating between 5 or so over the years, including publishing platforms/blogs. It's easy to reply "Don't! There's no greener grass on any side." But that also misses the point, I believe, when in the end one just wants to explore and tinker. And not get stuff done all the time. All that being said, I believe there's hope in simplicity of a Zettelkasten, but maybe that's not what is being searched for 😅

      via [[Christian Tietze]] at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/22076/#Comment_22076

      There's tremendous value in keeping a single zettelkasten store of knowledge. Spreading it out only dilutes things and can prevent building. Shiny object syndrome can be a problem as it's often splitting the stores of information and silo-ing them from each other. Unless the shiny object can do something radically different or has a dramatic affordance it's really only a distraction.

      But still, sometime the search for either simpler or better serves other needs...

    1. Dousa, Thomas M. “Facts and Frameworks in Paul Otlet’s and Julius Otto Kaiser’s Theories of Knowledge Organization.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 36, no. 2 (2010): 19–25. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.2010.1720360208.

    2. In the 1950s and 1960s, information retrieval (IR) theorists drew a distinction between“document retrieval systems” and “fact retrieval systems.” The former, were intendedto retrieve, in response to a user’s query, all documents that might contain informationpertinent to answering that query, while the latter were to lead the user directly tospecific pieces of information – facts – embedded within the documents being searchedthat would answer his or her question. The idea of information analysis clearlyprovided the theoretical impetus for fact retrieval (aka question-answering) systems
    1. How to Spot Emerging Note Clusters Without Alphanumeric Note Numbering? by [[Ton Zijlstra]] in Interdependent Thoughts

      I recall Bob Doto had a video at some point in which he used the local graph to show relationships to find bunches of notes for potentially writing pieces or articles as indicated in Tons' article.

      One of the biggest issues with digital note taking tools is that they don't make it easy to see and identify chains of notes which might make for articles, chapters, or books.

      Surely there must be some way to calculate neighborhoods of notes from a topological perspective? Perhaps if one imposed a measure on the space to create relative distances of notes?

  3. Oct 2024
    1. Is "Scoping the subject" a counter-Zettelkasten approach?

      Sounds like you're doing what Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren would call "inspectional reading" and outlining the space of your topic. This is both fine and expected. You have to start somewhere. You're scaffolding some basic information in a new space and that's worthwhile. You're learning the basics.

      Eventually you may come back and do a more analytical read and/or cross reference your first sources with other sources in a syntopical read. It's at these later two levels of reading where doing zettelkasten work is much more profitable, particularly for discerning differences, creating new insights, and expanding knowledge.

      If you want to think of it this way, what would a kindergartner's zettelkasten contain? a high school senior? a Ph.D. researcher? 30 year seasoned academic researcher? Are the levels of knowledge all the same? Is the kindergartner material really useful to the high school senior? Probably not at all, it's very basic. As a result, putting in hundreds of atomic notes as you're scaffolding your early learning can be counter-productive. Read some things, highlight them, annotate them. You'll have lots of fleeting notes, but most of them will seem stupidly basic after a month or two. What you really want as main notes are the truly interesting advanced stuff. When you're entering a new area, certainly index ideas, but don't stress about capturing absolutely everything until you have a better understanding of what's going on. Then bring your zettelkasten in to leverage yourself up to the next level.

      • Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/
      • Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.

      reply to u/jack_hanson_c at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g9dv9b/is_scoping_the_subject_a_counterzettelkasten/

    1. We observe significant declines in both website visits and question volumes at Stack Overflow, particularly around topics where ChatGPT excels. By contrast, activity in Reddit communities shows no evidence of decline, suggesting the importance of social fabric as a buffer against the community-degrading effects of LLMs.

      Conclusion: LLMs cover certain areas that were before solved by human brainpower on stack overflow, and that is measurable over a period of oct-2021 -> march 2023. Reddit does not show this decline and this is alledged due to social fabric on reddit.

      I want to know if it is possible to extract claims from this paper automatically in a way that it integrates certain relations in a knowledge graph, utilizing a system that improves itself.

    1. what really I was really interested in was the idea that Marx wasn't really Keen or was sort of hostile to the idea of equality which I'm guessing will come as a surprise to many people

      for - interesting perspective - Karl Marx - He wasn't principally interested in equality - book - Capitalism: the word and the thing - perspectival knowledge of - Michael Sonenscher - misunderstanding - modern capitalists - misunderstand Karl Marx's work - Michael Sonenscher - Karl Marx and Capitalism - Maximizing each individual's freedom while not trampling on the same aspiration of other individuals within a society

      Interesting perspective - Karl Marx wasn't principally interested in equality - Sonenscher offers an interesting interpretation and perspectival knowledge of Karl Marx's motivation in his principal work paraphrase - Marx's thought centered on is interest in individuality and the degree to which in certain respects being somebody who is free and able to make choices about his or her lives and future activities is going to depend on each person's: - qualities - capabilities - capacities - preoccupations - values, etc - For Marx, freedom is in the final analysis something to do with something - particular - specific and - individual w - What matters to me may not matter entirely in the same sort of way to you because ultimately - in an ideal State of Affairs, my kinds of concerns and your kinds of concerns will be simply specific to you and to me respectively - For Marx, the problems begin as is also the case with Rosseau - when these kinds of absolute qualities are displaced by - relative qualities that apply equally to us both - For Marx, things like - markets - prices - commodities and - things that connect people - are the hallmarks of equality because they put people on the same kind of footing prices and productivity - Whereas the things that REALLY SHOULD COUNT are - the things that separate and distinguish people that make each individual fully and and entirely him or herself and - the idea for Marx is that capitalism - which is not a term that Marx used, - puts people on a kind of spurious footing of equality - Getting beyond capitalism means getting beyond equality to a state of effect in which - difference , - particularity, - individuality and - uniqueness - in a certain kind of sense will prevail

      comment - This perspective is quite enlightening on Marx's motivations on this part of his work and is likely misconstrued by those mainstream "capitalists" who vilify his work without critical analysis - Of course freedom - within a social context - is never an absolute term. - It is not possible to live in a society in which everyone is able to actualize their full imaginations, something pointed out in the work of two other famous thought leaders of modern history: - Thomas Hobbes observed in his famous work, Leviathan, and - Sigmund Freud also made a primary subject of his ID, Ego and Superego framework. - Total freedom would lead - first to anarchy and then - the emergence within that anarchy of those which possess the most charisma, influence, self-seeking manipulative skills and brutality - surfacing rule by authority - Historically, as democracy attempts to surface from a history of authoritarian, patriarchal governance, - democracy is far from ubiquitous and authoritarian governance is still alive and well in many parts of the world - The battle between - authoritarian governments among themselves and - authoritarian and democratic governments - results in war, violence and trauma that creates the breeding ground for the next generation of authoritarian leaders - Marx's main intent seems to be to enable the individual existing within a society to live the fullest life possible, - by way of enabling and maximizing their unique expression, - while not constraining the same aspiration in other individuals who belong to the same society

    1. “Personal knowledge management,” or “PKM” as it’s oen called,provides an umbrella under which people of disparate vocations engage indiscourse surrounding not only notes and note-taking, but every niche andnuance of managing information.

      Is he poking fun at the PKM space here? This non-definition definition would seem to be a subtle jab certainly.

    1. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al. 2020).

      for - scientists warning - 2024 state of the climate report - adjacency - 2024 US election - Trump - scientists warning - state of the climate - cognitive dissonance - 4P knowledge framework - Johan Rockstrom, Michael Mann, William Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Timothy Lenton, Jillian Gregg, Naomi Oreskes, Stefan Rahmstorf, Thomas Newsome

      adjacency - between - 2024 state of the climate report - scientists warning - political polarization - Trump reelection - climate communication - cognitive dissonance - adjacency relationship - The scientists warning are having limited effect as a tool for mass climate communications - The fact that so many people are supporting climate denying candidates like Trump demonstrates the cognitive dissonance and lack of effective climate communications strategy - It is insightful to analyze from 4P knowledge framework: - propositional knowledge - perspectival knowledge - participatory knowledge - procedural knowledge - Every person is situated and located somewhere unique and specific in life - 4 P knowledge is concurrent - When climate scientists communicate propositional knowledge via mass media, it is a kind of broadcast message that can lose salience if the other 3 types of knowledge have a mismatch: - without perspectival knowledge context, the knowledge can have no meaning or priority - without procedural knowledge, the knowledge is theoretical and does not lead to a better life - without participatory knowledge, the receiver feels alienated

    1. he problem of reading scientific texts seems to lie in the fact that here one needsnot a short-term memory but a long-term memory in order to gain reference pointsfor distinguishing the essential from the unessential and the new from the merelyrepetitive. But one cannot remember everything. That would be memorization. Inother words, you have to be able to read highly selectively and pull out widelyinterconnected references. One must be able to understand recursions. But howdoes one learn this, if no instructions can be given; or at best aboutconspicuousness (as in the previous sentence for example “recursions”, but not“must”)?Perhaps the best method is to take notes – not excerpts, but condensedreformulations of what has been read. The re-description of what has already beendescribed leads almost automatically to the training of an attention for “frames”,for schemes of observation or even for conditions that lead to the text offeringcertain descriptions and not others. In doing so, it is useful to always consider:What is not meant, what is excluded, when something specific is asserted? Whentalking about “human rights”: What does the author distinguish his statementsfrom? From non-human rights? From human obligations? Or culturallycomparatively or historically from populations that do not know human rights andcan live with them quite well?

