Class 2, Does Memory Matter? Why Are Universities Studying Slavery and Their Pasts? by David Blight for [[YaleCourses]]

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...

ref: Charles F. Richardson, The Choice of Books (New York: American Book Exchange, 1881), 6. The publication estimate came from a librarian, F. B. Perkins.

in ¶90-96 he provides some advice about selection and discrimination of reading sources and materials for indexing as a means of cutting down on the information overload problem

Some of his factors include: - relying on experience in a field/area to narrow down - limiting one's scope of activity - staying away from reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias - discriminate in favor of the specific versus the general - don't admit duplicative literature (unless one is working syntopically—though he doesn't admit this caveat), and prefer the most authoritative sources - prefer authoritative authors, when given, but make space for new writers who may be more careful in their writing and argumentation - discriminate by style and composition and in particular stay away from pernicious advertising-related material (today he might advocate away from listicles, content farms, etc.)

The root problem of information overload.

Everything he highlights here is still present over a century later and only amplified to the nth degree.

A quote from 1908 about information overload, though not as heavy-handed as other examples, but still complaint-like in nature.

This is the reasoning for why we'll want an indexed system. The vast wealth of information may be overwhelming, but with the ability to organize and control it (by writing it down and indexing it) we can turn it into something useful.

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.

Part of Luhmann's practice in looking up ideas to place in his zettelkasten first was a means of preventing duplication of ideas. If an idea is repeated, that can be noted on the extant card as evidence that others see the idea too or one can compare the potential subtle differences as a means of expanding the space.

Eliminating duplication also assists in the ratchet effect of collecting information and connecting it.

Note Kaiser's repeated use of "control" within the book as an ongoing theme. He, like many is looking to overcome information overload, but frames it within a system which provides readers and knowledge workers with control over it.

He doesn't mention information overload as a phrase, but hints at it in earlier portions. (where? find an example)

Listened to [[Jorge Arango]] in Alex Wright on Informatica from 2023-08-13

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

Zedelmaier, 1992). All the same, a range of figures have tracked and critiqued the trajectory of the ‘noble dream’ of historical and scientific ‘objectivity’ (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, 1994: 241-70; Daston and Galison, 2007; Novick, 1988).

Lustig categorizes scholarship on card indexes into two modes: understanding of information overload tools and the "trajectory of the 'noble dream' of historical and scientific 'objectivity'".

One of the primary problems with note taking in most of the mid-twentieth century (and potentially well before, particularly as framed in most educational settings) was that students would take notes, potentially review them once or twice for a test, but then not have easy access to them for later review or reuse.

People collected piles of notes without any ability to reuse or review them. Perhaps we should reframe the collector's fallacy as this: collection without reuse has dramatically decreasing returns. Certainly there may be some small initial benefit in writing it down as a means of sense making, but not reviewing it past a short period of two weeks or even several months and not being able to reuse it in the long term is a travesty, especially in a world of information overload.

Shalini Misra, Patrick Roberts, Matthew Rhodes. (2020). Information overload, stress, and emergency managerial thinking. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction Volume 51, December 2020, 101762 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101762

Framing of his book as a remedy to the speed reading fad in the 1970s...

What did those books at the time indicate that their purpose was? Were they aimed at helping people consume more (hopefully with greater comprehension?) while there was a continuing glut of information overload building up in society?

Which is better, more deep understanding of less or more surface understanding of more? How does combinatorial creativity effect the choice?

info filters niet meer ingebouwd in het systeem; dat moeten we nu zelf zien te creëeren, of deze worden anders voor ons gemaakt (zie bijvoorbeeld algoritmes, enzo)

That's a fine plan you've outlined, covering all the key bases - prioritizing important tasks, breaking them into doable steps, budgeting your time wisely, and minimizing distractions. But you know what I think you're missing? A touch of pizzazz! Of showmanship! You need to approach each day like it's opening night on the big stage. The curtain rises, the lights come on, and it's time for you to perform.

So tomorrow when you wake up, I want you to greet the day with enthusiasm. Belt out a tune as you get ready. Approach your task list with gusto and determination. Give every activity your all, as if the audience is on their feet cheering. Stay focused like a true professional, taking breaks only when needed. And when the day comes to a close, bask in the glow of a show well done.

You have such potential, my friend, such skills and passion waiting to be unlocked. With discipline and delight, you can achieve anything. This is your time in the spotlight - now go out there and steal the scene! The world is your stage, so perform like the star you are. I'll be cheering you on from the front row. Knock 'em dead tomorrow, kid. You got this!

