Project Tailwind by Steven Johnson

https://mem.ai/

I've had this on a list for ages, but never put into my digital notes...

https://xtiles.app/6249b3f811d8db0dcd173512

Fascinating to see an xTiles page named "competitive analysis", but an interesting example of "eating their own dogfood" to make it.

Introducing BOOX Tab Ultra C: Let the Colors Help You Work Better

They're primarily touting one of the few e-ink tablets that does color (beginning in 2023), but it's fascinating to see the Boox marketing department using this video to sell the idea of color on a screen as a tool for thought this way.

It's subtle and something we take for granted, so they have a point, but somehow odd none the less, perhaps because of its ubiquity.

Let the colors help you think, organize, and work better.

Let the colors help you work better.

Colors inspire

How To Use The ACE Framework This Week

ACE Framework - Add - Connect - Express

yet another acronym

hmmm... because... as a tool for building/developing thoughts

Commonplacing, florilegia, anthologies, miscellanies, zettelkasten are a ratchet for thinking.

Too many go too deep into the idea of "atomic notes" without either questioning or realizing their use case. What is your purpose in having atomic notes? Most writing about them online talk about the theoretical without addressing the underlying "why".

They're great for capturing things on the go and having the ability to re-arrange and reuse them into much larger works. Often once you've used them a few times, they're less useful, specially for the average person. (Of course it's another matter if you're an academic researcher, they're probably your bread and butter.) For the beekeepers of the world who need some quick tidbits which they use frequently, then keeping them in a larger outlined document or file is really more than enough. Of course, if you're creating some longer book-length treatise on beekeeping, then it can be incredibly helpful to have them at atomic length.

There's a spectrum from the small atomic note to the longer length file (or even book). Ask yourself, "what's your goal in having one or the other, or something in between?" They're tools, choose the best one for your needs.

Hypothesis Animated Intro, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCkm0lL-6lc.

This was an early animation for Hypothes.is as a tool. It was on one of their early homepages and is (still) a pretty good encapsulation of what they do and who they are as a tool for thought.

We need more scholarship which leaves open thinking spaces for future scholars.

Correcting a text within a digital archive or database allows the change to propagate to all portions of the collection compared with a physical card index which has the hurdle of multiple storage and requires manual changes on all of the associated copies.

This sort of affordance can be seen in more modern note taking tools like Obsidian which does this sort of work with global search and replace of double bracketed words which change everywhere in the collection.

Wigent, William David, Burton David William Housel, and Edward Harry Gilman. Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office System. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1916. http://archive.org/details/modernfilingate02compgoog.

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. FAccT ’21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

Would the argument here for stochastic parrots also potentially apply to or could it be abstracted to Markov monkeys?

ChatGPT as an instrument that allows one to play text like an instrument.

Sounds fascinating<br /> - https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/jeffersonian-dinners/ - https://jeffersondinner.org/jefferson-dinner/

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

Vintage Library Card Sorter, Gaylord Brothers, A to Z Organizer, Wall Mount

Little Machines in Your Zettelkasten<br /> by Sascha Fast

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt

Bad analogies can lead to poor decisions.

reply to u/laystitcher at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11ay28d/how_did_you_teach_yourself_zettelkasten/

Roughly in order: - Sixth grade social studies class assignment that used a "traditional" index card-based note taking system. - Years of annotating books - Years of blogging - Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001. - Locke, John, 1632-1704. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. 1685. Reprint, London, 1706. https://archive.org/details/gu_newmethodmaki00lock/mode/2up. - Erasmus, Desiderius. Literary and Educational Writings, 1 and 2. Edited by Craig R. Thompson. Vol. 23 & 24. Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1978. https://utorontopress.com/9781487520731/collected-works-of-erasmus. - Kuehn, Manfred. Taking Note, A blog on the nature of note-taking. December 2007 - December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181224085859/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/ - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. - Webb, Beatrice Potter. Appendix C of My Apprenticeship. First Edition. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926. - Schmidt, Johannes F. K. “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.” Sociologica 12, no. 1 (July 26, 2018): 53–60. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8350. - Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October 112, no. Spring (2005): 35–44. - Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 7–30. - 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. - Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.