      In other words, Luhmann is urging to engage in pattern recognition.

      True intellectual work using the Zettelkasten demands pattern recognition when reading. Domain specific knowledge + pattern recognition = efficient reading; for it allows to distinguish signal from noise, value from trash.

    2. Another possibility is read texts on certain topics – liability fordefects in civil law, socialization theory, risk research, etc. – in parallel. Then onegradually develops a feeling for what is already known and knows the “state of theart”. New things then stand out. But you learn something that is mostly veryquickly outdated and then to unlearn again.

      Is this a criticism by Luhmann on the conventional notion of syntopical reading in Adlerian terms? Probably without knowing Adler's work.

      Because science/truth work (knowledge) is constantly in revision, conventional syntopical reading on a topic of science is without necessary value?

      Perhaps unless stored and expanded upon in a ZK?

      Further thought is required to disseminate this paragraph.

  4. Sep 2024
    1. This method allows individuals to manage and interlink their information more effectively by creating interconnected nodes, known as knowledge graphs.
    1. I enjoyed this podcast but got the feeling they see PKM as a kind of grueling Fordist production line. The process in your book seems a lot less like a grind and a lot more like fun!

      Zettelkasten is a method for creating "slow productivity" against a sea of information overload

      Some of the framing goes back to using the card index as a means of overcoming the eternal problem of "information overload" [see A. Blair, Yale University Press, 2010]. I ran into an example the other day in David Blight's DeVane Lectures at Yale in which he simultaneously shrugged at the problem while talking about (perhaps unknown to him) the actual remedy: https://boffosocko.com/2024/09/16/paul-conkins-zettelkasten-advice/

      It's also seen in Luhmann claiming he only worked on things he found easy/fun. The secret is that while you're doing this, your zettelkasten is functioning as a pawl against the ratchet of ideas so that as you proceed, you don't lose your place in your train of thought (folgezettel) even if it's months since you thought of something last. This allows you to always be building something of interest to you even (especially) if the pace is slow and you don't know where you're going as you proceed. It's definitely a form of advanced productivity, but not in the sort of "give-me-results-right-now" way that most have come to expect in a post-Industrial Revolution world. This distinction is what is usually lost on those coming from a productivity first perspective and causes friction because it's not the sort of productivity they've come to expect.


      In reply to writingslowly and Bob Doto at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447/1285175583877103749<br /> Conversation/context not for direct attribution

    1. We had a strong personal motivation for this project: we often find ourselves stuck in our own creative work. Latticework’s links might make you think of citations and primary sources—tools for finding the truth in a rigorous research process. But our work on Latticework was mostly driven by the problems of getting emotionally stuck, of feeling disconnected from our framing of the project or our work on it.

      Again the important distinction, here in the context which itch Latticework scratches, between 'evidence' and 'kindle' perspectives. The latter is an emotional thing, where knowledge is not an external thing, but a internal network of meaning.

    1. Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter by [[Casey Newton]]

      Newton takes a thin view of the eternal question of information overload and whether or not AI might improve the situation. No serious results...

    2. databases are not designed to be browsed.

      Casey Newton makes this blanket statement. Any real evidence for this beyond his "gut"?

      Many "paper machines" like Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten were almost custom made not just for searching, but for browsing through regularly much like commonplace books.

      Perhaps the question is really, how is your particular database designed?

    1. I wonder if there's a copy anywhere of the Macey business system book that they sold to explain how to use it?

      reply to u/atomicnotes at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1fa0240/early_1900s_3_x_5_inch_card_index_filing_cabinet/

      This is an excellent question. I strongly suspect you won't find a booklet or book from Macey after 1906 that does this, though there may have been something before that.

      You'll notice that on page 9, the 1906 Macy Catalog takes what I consider to be a pot shot at their Shaw-Walker competition in the section "Not a kindergarten". Shaw-Walker was selling not just furniture, but a more specific system, as well as a magazine. Since there's something to be learned for current knowledge managers and zettel-casters in the historical experience of these companies and the systems and methods they were selling, I'll quote that section here (substitute references to enterprise and business for yourself):

      Not a Kindergarten

      Every successful enterprise knows its own requirements best, and develops the best system for its own purpose. We manufacture business machinery. Our appliances and supplies are boiled down to a few parts, and simple forms, and will accommodate any system in any business. The office boy can understand and use them. If we undertook to teach the whole world how to run its business, we would have to saddle the cost on those who buy for what we tried to teach those who do not.

      System in business is desirable, but no system can make a business successful, where the management is deficient. So called ‘Systems’ often result in useless expense and disappointment. We retain what experience proves useful and practical; so far as possible, eliminating all complicated and useless features. This explains how we can employ the best workmanship and material, combined with pleasing designs, and sell our goods with profit at lower prices than the inferior articles offered by others.

      There may have been some booklets at some point, but I've not run across them for any of the major manufacturers of the time. (I've only loosely searched this area.) Some of the general principles were covered in various articles in System Magazine which was published by Shaw-Walker, a filing cabinet manufacturer, in the early century. System Magazine was sold to McGraw-Hill which renamed it Business Week, but it is now better known as Bloomberg Business Week. In the December 1906 issue of System, W. K. Kellogg, the President of the Toasted Corn Flake Company, is quoted touting the invaluable nature of the Shaw-Walker filing system at a time when his company was using 640 drawers of their system.

      To some extent the smaller discrete "system" was really a part of a broader range of information and knowledge of business and competition. This can be seen in the fact that System Magazine still exists, just under an alternate name, along with a much broader area of business schools and business systems. We've just "forgotten" (or take for granted) the art of the smaller systems and processes which seemed new in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

      Other companies had "systems" they sold or taught, much like Tiago Forte teaches his "Second Brain" method or Nick Milo teaches "Linking Your Thinking". However, most of them were really in the business of selling goods: furniture, filing cabinets, desks, index cards, card dividers, etc. and this was where the real money was to be found at the time.

      A similar example in the space is the Memindex System booklet that came with their box and index cards. The broad principles of the system can be described in a few paragraphs so that the average person can read it and modify it to their particular needs or use case. The company never felt the need to write an entire book along the lines of David Allen's Getting Things Done or Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal Method. Allen and Carroll are selling systems by way of books or classes. Admittedly, Carroll does have custom printed notebooks for using his methods, but I suspect these are a tiny fraction of the overall notebook sales for those who use his method.

      Here's evidence of a correspondence course from the Library Bureau some time after 1927, which was when they'd been purchased by Remington Rand: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335534180049 . Library Bureau had an easier time as their system was standardized for libraries, though they did have efforts to cater to business concerns the way Shaw-Walker, The Macey Company, Globe-Wernicke and others certainly did.

      I think the best examples in broader book form from that time period are Kaiser's two books which still stand up pretty well today for those creating knowledge management systems, zettelkasten, commonplace books, getting things done/productivity systems, second brains, etc.

      Kaiser, J. Card System at the Office. The Card System Series 1. London: Vacher and Sons, 1908. http://archive.org/details/cardsystematoffi00kaisrich.

      ———. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

    1. the problem here is that physicists am never worried about consciousness because that's the problem of neuroscientists. And neuroscientists don't know quantum physics. So what the hell then? You know, there is a hole in the middle right?

      for - consciousness - incomplete knowledge of science - hole in understanding - physics - neuroscience - quantum mechanics - Federico Faggin

    1. AI’s effect on our idea of knowledge could well be broader than that. We’ll still look for justified true beliefs, but perhaps we’ll stop seeing what happens as the result of rational, knowable frameworks that serenely govern the universe.  Perhaps we will see our own inevitable fallibility as a consequence of living in a world that is more hidden and more mysterious than we thought. We can see this wildness now because AI lets us thrive in such a world.

      AI to teach us complexity and sensemaking / sense of wonder in viewing the world. It might, given who builds the AIs I don't think so though. Can we build sensemaking tools that seem AI to the rest of us? genAI is statistical probabilities all around, with a hint of randomness to prevent the same outcome for the same questions each time. That is not complexity just mimicry though. Can sensemaking mimic AI to, might be a more useful way?

    2. Michele Zanini and I recently wrote a brief post for Harvard Business Review about what this sort of change in worldview might mean for  business, from strategy to supply chain management. For example, two  faculty members at the Center for Strategic Leadership at the U.S Army War College have suggested that AI could fluidly assign leadership roles based on the specific details of a threatening situation and the particular capabilities and strengths of the people in the team. This would alter the idea of leadership itself: Not a personality trait but a fit between the specifics of character, a team, and a situation.

      Yes, this I can see, but that's not making AI into K, but embracing complexity and being able to adapt fluidly in the face of it. To increase agency, my working def of K. This is what sensemaking is for, not AI as such.

    3. Newton’s Laws, the rules and hints for diagnosing a biopsy — to say that they fail at predicting highly particularized events: Will there be a traffic snarl? Are you going to develop allergies late in life? Will you like the new Tom Cruise comedy? This is where traditional knowledge stops, and AI’s facility with particulars steps in.