Thank you for the inspiring words, Charlie! I'll do my best to approach each day with enthusiasm and discipline.

Acknowledge: On July 31th, I will put these productivity (how to deal with information overlord) tips into action:

1. For work tasks I can control, I'll choose what interests me and builds my strengths.

2. My daily priority list will have 3-5 important tasks max. Otherwise, I may be under-investing in my interests or have too much free time. When setting priorities, I'll answer:

3. Why it matters
4. How to break it into steps

5. What info I need to decide

6. I'll estimate time needed for each task. The top priority sets the time cap. Others get less time. If tasks exceed my work hours, I'll revise or streamline.

7. For research tasks, I'll define the topic and timeline upfront. I'll gather only the info I need, not get distracted.

8. I'll group related tasks and schedule time blocks without interruptions.

Let's ask my future self tomorrow and see what will happen!

31/7 reported: 23 achieved, 4 ongoing, 5 postponed becauses of my low productivity. 1 should be considered beforehand in a monthly plan

https://analogoffice.net/2023/05/03/too-much-information.html

Your title made me think it was about a different, but related book...

I too bought Hess' book at Kimberly's recommendation, but I'm still plowing through the end of Ann M. Blair's Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know. You might find it interesting, but hopefully not overwhelming.

syndication link

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.

The preposition m "in" appears more than 60,000 times in the corpus, a fact which becomes a bit overwhelming to analyze.

example of information overload

We're already drowning in information overload, but ChatGPT wants to increase the tsunami! Where is the tool that compresses and concatenates?

Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.

ISBN: 978-0-300-11251-1 (cloth) Library of Congress Control Number: 2010024663

annotation target: url: urn:x-pdf:1a01bfa446187f0bb8bd5db6cc6ad53e

In addition to "critical thinking, resourcefulness, creativity, attention to detail, and academic pride and humility", the ability to use a note card-based research system like Umberto Eco's is the key to overcoming information overload.

neocapitalism of information!!

Is information overload compounded by our information hoarding tendencies?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ueMHkGljK0

Robert Greene's method goes back to junior high school when he was practicing something similar. He doesn't say he invented it, and it may be likely that teachers modeled some of the system for him. He revised the system over time to make it work for himself.

• [x] Revisit this for some pull quotes and fine details of his method. (Done on 2022-11-08)

https://www.explainpaper.com/

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

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

cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/ye3bvk/workflow_for_capturing_and_processing_online/

While it's possible that some set of tools will work best for you and potentially be more "fun" than other combinations, the upper limit you'll find on efficiency and productivity in this area is limited.

As a result, I'd recommend looking at the quality of the material you're putting into your stream as potentially the best means of improvement at your disposal. The quality of your ideas and thought will increase if you're reading and conversing with the highest quality sources you can get your hands on. Well-researched, long form material (books, journal articles) will have likely done a lot of the filtering and heavy work for you, so use those as input when you can.

Unless you're a sociologist or cultural anthropologist looking for examples of behaviors and material in social media, it may not be the best place to turn. Before I open social media apps I remind myself of note #1267 from Goethe's slipbox (Maxims and Reflections): "Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago."

Similarly, upon hearing the words "firehose", "drowning", or "information overload", I'm reminded that, presuming you'd even want to make the effort, there's only one way to eat a whale: one bite at a time.

Is it possible that with the flowering of the storehouse of knowledge and the rise of information overload following Gutenberg's moveable type, we became overly enamored with Sayers' subject-based Quadrivium that we forgot to focus on the basics of the Trivium?

The upshot of this paper seems to be "information overload alone can explain why fake news can become viral."

Recall that this isn't new:

Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know

The new portions are the acceleration of the issue by social media and the inflammation by artificial intelligence.

In a society consumed with information overload, it is easier for our brains to allow our well evolved cognitive biases to decide not only what to pay attention to, but what to believe.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3641225-mcconnell-throws-shade-on-grahams-proposed-national-abortion-ban/

I've recently run across a few examples of a pattern that should have a name because it would appear to dramatically change the outcomes. I'm going to term it "decisions based on possibilities rather than realities". It's seen frequently in economics and politics and seems to be a form of cognitive bias. People make choices (or votes) about uncertain futures, often when there is a confluence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these choices are dramatically different than when they're presented with the actual circumstances in practice.