And many, many others as I'm a student of intellectual history.... If you want to go spelunking on some of my public notes, perhaps this is an interesting place to start: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22note+taking%22 I also keep a reasonable public bibliography on this and related areas: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought

relation to Note taking problem and proposed solution?

This seems to be a common reality and/or fear.

We tend to think in terms of our tools.<br /> ᔥ Christian Tietze in Eco's 'How to Write a Thesis' Available in English at 2015-03-17<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:26:16)

Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world | Aeon Essays<br /> by Stephen Muecke

Mull on this...

Döring, Tanja, and Steffi Beckhaus. “The Card Box at Hand: Exploring the Potentials of a Paper-Based Tangible Interface for Education and Research in Art History.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, 87–90. TEI ’07. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1145/1226969.1226986.

This looks fascinating with respect to note taking and subsequent arranging, outlining, and use of notes in human computer interaction space for creating usable user interfaces.

Deepdwn

Markdown editor and organizer for Windows, Mac and Linux

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.

The writing of a thesis is a shock to many specifically because information overload has not only gotten worse, but because the underlying historical method of doing so has either been removed from the educational equation or so heavily watered down that students don't think to use it.

When I think and write about "note taking" I'm doing it in a subtly different way and method than how it seems to be used in common parlance. Most seem to use it solely for information extraction and as a memory crutch which they may or may not revisit to memorize or use and then throw away. I do it for some of these reasons, but my practice goes far beyond this for generating new ideas, mixing up ideas creatively, and for writing. Note reuse seems to be the thing missing from the equation. It also coincidentally was the reason I quit taking notes in college.

If I were going to use an AI, I'd want to plugin and give massive priority to my commonplace book and personal notes followed by the materials I've read, watched, and listened to secondarily.

The interface of Wordcraft sounds like some of that interface that note takers and thinkers in the tools for thought space would appreciate in their

Rather than pairing it with artificial intelligence and prompts for specific writing tasks, one might pair tools for though interfaces with specific thinking tasks related to elaboration and continuation. Examples of these might be gleaned from lists like Project Zero's thinking routines: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

The sense of writing partner here is similar to that mentioned by Niklas Luhmann in Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account (1981), though in his case his writing partner was a carefully constructed database archive of his past notes.

see: Luhmann, Niklas. “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen: Ein Erfahrungsbericht.” In Öffentliche Meinung und sozialer Wandel / Public Opinion and Social Change, edited by Horst Baier, Hans Mathias Kepplinger, and Kurt Reumann, 222–28. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-87749-9_19.<br /> translation at https://web.archive.org/web/20150825031821/http://scriptogr.am/kuehnm.

https://zettels.info/en/int/default.asp

A digital note taking product

ᔥ[[Frank Berzbach]] in Künstliche Intelligenz aus Holz - sciencegarden - Magazin für junge Forschung at 2002-06-30<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-10 06:59:08)<br /> where he referred to it as "A free online Zettelkasten by Joachim Richter"

What are the differences and affordances in moving from cadavre exquis to Eno/Schmidt's Oblique Strategies to ChatGPT?

When jargon or argot points to "coherent phenomenon" or provides a taxonomic purpose, it can be useful beyond its alternate function of gatekeeping areas of thought.

reply to stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/comment/j6x52ce/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Luhmann often used the shorthand of red numbers to indicate a link to nearby card in the current branch/stem, which Scott Scheper calls "stemlinks" in Antinet Zettelkasten (2022) p234. So, for example, on card ZKII 9/8 there is a red "1" which indicates the branching card ZKII 9/8,1. Scott uses a more computer science oriented notation of "/1" to indicate this as if he were traversing up or down a folder structure. Since there isn't really a (useful) idea of a root or home folder, and one wouldn't often want to refer to their zettelkasten itself, one might consider using the solidus "/" to indicate the current card? I personally do this, but not very frequently, though I might do it more often with respect to indicating argumentation within and among other cards.