      AI or rather our understanding of complexity that needs to step in? The examples [[David Weinberger]] gives of general things that can't do particularised events are examples of linear generalisations failing at (a higher level of) complexity. Also I would say 'prediction' which is assumed to here be the point of K is not what it is about. Probabilities, uncertainties (which is what linear approaches do: reduce uncertainties on a few things at the cost of making others unknowable within the same model, Heisenberg style), that in complexity you can nudge, attenuate etc. I'd rather involve complexity more deeply in K than AI.

    4. [[David Weinberger]] on K in the age of AI. AI has no outside framework of reference or context as David says is inherent in K (next to Socrates notions of what episteme takes). Says AI may change our notion of K, where AI is better at including particulars, whereas human K is centered on limited generalisations.

  5. Aug 2024
    1. don't do this experiment philosophically do it experientially it's like undressing at night we take off everything that can be taken off

      for BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira

      BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira - metaphor - Like taking all our clothes off when we are preparing for bedtime

      comment - self knowledge exercise - Rupert Spira - This exercise makes me think of my own thoughts around discovering or rather, rediscovering one's true nature - If we are to discuss the "greater self" from whence we came, then it's tantamount to discovering - the nature nature within - human nature - So anything that is recognized as human nature, cannot be the ground state - The ground state must go beyond anything that depends on the human body - Thoughts and perceptions are mediated by brains and sense organs, both depend on the human body and so - are dependent on human nature - Self knowledge is unmediated and directly experienced - It has the quality of the ground state within us, the nature part of our human nature

    2. one way to make this experiential investigation into the essential nature of our self would be to remove in fact we don't need to remove it would be sufficient to imagine removing everything from us that is not essential to us so i suggest we let's just embark do this investigation for a few minutes

      for - BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira

      BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira - Remove phenomenological experiences that are transient - that is, have a beginning or end - The fact that they do not last implies that they cannot be part of our essential, unchanging nature

    3. there is one aspect one element of the universe that we have direct unmediated access to when i say unmediated i mean we have access to it through a channel that is does not go through perception or thought and that is our knowledge of our self our knowledge of our self is the only knowledge there is that is not mediated through thought or perception and therefore it is the only channel through which we have direct unmediated access to the reality of the universe and it is for this reason that self-knowledge stands at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions

      for - key insight - quote - self knowledge - Rupert Spira

      key insight - quote - self knowledge - Rupert Spira - There is one aspect of the universe that we have direct unmediated access to w

      • When i say unmediated i mean we have access to it through a channel that is does not go through

        • perception or
        • thought and that is our knowledge of our self
      • Our knowledge of our self is the only knowledge there is that is not mediated through

        • thought or
        • perception
      • and therefore it is the only channel through which we have direct unmediated access to the reality of the universe

      • It is for this reason that self-knowledge stands at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions.

    1. According toLacan, then, neither psychoanalytic orthodoxy nor academicpsychology recognizes a difference in principle between knowl-edge (psychic life) and the truth by which it is driven onward(the reality to which psychic life must adapt itself)

      Thus Lacan introduces the divide between the real and reality. Hegel and ego psychoanalysis assume that knowledge (the consciousness) and truth can always coincide and have an affinity for each other

    2. According to Lacan, the absolute knowledgethat is thus attained is like a symbolic system that expresses theessential structures of reality in its entirety. This final state can-not be described as anything other than perfect self-conscious-ness.

      Thus stating that absolute knowledge is not awareness of the real, as the real's effects but not actuality can be grasped. Simply, absolute knowledge is perfect self-consciousness where knowledge and truth combine

    3. e intrinsically interwoven insuch a manner that knowledge will constantly incorporate thetruth that disturbs it, until both are absorbed into each withoutremainder.

      Truth and knowledges relationship

    4. Truth and knowledgeare not related to each other externally here,

      Lacan states that knowledge is the way consciousness understands itself, and it has to adapt to truth.

    1. Interesting perspective as interpretation where Jack says at the moment the song says "Who made up words, who made up numbers? Who wrote the Bible, who wrote the Q'uran" it might not even be a call to reflect and think for yourself (although this is absolutely a recurring theme in the song) but maybe they are implying all the science traces back not to the West (Europe) but to the East (Egypt, Africa). This interpretation aligns with the album this song was produced in, which is about Africa.

    1. Unrelated to the song itself. It is interesting that different people interpret the song's meaning differently. Likely due to individual differences in perspective, history, culture, etc.

      Makes me reflect. Is knowledge/wisdom contained solely in content and words? Or is knowledge/wisdom rather contained in the RELATIONSHIP, the INTERACTION, between past experience, previous knowledge (identity) and substance?

      Currently I am inclined to go for the latter.

  6. Jul 2024
    1. If all human data were structured in one massive knowledge-graph (a global knowledge graph), we could unlock this potential. Fortunately, Solid is that knowledge graph.
    1. There is for himno royal road to order. Knowledge andright will a r e indispensable. This doesnot mean that the world will heed, andeducate its feelings and thoughts forthe sake of self-preservation. But quiteproperly, Mr. Wells should not care.He has diagnosed the ailment and pre-scribed the sensible dose. The patientis always a t liberty to pass out in self-conceit or with the aid of quacks.PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

      relationship to Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and modern politics?

      relationship to the Great Books idea in 1942-1952 and beyond?

      repeating history...

    1. "And the rich get stitched up, when we get cut Man a heal dem broken bones in the bush with the wed mud" Rich are more advantaged than the mass middle class/poor. It's always the middle/lower classes who have to do the dirty work of the elites, it's because we gave our power away in the first place which is why we're treated like toy soldiers. this song is all about equality and self-empowerment in this aspect. Raises the importance of naturopathy science, how old and ancient herbal rememdies and medicinal practices are more advanced and provide better treatment than modern medicine. raises the issue of the supression of ancient medicinnal practices/herbs by corporate structures who just want to generate more income and improperly prescribe harmful substances/drugs to people. The EU is already banning natural herbs that cure all sorts of natural illnesses by natural/healthy means. "Can you read signs? can you read stars? Can you make peace? can you fight war? Can you milk cows, even though you drive cars? huh Can you survive, Against All Odds, Now?" reference to occult/esoteric wisdom - alchemism, astronomy/astrology, tarot reading. those questions are to make us self-reflect on what modern civilization and human beings can do compared to ancient civilizations and cultures. are we moving backwards or moving forwards towards progression mentally, spiritually, emnotionally and physically? are we surviving/beyond the need for survival.. or are we heading towards the path of self-destruction as a species?

      Is there truth in this regarding medicine? Can we get more out of nature than media and common knowledge portrays? I am not certain, nor is this an area of research for me; but the truth is that it is fascinating to think about.

      The larger point does make sense, too much people are focused on money for the sake of money. Money is supposed to be a means to an end; the end being the improvement of society; in the way things are currently set up.

    2. "Pay no mind to the youths Cause it's not like the future depends on it" sarcasm. esp. if you look at the music video, you'll notice Damian's sarcastic hand gesture, tone and facial experience. mocking the irony of how schools don't provide children with real knowledge of the world which is ironic because their generation will be the future keepers of humanity with old/new responsibilities and purposes to fulfil. once again, we're stuck in this repeitive cycle of stagnation - problem, reaction, solution. it's kind of what aristotle once said about knowledge and teaching: "This discovery of yours, this writing, you give your students not truth, but only the appearance of truth. They will read many things and will have learned nothing. They will therefore seem to know many things, when they are, for the most part, ignorant and hard to get along with, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

      Interesting food for thought for the optimization of education: should we give students not just domain knowledge (in an efficient manner) but also intercultural and experiental knowledge of the world?

      Not just related to personal development such as wealth creation and personal finance, but also how other civilizations work... Tolerance. Teach them philosophy as well.

      Obviously in such a way that it is attracting and they are intrinsically motivated to go to school and learn.


      Raises a broader question: Is domain knowledge worth anything if you have no knowledge (or experience) about the world in itself? Can you be of any value if you do not know the world in such a manner?

    3. "Some of the smartest dummies Can't read the language of Egyptian mummies" points to the notion of paradoxes, dualism, where even the most knowledgeable, creative, innovative, intelligent and academic can't interpret or make sense of ancient wisdom, the pun "language of the Egyptian mummies" refers to the language of the spiritual - life after death wisdom. the divine, infinite and eternal.

      I will call the guy who gives a full theoretical analysis of this song, Mr. X.

      Well, I wonder where Mr. X got all his analysis from first of all. Is it his interpretation? Or what is his source for the meaning of the song?

      Is it therefore objectively true to the artist's intent or is it merely a (good) explanation that seeks to provoke thought?


      I don't know how accurate this claim is as I have not yet dived deeply into ancient knowledge and compare it to modern interpretations of it, but I do feel like this hits a nail... Either Mr. X does or the artists.

      It is quite logical that it is difficult to interpret ancient wisdom as wisdom often assumes the student or reader is familiar with common knowledge... However, what was common in ancient times might be rare currently, or even forgotten or used in different ways, making it very difficult to interpret and parse such texts without a high degree of mastery of background knowledge.