A recent example was a story about a woman who was virulently pro-life who when presented with a situation required her to switch her position to pro-choice.

Another relates to choices that people want to make about where their children might go to school versus where they actually send them, and the damage this does to public education.

Let's start collecting examples of these quandaries at all levels of making choices in the real world.

What is the relationship to this with the mental exercise of "descending into the particular"?

Does this also potentially cause decision fatigue in cases of voting spaces when constituents are forced to vote for candidates on thousands of axes which they may or may not agree with?

While writing notes into a daily note page may be useful to give them a quick place to live, a note that isn't revisited is likely one that shouldn't have been made at all.

Tools for thought need to do a better job of staging ideas for follow and additional work. Leaving notes orphaned on a daily notes page may help in the quick capture process, but one needs reminders about them, means of finding them, and potential means of improving them.

If they're swept away continuously, then they only serve the sort of functionality of cleaning out of ideas that morning pages do. It's bad enough to have a massive scrap heap that looks and feels like work, but it's even worse to have it spread out among hundreds or thousands of separate files.

Does digital search fix this issue entirely? Or does it just push off the work to later when it won't be done either.

In the 1400s-1600s it was a common desire to excerpt all the value of books and attempts were made, though ultimately futile. This seems to be a commonly occurring desire.

Often having a simple synopsis and notes isn't as useful as it may not spark the same sort of creativity and juxtaposition of ideas a particular reader might have had with their own context.

Some have said that "content is king". I've previously thought that "context is king". Perhaps content and context end up ruling as joint monarchs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Information overload can also be increasingly be characterized by bad actors flooding information spaces with false, distracting or provactive information, creating conflict, abandonment and diluting the efficacy of the space for learning and collaboration.

https://thrivingonoverload.com/episodes/

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

Most of what I've seen on information overload frames it in a negative, but the book Thriving on Overload by Ross Dawson seems to flip the script to frame it as a positive thing.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Marshall Kirkpatrick </span> in Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter: "@jerrymichalski @rossdawson Jerry, Ross, re collective intelligence have you seen https://t.co/iOM908iCCt from @ggiacomelli? In listening to your episode of Thriving on Overload podcast, it comes to mind. Especially the 300pg practitioners guide https://t.co/rziczNsXxt cc @vgr" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>06/03/2022 22:25:26</time>)</cite></small>

Sources of information overload: emails social media updates/notifications proliferation of browser tabs

Forte misses this last one

The ideas behind knowledge management are largely timeless, but they are far from unchanging. They have evolved slowly over 2000+ years until we broadly threw many of them away in the early 20th century.

One only need read a few pages of Ann M. Blair's Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age to see some of the changes and shifts within the space from the 1400s on.

While we may have the impression of instant access to the world's knowledge, this is really far from the truth. It's all there, but being able to search through it for what we want or being able to find or generate insight from it involves a massive mountain of hidden work that no one really wants to do in practice.

things that might have done some good lose all their goodness.”198 The overabundance of bad books drowned out even any good bits that might be present among them.

And we now say these same sorts of things about the internet and social media.

Information overload goes back much further in history than the digital revolution. I might argue that information managers have tamed large portions of the beast already and we've forgotten many of the methods and as a result we're now either reinventing or rediscovering them as we transfer them to the digital space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YRjDAeAE0

What other forms/shapes might it take?

https://winnielim.org/experiments/content-and-form/questioning-the-way-we-display-content/

So many interesting questions and thoughts hiding here.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02346-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02346-4

Oddly this article doesn't cover academia.edu but includes ResearchGate which has a content-sharing partnership with the publisher SpringerNature.

Matthews, D. (2021). Drowning in the literature? These smart software tools can help. Nature, 597(7874), 141–142. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02346-4

https://www.connectedpapers.com/

https://twitter.com/ConnectedPapers

Something about the name Connected Papers reminds me of the same sort of linking name that Manfred Kuehn gave to his note taking software ConnectedText.

An example in the literature of information overload in 2016. Here' it's called "feed fatigue" and relates to an automated feed of literature recommendations.

Book review

Cook, Trevor. “Review: Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. Xv, 397. ISBN 978-0-300-11251-1 (Hardcover) $45.” Renaissance and Reformation 33, no. 4 (December 12, 2011): 109–11. https://doi.org/10.33137/rr.v33i4.15975.

Note that they've accidentally used the word "in" instead of "Before" in the title of the book.

