https://triz.org/principles/

http://www.tricki.org/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?

Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

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

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

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

— Matty Illustration (@MN_illustration) June 30, 2022

cc: https://twitter.com/marshallk

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

Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://thebrain.com/

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

https://thrivingonoverload.com/episodes/

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

https://twitter.com/augmented_CI

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

This wording seems quite profound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F*ck! I've been scooped!

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

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

Active reading to the extreme!

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

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

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

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

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

I want to know the source of the quote.

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

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>@phonetonote </span> in scott on Twitter: "tools for thought will continue to work better if we make them interoperable. to continue on this journey, please join the discussion on github — https://t.co/kpOF0gAgqO and a thank you to @davewiner for getting this project (and a few others :) ) off the ground" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2022 21:13:19</time>)</cite></small>

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

https://www.edvo.com/

Beta app for note taking/productivity.

https://heptabase.com/

A visual note-taking tool for learning complex topics. (YC W22)

This is a fine sentiment, but a networked version of wikilinks is bound to cause conflicts in folksonomies and issues with sourcing and verifiability. The potential for context collapse is potentially too great to have these scale for this type of knowledge production. One would need to have trusted groups to create usefulness. Search at scale for these is likely to be at issue as well.

Are the affordances beyond the local scale really any better than current web technologies? What about the potential effects on the commons?

https://www.athensresearch.org/

I've got Athens in my list of apps somewhere already...

What are the differences in the affordances of handwritten notes versus digital notes? Worth making a complete list.

One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.

Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."

This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

https://openknowledgemaps.org/

Open Knowledge maps is a visual literature search tool that is based on keywords rather than on a paper's title, author, or DOI. The service was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly communication researcher at Graz University of Technology.

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.

https://www.thunknotes.com/

Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten

Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

Resisting syntagmatic closure

Ideas placed into a card file or zettelkasten resist syntagmatic closure. Even well-formed structures in a card file can accept, expand, and integrate new ideas.

Is a zettelkasten ever done?

Mary Douglas has a fascinating looking text on ring composition, a literary style which puts the meaning of the text in the middle and frames it with the beginning and end which are in parallel.

Texts like the Bible, Homer, and even Tristram Shandy might be looked at from a different perspective with this lens.

Suggested to me by Ann Bergin within the context of The Extended Mind

https://roam.elaptics.co.uk/posts/lfr-letters-from-a-roaman-letter-xxxviii

Orality is a technology or as a tool for thinking.

Q: How many permanent notes did it take before you felt you had a communication partner?

Sönke Ahrens has indicated that the first couple hundred notes are more of a static collection. Then from five hundred notes onward there is a shift and having an index becomes more important. It's only at about one thousand notes that one begins automatically turning to the zettelkasten to find connections. Perhaps it's at this point that the tool begins to look like a communication partner.

link this to the few other examples from others.

The zettelkasten is a tool for thought that forces you to engage more deeply with what you're reading.

https://uxdesign.cc/the-power-of-seeing-only-the-questions-in-a-piece-of-writing-8f486d2c6d7d

I read this last week, but didn't log it. Fascinating tool here.

https://highlighted.app/

Highlighted.app Tagline: "Capture, organize and revisit important parts of your books."

Apple iOS only

State-space exploration and idea combining (systematic pairings) are just modern reimaginings of ideas going back to Raymond Llull and possibly earlier.

Missing reference in this chapter on encouraging gestures as a tool for thought: "idle hands are the devil's workshop".

Could the Bible have been encouraging the use of one's hands for communication??

—Woff-Michael Roth

Actively attempting to express oneself is one of the best methods of evolving one's understanding.

Link this to the ideas related to being forced to actively manufacture the answer to a question is one of the best ways to learn.

Should active reading, thinking, and annotating also include making gestures as a means of providing more clear reasoning, and drawing better inferences from one's material?

Would gestural movements with a hand or physical writing be helpful in annotation over digital annotation using typing as an input? Is this related to the anecdotal evidence/research of handwriting being a better method of note taking over typing?

Could products like Hypothes.is or Diigo benefit from the use of digital pens on screens as a means of improving learning over using a mouse and a keyboard to highlight and annotate?

https://only-the-questions.glitch.me/

A tool for extracting all the questions out of a particular text.

Via: https://uxdesign.cc/the-power-of-seeing-only-the-questions-in-a-piece-of-writing-8f486d2c6d7d

Link to [[searching for questions while reading]]

Google translation:

9/8g The Zettelkasten technique is based on experience: You can't think without writing—at least not in contexts that require selective access to memory.

That also means: you can't think without notching differences.

There's something interesting about the translation here of "notching" occurring on an index card about ideas which can be linked to the early computer science version of edge-notched cards. Could this have been a subtle and tangential reference to just this sort of computing?

The idea isn't new to me, but in the last phrase Luhmann tangentially highlights the value of the zettelkasten for more easily and directly comparing and contrasting the ideas on two different cards which might be either linked or juxtaposed.