      It's even harder for certain ancient times where everything was rooted in oral tradition without writing. People back then could've been generally wise, but without texts to refer to as primary sources it is virtually impossible to make sense of it.

    1. one of the things i suggested in a short history of progress is that 00:30:18 one of our problems even though we're very clever as a species we're not wise

      for - key insight - progress trap - A Short History of Progress - we are clever but NOT wise!

      key insight - progress trap - A Short History of Progress - we are clever but NOT wise! - In other words - Intelligence is FAR DIFFERENT than wisdom

      new memes - We have an abundance of intelligence and a dearth of wisdom - A little knowledge is dangerous, a lot of knowledge is even more dangerous

    1. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution." - Albert Einstein
  7. Jun 2024
    1. Narratives are how we conceptualize the world. Certain narrative links – links between events that we add in to help explain the world – are picked up through mimesis. We see others think of the world in a particular way, and we start to conceptualize the world in similar terms. And the best solution to a harmful narrative is a more enriching narrative. You have to have a replacement for the narrative you are trying to rid yourself of.

      This is equal to the imitation principle of biologically primary knowledge as stated in Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 2011). Perhaps also the borrow-and-reorganize principle though that has to do with biologically secondary knowledge and explicit instruction.

    1. “I think there’s been a slow transition over the years where you start off as someone who is a learner and who consumes knowledge. At some point, you start to realize you’re actually producing something,” says Sung, noting that it took time to focus her field of study at HGSE. “Sometimes people come here with very specific interests. I wasn’t one of those people, I had to do a lot of narrowing down and a lot of boiling down to get to a point where I’m at a dissertation and a career.”

      opinion on transition

    1. The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise by [[Marc Brooker]]

      Most hobbies, sports, and areas of interest can be split into four quadrants by an individual's particular sub-interest along the lines of doing/discussing versus the activity/gear for the activity. Many people will self-select into one of the four at the expense of the other three and this can affect the type and tenor of communities around that particular activity.

      Excellence in one area doesn't imply excellence in the others. "True" fanatics ought to attempt to excel in all four quadrants.

    1. Advocating for the great booksidea, then, could mean fighting against anti-intellectualism, antira-tionalism (i.e., the reliance on ideology), and “agnotology.”

      definition of agnotology:

      Within the sociology of knowledge, agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product, influence opinion, or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data (disinformation). More generally, the term includes the condition where more knowledge of a subject creates greater uncertainty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

  8. May 2024
    1. Thisinterventionrecognizes students’ annotations as objectsopen tocontinuous development, engaging students to connect, analyze, and expand upon their ideasthrough the synthesis processes. Meanwhile, the synthesis products can be integratedinto otherlearning events, enriching the overall learning experiences.

      How can AI be leveraged to support: (1) the process of synthesizing students' annotations, and (2) the use of these synthesis artifacts in subsequent in-class group discussions?

    1. this is whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness

      for - key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity

      • the worry for Goethe and whitehead is that
        • we forget sometimes with the typical scientific method that = we can only ever apply concepts derived from our empirical experience
      • and so if we're trying to understand experience as if it were really
        • an illusion produced by
          • collisions of particles or
          • brain chemistry or
          • something that we can never in principle experience
      • what we're doing is
        • applying concepts derived from our experience
        • to an imagined realm that
          • we think is beyond experience
      • but it's not
      • This is Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

      key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - This helps explain the rising rejection of science from the masses. I didn't realize there was already a name for the phenomena responsible for the emergence of collective denialist behavior

      adjacency - between - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - increasing collective rejection of science in the polycrisis - adjacency statement - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness exactly names and describes - the growing trend of a populus rejection of climate science (climate denialism), COVID vaccine denialism, exponential growth of conspiracy theory and misinformation - because of the inability for non-elites and elites alike to concretize abstractions the same way that elite scientists and policy-makers do - Research papers have shown that the knowledge deficit model which was relied upon for decades was not accurate representation of climate denialism - Yet, I would hold that Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concretism plays a role here - This mistrust in science is rooted in this fallacy as well as progress traps - Deep Humanity is quite steeped in Whitehead's process relational ontology and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness requires mass education for a sustainable transition - This abstract concreteness is everywhere: - Shift from Ptolemy's geocentric worldview to the Copernican heliocentric worldview - Now we are told that the sun is not fixed, but is itself rotating around the Milky Way with billions of other galaxies - scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating for dating objects in deep time - climate science - atomic physics - quantum physics - distrust of vaccines, which we cannot see - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects is related to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. - "Seeing is believing" but we cannot directly experience the ultra large or ultra small. So we have scientific language that draws parallels to that, but it is not a direct experience. - - Those not steeped in years or decades of science have the very real option of feeling that the concepts are fallacies and don't hold as much weight as that which they can experience directly, even though those concepts have obviously produced artefacts that they use, like cellphones, the internet and airplanes.

  9. Apr 2024
    1. It occursat many levels of animal life

      for -: zombies - David Chalmers - UTOK - Unifed Theory of Knowledge - Gregg Henriques

      • comment
        • As David Chalmer observes with the philosophical idea of "zombies", strictly speaking, we impute the existence of other consciousnesses, including other human consciousnesses
        • This construction of the "other consciousness" begins at birth with the socialization of the neonate and infant from its mother and father.
      • To claim that other species display consciousness is an imputation.and based upon external signs, not internal experience.
    1. for - enlightenment 2.0 - Gregg Henriques - UTOK - Unified Theory of Knowledge

      summary - Gregg attempts to unify philosophy, psychology and neuroscience into one explanatory model he calls the "Unified Theory of Knowledge"

    1. Getting hooked on computers is easy—almost anybody can make a program work, just as almost anybody can nail two pieces of wood together in a few tries. The trouble is that the market for two pieces of wood nailed together—inexpertly—is fairly small outside of the "proud grandfather" segment, and getting from there to a decent set of chairs or fitted cupboards takes talent, practice, and education.

      This is a great analogy

    1. Put another way: to really internalize a process, it's not enough just to review Anki cards. You need to carry out the process, in context. And you need to solve real problems with it.

      Theory will only take you so far.

      -Oppenheimer (2023)

    2. These are goals which, for me, are intellectually appealing, but which I'm not emotionally invested in.

      Learning requires an emotional connection

    1. In my personal memory practice, nearly all the benefit has come from learning how to: better digest material; make better questions and answers; better connect the memory system to my life and creative work

      we need: * critical thinking * better analytical skills

    1. https://andysylvester.com/2024/04/12/knowledge-management-and-organizing-information-for-use/

      (6:13) Andy mentions lost "tribal knowledge" with respect to corporate information. This aphorism seems fairly regular in Western countries, but the interesting part about actual tribal knowledge is that it would have been stored with several people and spread out in ways to make the accidental deaths of individuals not able to take the knowledge to their graves with them.

    1. We can’t master knowledge. It’s what we live in. This requires a radical shift of worldview from colonialist to ecological. The colonial approach to knowledge is to capture it in order to profit from it. The ecological approach is to live within it as within a garden to be tended. The two worldviews may well be mutually incompatible, though this matter is hardly resolved yet.

      Vgl [[Netwerkleren Connectivism 20100421081941]] / [[Context is netwerk van betekenis 20210418104314]] [[Observator geeft betekenis 20210417124703]] . I think K as stock is prone to collector's fallacy. My working def of K is agency along lines of Sveiby. Such K is always situated in the interaction with the world, networks of meaning as context. This as K isn't merely purified I (DIKW pyramid is bogus), it's weaving I, experience, context, skills into a meaningful whole, and it needs an agent to decide on what's meaningful.

    1. We found that far too many children were entering school with weak oral language skills and were acquiring alphabetic knowledge and fluency far too slowly. This limited their reading comprehension and academic progress through school.
    1. Lisa, Apple's demonstration of its leadership,in bringing technology to the knowledge worker.

      Use of "knowledge worker" in a 1983 advertisement for the Lisa computer from Apple.

    2. [Narrator]: The Cluttered Desk, Index Card,file folders, the in-out basket, the calculator.These are the tools of the office professional's past.Since the dawn of the computer age, better machines have always meant bigger and more powerful.But the software could not accommodate the needs of office professionals who are responsiblefor the look, shape and feel of tomorrow.

      In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

      Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.


      30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.


      Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

    1. One transaction at a time would generallynot lead either to much work or muchbusiness, and besides, a transaction cannot always be completedwhile you wait. The consequence is that we arrive at a num-ber of transactions going on simultaneously. When we nowreach the stage of too much work, then we must find waysand means to supplement our energy. Thus we arrive at amultitude of transactions by means of concerted action.

      While using different verbiage, Kaiser is talking about the idea of information overload here and providing the means to tame it by appropriately breaking it up into pieces upon which we might better apply our energies to turn it into something.

    2. it follows that no purchasable articlecan supply our individual wants so far as a key to our stockof information is concerned. We shall always be mainly de-pendent in this direction upon our own efforts to meet ourown situation.

      I appreciate his emphasis on "always" here. Though given our current rise of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, this is obviously a problem which people are attempting to overcome.