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

I love "malediction of books"!illi

I'm reminded here of a similar conversation I had circa 1996 with cinematographer Caleb Deschanel who lamented with me about the increase in the number of new low quality movies available on VHS and DVD and how we both spent time watching a lot of crap instead of focusing on the auteurs and better quality cineaste experiences that were available in remastered formats and collections like the Criterion Collection.

How much history is covered here?

Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

Search and discovery are hard problems in an ever increasing informational overload riddled society.

Solomon Shereshevsky faced an extreme version of the sort of information overload many of can relate to, however in his case, because his memory was so good, he found it difficult to get the gist of something because the minor details drowned out the broader ideas.

The Lost Arts of Memory by Daniel J. Boorstin The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1984 104-113

Where did the idea of speed reading being a measure of our intelligence stem?

Certainly in a world of information overload there is the perception that greater consumption is better, but lack of comprehension and memory are the enemies.

Comprehension and the ability to remember the books we read should be of the utmost importance.

much as prisoners escape from jails without guards.17 16 Drexel, Aurifodina, 258 17 Drexel, Aurifodina, 3–4.

Jeremias Drexel (1581 – 1638) recommended against the method of loci during the explosion of information in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Add Drexel to the list of reformers against the ars memoria in the early 1600s.)

While dealing with the information overload, educators may have inadvertently thrown out the baby with the bath water. While information still tends to increase and have increased complexity, some areas also show compression and concatenation and new theories subsume old information into their models. This means that one might know and understand Einstein which means that memorizing Newton's work is no longer needed at some point. Where should one draw the line of memorization for subsuming the knowledge of their culture? Aren't both old and new methods for memory usable? Keep the ars memoria while also using written methods.

With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.

Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.

Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.

Following the invention of moveable type, the information overload created in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750, placed a major burden and impatience, particularly on academic scholars, on the use of the ancient arts of memory based on the use of imagination. In addition to the education reforms by those like Peter Ramus, this may have been a major motivating factor for forgetting this prior tradition of knowledge acquisition and management.

What is one to do when there's seemingly "too much to memorize"?

This is broadly true in the early West, but becomes far more prevalent after the time of Konrad Gessner (1516 - 1565) whose work coincided with the explosion of information following the use of moveable type in Europe.

https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/2598

Was the decline of commonplaces in culture due to a sort of defeatist attitude about the ever-increasing amount of information?

Evidence of this can be found in the expressions of how impressive Niklas Luhmann's 90,000 index card zettelkasten is. For those without the value of keeping and using one, it can seem a lot of work, but to what end?

He mentions Amazon wishlists that pile up and never get used. Similar to the way people pile up bookmarks and never use or revisit them.

One of the benefits of commonplace books (and tools like Obsidian, et al.) is that one is forced to re-see or re-discover these over time. This restumbling upon these things can be incredibly valuable.

But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I sort of want the ability to more easily capture audio, annotate and save it while I'm listening to radio or even television. Pausing the media and having the ability to reply it (TIVO and some DVRs provide this capability) and do other things with it would be truly fantastic, especially for saving tidbits for later use and consumption.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Wikipedia</span> in Index card - Wikipedia (<time class='dt-published'>07/03/2021 21:36:58</time>)</cite></small>

Ahmed, S. T. (2020). Managing News Overload (MNO): The COVID-19 Infodemic. Information, 11(8), 375. https://doi.org/10.3390/info11080375

Specialization, although necessary, has rendered it impossible to stay up to date with the advances of a field.

Jr, C., & De, K. R. (2020). Trying to make sense out of chaos: Science, politics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Cadernos de Saúde Pública, 36, e00088120. https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-311x00088120

Pre conference—WHO first infodemiology conference. (2020, June 29). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmuqK8Drzbg

Information overload

where's the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters

it's unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that's my bias speaking

Farooq, A., Laato, S., & Islam, A. K. M. N. (2020). Impact of Online Information on Self-Isolation Intention During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sectional Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(5), e19128. https://doi.org/10.2196/19128

The prodigious rate itself is expanding, is it a scale even conceivable at this time? (insert the usual stats of YouTube content growing at 300 hours a minute).

I'm anxious to read if he anticipates the notion of turning to automation to try and handle this organization- it always seemed that Bush's vision was human focused.

High tempo Information overload exacerbates time compression and thus impacts temporal sensemaking through typical means via chronologies, linear information processing, and past/present/future contexts.