Link to:

• Graeber and Wengrow ideas of storytelling

• Shield of Achilles and ekphrasis thesis

• https://hypothes.is/a/I-VY-HyfEeyjIC_pm7NF7Q With the further context of the full quote including "with selective access to memory" Luhmann seemed to at least to make space (if not give a tacit nod?) to oral traditions which had methods for access to memories in ways that modern literates don't typically give any credit at all. Johannes F.K .Schmidt certainly didn't and actively erased it in Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.

Scrivener and its community are an example of a tool for thought being thought of as a magical tool potentially without people thinking about what the tool is doing that makes things so dramatically different.

This article is written in 2017 just before the expansion of the zettelkasten craze in various social media spaces.

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

The forms of thinking, writing, and elaboration that go into creating permanent notes for a slip box are natural means of facilitating actual, long-term learning.

Elaboration is thinking deeply about the meaning of what we've read, how it could inform or answer different questions, and how it can be linked or combined with other knowledge. It is one of the best-researched and most successful learning methods. While it seems to have some subtle differences, it sounds broadly similar to the Feynman technique and is related to the idea of writing questions based on one's notes in the Cornell note taking method.

The Cornell notes practice of writing questions in the empty left column as a means of testing knowledge can be an effective tool after taking notes to ensure that one has actually learned and understood the broad concepts. They can also be used for spaced repetition purposes as well.

Valuable though they may be as teaching and learning tools, they don't figure directly into the idea of permanent notes from a zettelkasten perspective.

In modern literate contexts, it is easier to establish doubletalk in oral contexts than it is in written contexts as the written is more easily reviewed for clarity and concreteness. Verbal ticks like "you know what I mean", "it's easy to see/show", and other versions of similar hand-waving arguments that indicate gaps in thinking and arguments are far easier to identify in writing than they are in speech where social pressure may cause the audience to agree without actually following the thread of the argument. Writing certainly allows for timeshiting, but it explicitly also expands time frames for grasping and understanding a full argument in a way not commonly seen in oral settings.

Note that this may not be the case in primarily oral cultures which may take specific steps to mitigate these patterns.

Link this to the anthropology example from Scott M. Lacy of the (Malian?) tribe that made group decisions by repeating a statement from the lowest to the highest and back again to ensure understanding and agreement.

This difference in communication between oral and literate is one which leaders can take advantage of in leading their followers astray. An example is Donald Trump who actively eschewed written communication or even reading in general in favor of oral and highly emotional speech. This generally freed him from the need to make coherent and useful arguments.

Chapter 9 of How to Take Smart Notes looks at some of the psychology research involving attention, multitasking, decision making, willpower, concentration, expertise, planning, to highlight the value of the design and structure of the zettelkasten as a positive tool for helping one to be more productive in their thinking and writing work.

Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

(Summary of Section 9.2)

Properly framed note taking methods are themselves a hermeneutic circle for thinking and creating.

(Gadamer 2004).

All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.

Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

Is there evidence that this is true?

Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.

Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?

By crosslinking one's notes in a hypertext-like manner one is able to give them many different contexts. This linking and context shifting is a solid method for helping one's ideas to have sex with each other as a means of generating new ideas.

Is there a relationship between this idea of context shifting and modality shifting? Are these just examples of building blocks for tools of thought? Are they sifts on different axes? When might they be though of as the same? Compare and contrast this further.

The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.

Whether it's for writing, to do lists, or other productivity spaces, a well designed system is something that one can put their absolute trust into. This allows one to free themselves from the burden of tracking and dealing with minutiae so they can get serious work done.

https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/

An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.

Thinking that the tool will solve a particular problem without knowing what the tool does or how to use it properly will surely set one up for failure. You can use a screwdriver like a hammer, but your results won't be as good as using a hammer and using it properly.

https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis

Analyse the structure of your Obsidian graph using various analysis techniques

At what point could digital tools be said to be thinking? Do they need to be generative? It certainly needs to be on the other side of serendipitously juxtaposing two interesting ideas. One can juxtapose millions of ideas, it's the selection of a tiny subset of these as "better" or more interesting than the others and then building off of that that constitutes this sort of generative thought.

https://vimeo.com/232545219

from: Eyeo Conference 2017

• http://eyeofestival.com/2017/speaker/robin-sloan/
• https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2017/232545219

Description

Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

Notes

Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4

Writing using the adjacent possible.

Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

Open questions

How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

What sources would you use to train your model?

References:

• Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
• Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
• Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
• Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production

Similar statements have been made by others:

I could quote Luhmann on this as well, who thought that "without writing one cannot think," But there is nothing peculiarly "Luhmannian" about this idea. Isaac Asimov is said to have said "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers." And, to give one other example, E. B. White (of "Strunk and White" fame) claimed that "writing is one way to go about thinking." In other words, writing is thinking. And since I do almost all my significant writing in ConnectedText these days, it might be called my "writing environment."—Manfred Kuehn

I think this was Luhmann's full quote:

Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.

(Translation) You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way.

Luhmann’s “you” or "one" in his quote is obviously only a Western cultural referent which erases the existence of oral based cultures which have other ways to do their sophisticated thinking. His ignorant framing on the topic shouldn’t be a shared one. Oral cultures managed to do their thinking through speech and memory.

1. Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8g (my translation).