      Sadly, AI seem to be designed for the commercial masses in the same way that Google Search is (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/jx6MYvETEe6Ip2OnCJnJbg), so without a large enough model of your own interests, can AI solve your personal problems? And if this is the case, how much data will it really need? To solve this problem, you need your own storehouse of personally curated data to teach an AI. Even if you have such a store for an AI, will the AI still proceed in the direction you would in reality or will it represent some stochastic or random process from the point it leaves your personal data set?

      How do we get around the chicken-and-egg problem here? What else might the solution space look like outside of this sketch?

    1. Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.From this time forth I never will speak word.

      His last rebellion, his final influence over the situation -- knowing nothing. And its ironic because he was the source of all knowledge and information that sparked all the events, and now that everything is done, he is still. There is no more movement, even if they would like there to be some. In this way he is really like Shakespeare, having the power to cause and inhibit action through knowledge -- the greed of which is Othello's fatal flaw.

  10. Mar 2024
    1. The term 'knowledge work' appeared in The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959) by Peter Drucker.[12] Drucker later coined the term 'knowledge worker' in The Effective Executive[13] in 1966. Later, in 1999, he suggested that "the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."
    1. The development of the card system and itsmore universal adoption within recent years isundoubtedly due in the mail to the development in modernbusiness and factory organisation ; it may be regarded as anoffspring of manufacture in quantities. (Massenfabrikation, Gross-industrie.) The recognised principle in manufacture in quantities ismaximum of output with minimum of labour. The means to attainthis end is specialisation, which in its turn yields greater precisionand accuracy as it^ result. All this is equally applicable to thecard system, and the last factor, greater precision and accuracy,is one of its most conspicuous claims.

      Julius Kaiser contemporaneously posits that mass manufacture and maximizing efficiency (greater output for minimum input) are the primary drivers of card index system use in the early 20th century. These also improve both precision and accuracy in handling information which allow for better company or factory operation, which would have been rising concerns for businesses and manufacturing operations at the rise of scientific management during the time period.

    1. Nay, yet there’s more in this.I prithee speak to me as to thy thinkings,As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughtsThe worst of words

      Iago has not elaborated or said much, it is Othello who is prying deeper and deeper into "knowing" what he should not, into peering into something that would disturb his peace. This connects to Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. It is then Othello's fault for looking for answers to his suspicions which he confirms with confirmation bias.

    1. 47:00 There is a difference between showing up and discerning your energy levels. If energy is low, you can still show up. You just need to do work that is lower in intensity.

  11. Feb 2024
    1. https://kumu.io/

      Make sense of your messy world. Kumu makes it easy to organize complex data into relationship maps that are beautiful to look at and a pleasure to use.

      tagline:

      The art of mapping is to create a context in which others can think.


      Tool mentioned on [[2022-06-02]] by Jerry Michalski during [[Friends of the Link]] meeting.

    1. Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired, April 1, 2000. https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/.

      Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0

      Annotations: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true

    2. the prevention of knowledge-enabled massdestruction
    3. Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowl-edge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves?
    4. I havefound the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the DalaiLama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, theDalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct ourlives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need todevelop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interde-pendency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individ-uals and societies that seems consonant with Attali’s Fraternity utopia.The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is thatmakes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neithermaterial progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key—that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.

      Dalai Lama throwing back to a large number of indigenous cultures and societies.... contemplate reading this book...

    5. We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on thevalue of open access to information, and recognize the problems thatarise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge.

      Many academics and modern people may think this way, but it is far from a "bedrock value".

      In many indigenous cultures knowledge was carefully sectioned and cordoned off.

      And as we know that knowledge itself is power (ipsa scientia potestas est - Francis Bacon) many people have frequently cordoned off access to information.

    6. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit de-velopment of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting ourpursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.
    7. In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings,Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, “It isnot possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge ofthe world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of in-trinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spreadof knowledge and are willing to take the consequences.”
    1. All men by nature desire to know.

      The famous, and oft-quoted first line of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

    Tags

    Annotators

  12. Jan 2024
    1. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destructionbut of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructive-ness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

      coinage of the phrase knowledge-enabled mass destruction here?

    1. 複習卡片時,可以選擇下方的 4 個動作:1. 重寫卡片,去除廢話2. 刪除卡片,不再需要3. 連結卡片,增加連結4. 寫成文章,分享知識​這樣做,就能讓大腦「擁有」筆記上的知識。

      review 複習 知識虛肥

  13. Dec 2023
    1. I think that we should be putting a high priority on developing the Next Generation nuclear 01:45:54 power uh but it's uh it's uh it's going to be a a tough job and as long as the as the special 01:46:05 interests are controlling our government uh we're not going to solve it
    1. Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

      How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

      How could one distribute the effects evenly?

      What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

    2. I dislike isolated events anddisconnected details. I really hate state-ments, views, prejudices, and beliefsthat jump at you suddenly out of mid-air.

      Wells would really hate social media, which he seems to have perfectly defined with this statement.

    3. without a World En-cyclopedia to hold men's minds togetherin something like a common interpreta-tion of reality there is no hope whateverof anything but an accidental and transi-tory alleviation to any of our world trou-bles. As mankind is so it will remainuntil it pulls its mind together. And if itdoes not pull its mind together then I donot see how it can help but decline.Never was a living species more peril-ously poised than ours at the presenttime. If it does not take thoughtto endits present mental indecisiveness catastro-phe lies ahead. Our species may yet endits strange eventful history as just the last,the cleverest, of the great apes. Thegreat ape that was clever-but not cleverenough. It could escape from mostthings but not from its own mental con-fusion.
    4. I believe thatin some such way as I have sketched, themental forces now largely and regrettablyscattered and immobilized in the univer-sities, the learned societies, research in-stitutions, and technical workers of theworld could be drawn together into areal directive world intelligence, and bythat mere linking and implementing ofwhat is known, human life as a wholecould be made much surer, stronger,bolder, and happier than it has ever beenup to the present time.
    5. We live in a worldof unused and misapplied knowledge andskill. That is my case. Knowledge andthought are ineffective.
    6. There had been no attempt toassemble that mechanism of knowledgeof which America stood in need.
    1. In the course of these experiments I have devoted a certain amount of anxious thought to the conspicuous ineffectiveness of modern knowledge.

      Does information overload prevent us from using knowledge more effectively? Are we distracted by the mundane?

    1. 4. Cite Card Icon : Hat (something above you)Tag : 5th block Quotation, cooking recipe from book, web, tv, anything about someone else’s idea is classified into this class. Important here is distinguishing “your idea (Discovery Card)” and “someone else’s idea (Cite Card)”. Source of the information must be included in the Cite Card. A book, for example, author, year, page(s) are recorded for later use.

      https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972899/in/album-72157594200490122/

      Despite being used primarily as a productivity tool the PoIC system also included some features of personal knowledge management with "discovery cards" and "citation cards". Discovery cards were things which contained one's own ideas while the citation cards were the ideas of others and included bibliographic information. Citation cards were tagged on the 5th block as an indicator within the system.

      Question: How was the information material managed? Was it separate from the date-based system? On first blush it would appear not, nor was there a subject index which would have made it more difficult for one to find data within the system.

  14. Nov 2023
    1. Sign in with Google for Web doesn't support silent sign in, in which case a credential is returned without any UI displayed. End users always see some UI, manual or automatic sign in, when a login credential is returned from Google to the relying party. This improves user privacy and control.
    1. However, the miniscule size of ‘facts’ did not neces-sarily reflect Deutsch’s adherence to any theory of information. Instead, it indicated hispersonal interest in distinctions of the smallest scale, vocalized by his motto ‘de minimiscurat historicus’, that history’s minutiae matter.

      Gotthard Deutsch didn't adhere to any particular theory of information when it came to the size of his notes. Instead Jason Lustig indicates that his perspective was influenced by his personal motto 'de minimis curat historicus' (history's minutiae matter), and as a result, he was interested in the smallest of distinctions of fact and evidence. ᔥ

    1. Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world.

      This is great!

    1. 美國國家美式足球聯盟(National Football League,NFL)的觀賞人次是遠高於籃球、棒球、冰球

      An example of a piece of knowledge to acquire.

    1. Humboldt represents the road not taken. He was a scientist who saw everything as interconnected. He called for good global stewardship and objected to the careless exploitation of resources. His warnings weren’t heeded.

      Given Alexander von Humboldt's time period (1769-1859), might he have been the recipient of indigenous knowledge during the Renaissance the same way that Graeber/Wengrow demonstrate others were around that same time frame?

    1. after almost 15 years of using git, I’ve become very used to git’s idiosyncracies and it’s easy for me to forget what’s confusing about it
  15. Oct 2023
    1. Victoria and Albert Museum and the Summer Palace Museum in Beijing.

      shapes what people learn about China- imperial, exotic

    2. evelopment of a field of art history on China. The objects had various meanings, representing the British army, the humiliation of the Chinese emperor, and the global discourse on non-European curiosities. The sell-off of imperial art in East Asia was influenced by war and revolution. Recently, mainland Chinese companies intervened to repatriate some of the plundered objects.
    1. Youmust apprehend the unity with definiteness. There is only oneway to know that you have succeeded. You must be able totell yourself or anybody else what the unity is, and in a fewwords. ( If it requires too many words, you have not seen theunity but a multiplicity. ) Do not be satisfied with "feeling theunity" that you cannot express. The reader who says, "I knowwhat it is, but I just can't say it," probably does not even foolhimself.

      Adler/Van Doren use the statement of unity of a work as an example of testing one's understanding of a work and its contents.

      (Again, did this exist in the 1940 edition?)

      Who do McDaniel and Donnelly 1996 cite in their work as predecessors of their idea as certainly it existed?


      Examples in the literature of this same idea/method after this: - https://hypothes.is/a/TclhyMfqEeyTkQdZl43ZyA (Feynman Technique in ZK; relationship to Ahrens) - explain it to me like I'm a 5th grader - https://hypothes.is/a/BKhfvuIyEeyZj_v7eMiYcg ("People talk" in Algebra Project) - https://hypothes.is/a/m0KQSDlZEeyYFLulG9z0vw (Intellectual Life version) - https://hypothes.is/a/OyAAflm5Ee6GStMjUMCKbw (earlier version of statement in this same work) - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw (Ahrens' version of elaboration citing McDaniel and Donnelly 1996, this uses both restatement and application to a situation as a means of testing understanding) - https://hypothes.is/a/B3sDhlm5Ee6wF0fRYO0OQg (Adler's version for testing understanding from his video) - https://hypothes.is/a/rh1M5vdEEeut4pOOF7OYNA (Manfred Kuenh and Luhmann's reformulating writing)

    1. on the traditional empiricist account we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world 00:11:03 that is we do not experience externality directly but only immediately not immediately but immediately because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes 00:11:18 sense organs and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there well to raise the question how faithful is the sensory report 00:11:30 of the external world is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question that's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap 00:11:42 between reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and reality as empirically sampled by the senses whose limitations and distortions are very well 00:11:56 known but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured
      • for: good explanation: empiricism, empiricism - knowledge gap, quote, quote - Dan Robinson, quote - philosophy, quote - empiricism - knowledge gap, Critique of Pure Reason - goal 1 - address empiricism and knowledge gap

      • good explanation : empiricism - knowledge gap

      • quote

        • on the traditional empiricist account
          • we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world
          • that is we do not experience externality directly but only MEDIATELY, not immediately but MEDIATELY
            • because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes, sense organs
          • and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there
          • To raise the question how faithful is the sensory report of the external world
            • is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question
          • That's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap between
            • reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and
            • reality as empirically sampled by the senses
              • whose limitations and distortions are very well known
                • but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured
      • Comment

        • Robinson contextualizes the empiricist project and gap thereof, as one of the 4 goals of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
        • Robinson informally calls this the "Locke" problem, after one of the founders of the Empiricist school, John Locke.
        • Robinson also alludes to a Thomas Reed approach to realism that contends that we don't experience reality MEDIATELY, but IMMEDIATELY, thereby eliminating the gap problem altogether.
        • It's interesting to see how modern biology views the empericist's knowledge gap, especially form the perspective of the Umwelt and Sensory Ecology
    1. Bill Atkinson had an idea about the freedom to associate knowledge not by what comes next on the list but by the links that are associated with it. This means that information can be organized in a non-linear fashion, allowing for connections to be made between seemingly unrelated ideas. By expanding on this idea, we can create new and innovative ways of storing and accessing information, potentially leading to breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence and data analysis.

  16. Sep 2023
    1. Professor Lehman, who is also the University of Tasmania’s Pro Vice-Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership and Palawa cultural historian, emphasised the importance of academic collaboration with Indigenous scholars and that scientific validation of oral traditions reinforces, rather than supersedes, the authority of Indigenous knowledge.

      The scientific validation of oral traditions aids in creating a third archive which fuses the value of Indigenous knowledges and Western ways of knowing.

    1. I mean, just what I said. If you adapt the zettelkasten to meet knowledge management needs, that’s great. But it does need adapting (as your examples, none of which are conversation-partner zettelkästen but, as syntopicon implies, a collection of information gathered into categories) and is not the best way to do it. (Edit: Ryan Holiday’s system is, by his own admission, not a zettelkästen despite being a bunch of cards with notes on them categorized in a box). Even the source you use about Goitein admits that he was more in the commonplace book tradition, and that other people’s use of his cards is not common to the point of being remarked on here. He doesn’t even call it a zettelkästen, and shouldn’t. There’s not even links or reference numbers, which are integral to the ZK system.It’s not an argument. But as with everything ymmv.(For what it’s worth, my ZK is extremely specific to my individual projects and readings. But I imagine that yes, with time and heavy adaptations, you can make it into little more than a record of my knowledge into broad topics. That you can use it that way does not mean that’s what it is for.)

      reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1l8lyk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      How is it that you're defining knowledge management or knowledge management system?

      I would argue that any zettelkasten of any stripe is taking knowledge/ideas from either content or one's own brain and transferring them into some sort of media by which they are managed or structured in some way for later linking, combination, or other reuse. By base definition this is clearly knowledge management. I don't know how one defines it otherwise except by pure denial.

      Your view of zettelkasten seems remarkably narrow. As a small sample the original Maschinen der Phantasie Marbach exhibition in 2013, which broadly prefigured the popularization of zettelkasten (and in particular the launch of zettelkasten.de) which we see today featured six zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was the only one with reference numbers or what we might now consider explicit HTML-like links. Most of the others contained either explicit groupings or implied links, but that doesn't diminish the value they held for their creators for creating a conversation of ideas for them. Incidentally most of the zettelkasten featured there prefigured Luhmann's and only two were roughly contemporaneous with his.

      If you look more closely at Adler, et al. you'll notice that the entire purpose of their enterprise was to create and nurture a conversation between themselves and their readers with texts and authors spanning over 2,500 years, a point which is underlined by the introductory volume which preceded the two volumes of the Syntopicon. Not coincidentally, that first volume of the 54 book series was entitled "The Great Conversation."

      Specifically from Adler's "How to Read a Book", the first edition of which predated the Great Books of the Western World:

      Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.

      This is a process which is effectuated by

      Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

      and later,

      That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

      (As an aside, why aren't more people talking about the nature of dialectical notes, which seem far more important and useful than either fleeting notes and permanent notes?)

      In your link to Holiday, he doesn't say his system isn't a zettelkasten, a word which an English speaker was highly unlikely to have used in 2013 in any case, even when referencing Manfred Kuehn from 2007. It simply indicates that "[Luhmann's] discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered".

      The Goitein source (which I wrote) may use commonplace book as a descriptor but that doesn't mitigate the fact that the entirety of the zettelkasten tradition arises from it (the primary difference being things written (usually) on bound pages versus slips of paper). Before these there was the closely related idea of florilegia stemming from the earlier locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

    2. Well one obvious drawback is that zettelkästen is not a knowledge management system.

      reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1fn8w4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 and

      Well, Zettelkasten is not a knowledge management system. [...] Update: I mean digital ZK. Shoe-box ZK is a combination of knowledge management system of that time and "thought system" of Niklas Luhmann. u/Aponogetone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1f23nj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      I'm curious to see some evidence for why both you and u/Aponogetone say that a slip box (analog, digital or otherwise) is not a knowledge management system? Perhaps you don't think of it that way or use it solely to that end, but I find it difficult to see in light of the way I use mine and others have in the past. I suspect that if I had access to either of yours I could use it as a knowledge management system and it would tell me a lot about your interests and what you know and with a bit of work I could continue using it as one.

      Even an argument against the more encompassing group nature versus personal or individual knowledge management systems is blunted by the use of a Zettelkasten by Adler, Hutchins, et al. to create the Syntopicon, the group uses by the Mundaneum effort (which went to great lengths to standardize information to be findable), the Oxford English Dictionary compilation, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, or even the academics who still use photocopies or microfilm versions of S.D. Goitein's zettelkasten.

      What are the rest of us missing in your argument?

    1. The colors represent categories, you are correct. So, for instance, with the War book, blue cards would be about politics, yellow strictly war, green the arts and entertainment, pink cards on strategy, etc. I could use this in several ways. I could glance at the cards for one chapter and see no blue or green cards and realize a problem. I could also take out all the cards of one color to see which story I liked best, etc. It also made the shoebox look pretty cool.

      Robert Greene used a color code for his index cards which also helped him to realize gaps in certain areas. He also liked them because "It also made the shoebox look pretty cool."

    1. according to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • for: quote, quote - Galileo, quote - hiding the origin of knowledge, physical theory - hiding origin of knowledge

      • quote

        • According to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • author: Michel Bitbol
    2. From the very beginning, his work has been guided by what Edmund Husserl called the mothers of knowledge. Namely, the dynamics of lived embodied experience,
      • for: Edmund Husserl, the Mother of Knowledge, nondual, nonduality, non-dual, non-duality, the ground of existence
      • definition: the mother of knowledge
        • the dynamics of lived embodied experience
      • author: Edmond Husserl
    1. (1:20.00-1:40.00) What he describes is the following: Most of his notes originate from the digital using hypothes.is, where he reads material online and can annotate, highlight, and tag to help future him find the material by tag or bulk digital search. He calls his hypothes.is a commonplace book that is somewhat pre-organized.

      Aldrich continues by explaining that in his commonplace hypothes.is his notes are not interlinked in a Luhmannian Zettelkasten sense, but he "sucks the data" right into Obsidian where he plays around with the content and does some of that interlinking and massage it.