The act of taking notes helps to focus the mind and one's concentration. This facilitates better and deeper thinking. While he erases oral cultures and those who used mnemonic techniques, Niklas Luhmann said, "without writing, there is no thinking."

Engel calls his system the Caper Star because the "spirited leaps of imagination" are required to help the student on their quest.

72 Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico, 5th ed. (Venice, 1669), 83. On this inven-tion, see also Umberto Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto. Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan, 2007), 45–7.

Emanuele Tesaurio's Indice Categorico was a tool for thought which aimed to discover new information by using metaphors and analogies with respect to the categories or taxonomies so as to draw links between them.

From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.

Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?

How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?

From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?

https://www.goedel.io/p/tools-for-thought-but-not-for-search

Searching for two ingredients in an effort to find a recipe that will allow their use should be de rigueur in a personal knowledge manager, sadly it doesn't appear to be the case.

This sort of simple search not working in these tools is just silly.

They should be able to search across blocks, pages, and even provide graph views to help in this process. Where are all the overlaps of these words within one's database?

https://www.goedel.io/p/tft-performance-methodology?ck_subscriber_id=1372436421

Set up for some experiments in Obsidian, Roam Research, and Logseq to test performance.

How can the idea of agency expansion within games be used as a broader tool?

Rebuilding one's earlier context and switching between apps are tremendous sinks of time and energy when writing, thinking, and creating.

It's better to get as much done as possible in the present so as not to need to do all the work over again later.

There is an interesting difference between artificial intelligence and intelligence automation. Index cards were already doing the second by the early 1940s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnQ8lYcvFU

rewatched

One's native language is one of their most important tools for thought.

Stories are an important way of thinking about and explaining the world. They may also be a potential brain hack.

Note their use here just after Hari has mentioned that connecting with people (often by way of their stories) is a basic human condition and need. Also note that Hari was previously a columnist with a slant, has he realized that this is the better way to convince people of plausible sounding things? Particularly without source, attribution, research, and potentially cherry picking data.

Are we blinding ourselves by telling stories? Particularly without comparison or actual testing?

I saw a book about this topic months ago and need to find it and dig it up.

Developed by Detlef Stern

https://t73f.de/blog/2021/zettelstore_0_1/

https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021193157/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

Manfred Kuehn looks at Karl Kraus' criticism of the idea of a zettelkasten as a tool which can be misused.

Of course this begs the question of what one is using their index card catalog for? Are you using it as a rhetorical thinking and creation device or simply a second memory?

The sentiment that it is impossible to think without writing is patently wrong. While it's an excellent tool, it takes an overly textual perspective and completely ignores the value of orality an memory in prehistory.

Modern culture has lost so many of our valuable cultural resources that we have completely forgotten that they even existed.

Oral cultures certainly had networked thought, Luhmann and others simply can't imagine how it may have worked. We're also blinded by the imagined size of societies in pre-agricultural contexts. The size and scope of cities and city networks makes the history of writing have an outsized appearance.

Further, we don't have solid records of these older netowrks, a major drawback of oral cultures which aren't properly maintained, but this doesn't mean that they didn not exist.

Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

Focusing on literacy as one of the features that makes humanity special is a major flaw. In fact, it is likely our earlier orality and the attendant portions that come with that which made us unique within the animal kingdom. While transmission of knowledge and information may be quicker with literacy and even with computer technology, our ability to cope with it stems first from our orality.

The definition of ownership here is at odds. The person invented the thought, they're just storing it somewhere else that isn't their own brain. This doesn't release ownership necessarily.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/three-layers-structure-zettelkasten/

Could one create a rhyzomatic wiki or similar tool for thought?

This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?

Which direction gives rise to more complexity?

Specifically highlighting that the "focus must be on the 'using', not the 'thing'".

This quote is very reminiscent of John M. Culkin's quote (often misattributed to McLuhan) "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Linus Lee</span> in Towards a research community for better thinking tools | thesephist.com (<time class='dt-published'>12/01/2021 08:23:07</time>)</cite></small>

https://frankmcpherson.blog/2021/12/03/i-think-folks.html

https://thesephist.com/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Frank McPherson</span> in Frankly... (<time class='dt-published'>12/03/2021 12:49:46</time>)</cite></small>

The primary value of the card catalogue and index cards as tools for thought is that it is a self-contained, uniform and mobile carrier that can be arranged and processed based on strict systems of order. Books have many of these properties, but the information isn't as atomic or as easily re-ordered.

https://nowcomment.com/

In a category of tool like Hypothes.is. Worth checking out for UI and functionality.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

What is missing in this train of thought is search. The real challenge is recalling of information easily, whether that is traditional search or something more AI-ish that can uncover connections between items that I don't see myself. What I want is a tool that can search across all my repositories, and that requires either APIs for communication or standard data storage formats. I prefer APis.

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

"The Zettelkasten takes more of my time than the writing of books." —Niklas Luhmann (via vimeo.com/173128404)

Some people complain about the amount of time that working in their zettelkasten or notes may take, and it may take a while, but it is exactly the actual work of creation that takes the longest. The rest of the process is just the copying over and editing.

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?