      Then, the best of the best material, or that which he is most interested in working with, writing about, etc., converted into a more Luhmannesque type Zettelkasten where it is much more densely interlinked. He emphasizes that his Luhmann zettelkasten is mostly consisting of his own thoughts and is very well-developed, to the point where he can "take a string of 20 cards and ostensibly it's its own essay and then publish it as a blog post or article."

    1. Recent work has revealed several new and significant aspects of the dynamics of theory change. First, statistical information, information about the probabilistic contingencies between events, plays a particularly important role in theory-formation both in science and in childhood. In the last fifteen years we’ve discovered the power of early statistical learning.

      The data of the past is congruent with the current psychological trends that face the education system of today. Developmentalists have charted how children construct and revise intuitive theories. In turn, a variety of theories have developed because of the greater use of statistical information that supports probabilistic contingencies that help to better inform us of causal models and their distinctive cognitive functions. These studies investigate the physical, psychological, and social domains. In the case of intuitive psychology, or "theory of mind," developmentalism has traced a progression from an early understanding of emotion and action to an understanding of intentions and simple aspects of perception, to an understanding of knowledge vs. ignorance, and finally to a representational and then an interpretive theory of mind.

      The mechanisms by which life evolved—from chemical beginnings to cognizing human beings—are central to understanding the psychological basis of learning. We are the product of an evolutionary process and it is the mechanisms inherent in this process that offer the most probable explanations to how we think and learn.

      Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.

    1. Your success in reading it is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer intended to com­municate.

      The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

      In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

      Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

    1. Data categories in Salesforce Knowledge are used to logically separate articles and to filter the knowledge base.

      By categorizing articles, users can quickly locate relevant information, making the knowledge base a more effective and user-friendly resource.

  17. Aug 2023
    1. A category of golf clubs that includes the driver and the fairway woods. Compared to the other types of clubs woods are longer and feature bigger and rounder clubheads that are designed to shoot the ball over long distances.
    1. Perimeter-weighted Then someone had a bright idea. What if we place more weight around the perimeter of the head? That way, if you mistakenly hit the ball from the toe of the heel rather than right out of the middle of the face, the momentum of this extra weight will prevent the clubhead from twisting as much at impact. Would that make life easier?
    1. Imagine the younger generation studying great books andlearning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult population con-tinuing to turn to the same sources of strength, inspiration,and communication. We could talk to one another then. Weshould be even better specialists than we are today because wecould understand the history of our specialty and its relationto all the others. We would be better citizens and better men.We might turn out to be the nucleus of the world community.

      Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

      Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

    2. The mathematical specialist, for example, canget further faster into the great mathematicians than a readerwho is without his specialized training. With the help ofgreat books, specialized knowledge can radiate out into agenuine interfiltration of common learning and common life.

      Here Hutchins is again prefiguring C.P. Snow's "two cultures". He makes the argument that by having a shared base of knowledge and culture in our society's past history of knowledge (and especially early scientists and mathematicians), everyone, despite their individual interests and specializations, can be an active participant in a broader human conversation.

    3. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

      Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

    4. In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.

      Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

      One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

    1. I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so. Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge. Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard. And how to pay for it all? If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
      • for: quote, quote - Sam Adams, quote - social media
      • quote, indyweb - support, people-centered
        • I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so.
        • Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge.
        • Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard.
        • And how to pay for it all?
        • If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
      • author: Sam Adams
        • 24 year IBM veteran -senior research scientist in AI at RTI International working on national scale knowledge graphs for global good
      • comment
        • his comment about exploiting all that data is based on an assumption
          • a centralized, server data model
      • this doesn't hold true with a people-centered, person-owned data network such as Inyweb
    1. Ted Nelson launches Project Xanadu, and he said, "Well, what if it wasn't just limited to the things that I have? What if I could connect ideas across a larger body of work?"
      • for: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, knowledge federation
    1. BookmarkTypes and uses of PKM

      Almost every well known writer/composer/creative throughout history had some sort of note taking or knowledge system of one sort or another (florilegium, commonplace books, notebooks, diaries, journals, zettelkasten, waste books, mnemonic techniques, etc.), which would put them into your "active" category. I think you'd be hard put to come up with evidence of a "sudden" emergence of an "active" PKM system beyond the choice of individual users to actively do something with their collections or not.

      If you want to go more distant than Eminem, try looking closely at Ramon Llull's practice in the 11th century, or Homer in the c. 8th century BCE. Or to go much, much farther back, there's solid evidence that indigenous peoples in Australia had what you call both passive and active PKM systems as far back as 65,000 years ago. These are still in use today. Naturally these were not written, but used what anthropologists call orality. (See Walter Ong, Milman Parry, Lynne Kelly, Margo Neale, Duane Hamacher, et al.)

    1. The basic settings allow users to quickly configure a subset of KB features and colors accessible on the left sidebar on this page.

      设置

  18. Jul 2023
    1. I have been using the Outline of Knowledge (OoK) which Adler developed for the Propædia volume of the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (orig. publ. 1974) as my way of indexing knowledge (there is a blog series describing this). I am now working on Part 7 of the series, which is concerned with porting from a card-based analogue system to a digital computer-based form, using the insights gained from having done so via the analogue approach initially.It appears as though the final version of the OoK which ever appeared was in 2010, and is archived at The Internet Archive.I am interested in whether anyone has continued using the OoK or has expanded upon it in any formalised or systematic way. I have made my own mods to it, of course, as it is several decades old and could bear with some revision. But I am not aware of any organisation or group that may already be doing this, including the Britannica itself (which seems a shame, if it is the case).Does anyone know of any such efforts?

      reply to u/TheVoroscope at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/va2s09/comment/jtwqhd7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      u/TheVoroscope, the only things I've seen on it are the original and what you've written. I suspect anything current will be quite niche and would require searching in the areas of academic journal articles or at the level of graduate studies within the library sciences where you might find something. Simon Winchester had a section on the rise and downfall of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his most recent book Knowing What We Know (2023) which has a brief mention of the Propædia, but it was broadly described as a $32 million dollar bomb that ended the Encyclopedia. I would suspect that the last printings in 2010 and 2012 were probably the last more as a result of the rise of internet usage than they were the form and function of the Propædia itself though.

    1. The concept of the purity of science should be abandoned.
      • for: progress trap, abstraction
        • comment
          • we do not recognize the power of abstraction
          • through it, we begin to construct Indra's Net of Jewels, one jewel (idea) at a time
          • but each jewel (idea) that we construct is just a little knowledge, and as Dan observes, a little knowledge, compared to the endless knowledge reflected in any jewel is dangerous.
          • this then, is our dangerous predicament - we base technology on incomplete jewels of Indra's net
          • as we know from mathematics, when the finite meets the infinite, it can never win
    1. specific uses of the technology help develop what we call “relational confidence,” or the confidence that one has a close enough relationship to a colleague to ask and get needed knowledge. With greater relational confidence, knowledge sharing is more successful.
    1. Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world.

      This is great!

  19. Jun 2023
    1. (1:21:20-1:39:40) Chris Aldrich describes his hypothes.is to Zettelkasten workflow. Prevents Collector's Fallacy, still allows to collect a lot. Open Bucket vs. Closed Bucket. Aldrich mentions he uses a common place book using hypothes.is which is where all his interesting highlights and annotations go to, unfiltered, but adequately tagged. This allows him to easily find his material whenever necessary in the future. These are digital. Then the best of the best material that he's interested in and works with (in a project or writing sense?) will go into his Zettelkasten and become fully fledged. This allows to maintain a high gold to mud (signal to noise) ratio for the Zettelkasten. In addition, Aldrich mentions that his ZK is more of his own thoughts and reflections whilst the commonplace book is more of other people's thoughts.

    1. BookmarkNew book - Personal Knowledge Graphs, by Ivo Velitchkov

      https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2597/new-book-personal-knowledge-graphs-by-ivo-velitchkov#latest

      For some additional context the work can be found through https://personalknowledgegraphs.com/#/page/pkg. It also has portions of the building of the book which exist as a knowledge graph, though it doesn't appear that they put up the entirety of the book as a linked knowledge graph the way they had initially planned. I've read a few parts in draft form, including Flancian's chapter whose ideas are tremendous, but I have yet to read the remainder of the published work.

      [Disclosure: I had submitted and had been accepted to write an early, historical-flavored chapter for this volume, but ultimately fell out, as did many others, over disagreements regarding their editing and/or publishing process. I'm close with Flancian and appreciate his experimental programming work on https://anagora.org/index, which one might call a multi-layered wiki of personal wikis, commonplace books, zettelkasten, diaries, notes, and other similar forms of personal knowledge. If you've got a public, digitally available version of a zettelkasten you'd like to add to his project, do reach out to him to interconnect it with the Agora and others' work there.]

    1. knowledge mapping to analyze the changes in the number of published papers as time goes on, in terms of country and geographic area, research topics, research methods, funding sources, hot research spots, and research trends.
    1. And because libraries generally do not take possession of the ebook files they rent from publishers, their crucial role as long-term preservers of culture has been severed from their role as institutions that provide democratic access—a striking change.

      E-books have caused the missions of many libraries to shift away from institutions that provide democratic access to a preserved culture.

    1. I’ve also found that Tailwind works extremely well as an extension of my memory. I’ve uploaded my “spark file” of personal notes that date back almost twenty years, and using that as a source, I can ask remarkably open-ended questions—“did I ever write anything about 19th-century urban planning” or “what was the deal with that story about Houdini and Conan Doyle?”—and Tailwind will give me a cogent summary weaving together information from multiple notes. And it’s all accompanied by citations if I want to refer to the original direct quotes for whatever reason.

      This sounds like the sort of personalized AI tool I've been wishing for since the early ChatGPT models if not from even earlier dreams that predate that....

    1. This analysis will result in the form of a new knowledge-based multilingual terminological resource which is designed in order to meet the FAIR principles for Open Science and will serve, in the future, as a prototype for the development of a new software for the simplified rewriting of international legal texts relating to human rights.

      software to rewrite international legal texts relating to human rights, a well written prompt and a few examples, including the FAIR principles will let openAI's chatGPT do it effectively.

  20. May 2023
    1. Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, & Roger King (2005), "Building the memex sixty years later: trends and directions in personal knowledge bases", Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. The Wikipedia article on personal knowledge bases (PKBs) is basically a summary of the technical report. The report defined personal knowledge base systems, described their benefits, reviewed relevant fields of research, and compared systems in terms of several aspects of their data models: structural framework, knowledge elements, schema, and the role of transclusion. This report is the most comprehensive publication I've read that compares PKB systems according to their key features.
    1. Writing permanent notes was time consuming as f***.

      The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.

      Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.

      Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.

      For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.

      Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.

      If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.

      If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?

  21. Apr 2023
    1. It is difficult to see interdependencies This is especially true in the context of learning something complex, say economics. We can’t read about economics in a silo without understanding psychology, sociology and politics, at the very least. But we treat each subject as though they are independent of each other.

      Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

      If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

      Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

      Link to Garden of Forking Paths

      Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.


      It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

    1. Want to read: How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess 📚

      https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2023/04/28/want-to-read.html

      👀 How did I not see this?!?? 😍 Looks like a good follow up to Ann Blair's Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010) and the aperitif of Simon Winchester's Knowing What We Know (Harper) which just came out on Tuesday. 📚 Thanks for the recommendation Kimberly!

    1. To buy or not to buy a course? And, if the latter, which one? .t3_12fowjy._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionSo, I've been considering buying an online course for Zettelkasten (in Obsidian). Thing is... There are a bunch of them. Two (maybe three) questions:Is it worth it? Has anyone gone down that path and care to share their experience?Any recommendations? I've seen a bunch of options and really don't have any hints on how to evaluate them.

      reply to u/Accomplished-Tip-597 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12fowjy/to_buy_or_not_to_buy_a_course_and_if_the_latter/

      Which "industry", though? Productivity? Personal Knowledge Management? Neither of these are focused on the idea of a Luhmann-esque specific zettelkastenare they?

      For the original poster, what is your goal in taking a course? What do you want to get out of it? What are you going to use such a system for? The advice you're looking for will hinge on these.

      Everyone's use is going to be reasonably idiosyncratic, so not knowing anything else, my general recommendation (to minimize time, effort, and expense) would be to read one of the following (for free), practice at some of it for a few weeks before you do anything else. Then if you need it, talk u/taurusnoises into a few consultations based on what you'd like to accomplish. He's one of the few who does this who's got experience in the widest variety of traditions in addition to expertise in the platform you want (though I'd still recommend him if you were using something else.)

    1. Oakeshott saw educationas part of the ‘conversation of mankind’, wherein teachers induct their studentsinto that conversation by teaching them how to participate in the dialogue—howto hear the ‘voices’ of previous generations while cultivating their own uniquevoices.

      How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

      How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

    2. We could saythat he was the first progressive educator not simply because he encouraged hiscontemporaries and successors to think about the child as a special kind oflearner, but also because of his views on education’s role in helping to developan open, liberal polity. A political system, he said, needs people who are fair,open-minded, and think for themselves; it doesn’t want people who aresubservient to authority.

      We could say first, though I highly suspect that his ideas came from somewhere else...

  22. Mar 2023
    1. In the fall of 2015, she assigned students to write chapter introductions and translate some texts into modern English.

      continuing from https://hypothes.is/a/ddn4qs8mEe2gkq_1T7i3_Q

      Potential assignments:

      Students could be tasked with finding new material or working off of a pre-existing list.

      They could individually be responsible for indexing each individual sub-text within a corpus by: - providing a full bibliography; - identifying free areas of access for various versions (websites, Archive.org, Gutenberg, other OER corpora, etc.); Which is best, why? If not already digitized, then find a copy and create a digital version for inclusion into an appropriate repository. - summarizing the source in general and providing links to how it fits into the broader potential corpus for the class. - tagging it with relevant taxonomies to make it more easily searchable/selectable within its area of study - editing a definitive version of the text or providing better (digital/sharable) versions for archiving into OER repositories, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, https://standardebooks.org/, etc. - identifying interesting/appropriate tangential texts which either support/refute their current text - annotating their specific text and providing links and cross references to other related texts either within their classes' choices or exterior to them for potential future uses by both students and teachers.

      Some of this is already with DeRosa's framework, but emphasis could be on building additional runway and framing for helping professors and students to do this sort of work in the future. How might we create repositories that allow one a smörgåsbord of indexed data to relatively easily/quickly allow a classroom to pick and choose texts to make up their textbook in a first meeting and be able to modify it as they go? Or perhaps a teacher could create an outline of topics to cover along with a handful of required ones and then allow students to pick and choose from options in between along the way. This might also help students have options within a course to make the class more interesting and relevant to their own interests, lives, and futures.

      Don't allow students to just "build their own major", but allow them to build their own textbooks and syllabi with some appropriate and reasonable scaffolding.

    1. The ability to intentionally and strategically allocateour attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world. Wehave to jealously guard it like a valuable treasure.

      It would seem that the word treasure here is being used to modify one's attention. Historically in books about "knowledge work" or commonplacing, the word was used with respect to one's storehouse of knowledge itself and not one's attention. Some of the effect is the result of the break in historical tradition being passed down from one generation to another. It's also an indication that the shift in value has moved not from what one knows or has, but that the attention itself is more valued now, even in a book about excerpting, thinking, and keeping knowledge!

      Oh how far we have fallen!

      It's also an indication of the extremes of information overload we're facing that the treasure is attention and not the small tidbits of knowledge and understanding we're able to glean from the massive volumes we face on a daily basis.

    1. By looking at practices of note-taking for their ownsake we can get a better idea of how people performed intellectual work in the past, what caughttheir attention and how they moved from reading to producing a finished work, often via note-taking.
    1. Other PKM forums, places to discuss?

      reply to u/deafpolygon at https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/121ihrj/other_pkm_forums_places_to_discuss/

      The space is fragmented broadly by both tools (some with specific workflows) and philosophies, so you may have to hunt/peck (or subscribe/filter) for the types of pieces you're searching for. Here's some resources you might appreciate. In the fora section things are ordered roughly by relation to the topic as well as frequency of posting/activity.

      Fora

      Sites

      Discord

      For some communities like Obsidian, Logseq, etc. you're also likely to find discord servers with some reasonable sub-channels and activity as well. A good non-product specific Discord with related material is The Productivists at https://discord.gg/m2bP2hh3. There's also one for Zettelkasten https://discord.gg/bYrVm9sr.

      And of course as you visit all these locales, be sure to mention r/PKMS and maybe more will learn that this location is a better catch-all for in-depth conversations and questions.

    1. "Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit"

      reply to jameslongley at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2532/personal-knowledge-management-is-bullshit

      I find that these sorts of articles against the variety of practices have one thing in common: the writer fails to state a solid and realistic reason for why they got into it in the first place. They either have no reason "why" or, perhaps, just as often have all-the-reasons "why", which may be worse. Much of this is bound up in the sort of signaling and consumption which @Sascha outlines in point C (above).

      Perhaps of interest, there are a large number of Hypothes.is annotations on that original article written by a variety of sense-makers with whom I am familiar. See: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/ Of note, many come from various note making traditions including: commonplace books, bloggers, writers, wiki creators, zettelkasten, digital gardening, writers, thinkers, etc., so they give a broader and relatively diverse perspective. If I were pressed to say what most of them have in common philosophically, I'd say it was ownership of their thought.

      Perhaps it's just a point of anecdotal evidence, but I've been noticing that who write about or use the phrase "personal knowledge management" are ones who come at the space without an actual practice or point of view on what they're doing and why—they are either (trying to be) influencers or influencees.

      Fortunately it is entirely possible to "fake it until you make it" here, but it helps to have an idea of what you're trying to make.

    1. “increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5)
      • Quote
        • increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is
        • (Hoffman 2015:5).
    2. If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled” (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

      //Quote - If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled - (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

    3. “increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5).

      // quote - increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” - (Hoffman 2015:5). - The wealth of information available on the internet and through social media does not make us better informed, but simply makes us more certain that we are right - (Hoffman 2015:45)

    1. Learning has to be knowledge. 00:10:07 And learning has to be based on understanding. And what you understand you can absorb, internalize and it becomes knowledge. What you know, you don't forget. You can block something that you know, but not forget.