Some languages have location/proximity identifiers or markers (similar to here/there/over there). I'll sometimes use the Japanese markers (ko-so-a-do) as shorthand to provide rough approximation of idea relationships particularly when I have open questions. (example: kore, sore, are, dore -> this one, that one, that one over there, which one?) Many ideas are marked あ to indicate "just out of reach" or "needs additional thought". When ideas are adjacent or nearby, but by happenstance are relatively far away within my ZK (with respect to physical card distance in the box) they'll be pre-pended like こ/510/4b/3 (aka "ko"/510/4b/3).

https://twitter.com/elzr

Attendee at Tools for Thought Rocks event https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0

Interested in homoiconic spreadsheets. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9uZlEqUQw0

https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0

I attended this live this morning from 9:20 - 10:45 AM

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

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

link to Toki Pona as a conlang

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

https://www.toptools4learning.com/

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2022

https://wildrye.com/roundup-of-67-tools-for-thought-to-build-your-second-brain/

List of tools for thought apps

https://wildrye.com/tools-for-thought-need-a-purpose/

https://www.catholic.org/saints/patron.php

Potential patron saints of note takers, writers, knowledge workers, tools for thought, etc.

• Apothecaries - Cosmas and Damian
• archives - Laurent (Lawrence)
• archivists, librarians, libraries - Catherine of Alexandria, Jerome, Laurent (Lawrence)
• cabinetmakers - Anne, Joseph, Vincent de Paul
• contemplatives, contemplative life - John of the Cross, Mary Magdalene
• Craftworkers - Luke
• Editors John Bosco, Francis de Sales
• enlightenment - Holy Spirit, Our Lady of Good Counsel
• file makers - Theodosius the Cenobriarch
• Information Workers - Archangel Gabriel
• inquisitors - Peter of Verona
• Joiners - Joseph, Thomas, Apostle
• knowledge - Holy Spirit
• Learning - Ambrose, Catherine of Alexandria
• liberal arts - Catherine of Bologna
• linguists - Gotteschalk
• net makers - Peter the Apostle
• Notaries - Luke, Mark, Ivo of Kermartin
• pencil makers - Thomas Aquinas
• Scholars - Bridgid of Ireland, Thomas Aquinas
• scribes - Catherine of Alexandria
• Shorthand writers - Cassian of Imola
• Students - Catherine of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas, Gabriel Possenti
• Students (examinees) - Joseph of Cupertino

Andy is Adapting the approach of zettelkasten writer Christian Tietze

Andy suggests taking a step back and clustering annotations into piles or using a mind map or visualisations to identify common themes.

I wonder if this is a bit overkill for the number of notes I tend to take or a sign that I'm not taking enough notes?

What tools are out there that could integrate with my stack and help me do this.

Verbatim notes are not the goal.

The idea of note taking as a means of sensemaking and understanding is underlined in an 1892 article in a shorthand magazine whose general purpose was to encourage shorthand and increasing one's writing speed, often to create verbatim records:

To be useful, the notes taken at medical lectures should be a summary only; no attempt should be made to take a verbatim report.

https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

Weird Old Book Finder: http://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me/

https://tressel.xyz/

Tressel, a paid tool roughly like Readwise.io

Reminder to revisit this to write a related essay

Wiki is better than email http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-better-than-email

See also: https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design

"they" = "notes"

https://treeverse.app/

Treeverse is a tool for visualizing and navigating Twitter conversation threads.<br /> It is available as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.

https://wiki.rel8.dev/tools_for_thinking_podcast

see also: https://www.betaworks.com/media

After Ahrens' book I see an awful lot of people talking about "processing" books. There are too many assumptions about what this can mean and this hides many levels of inherent work involved in analyzing and synthesizing knowledge. I would suggest that we're better off talking about reading them, annotating, excerpting, and thinking about them, or maybe writing about and combining them with other knowledge than "processing" them.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Mount</span> in Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought | MZLabs (<time class='dt-published'>11/30/2022 13:11:31</time>)</cite></small>

Read 2022-12-31

https://mochi.cards

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Fernando Borretti</span> in Unbundling Tools for Thought (<time class='dt-published'>12/29/2022 15:59:17</time>)</cite></small>

https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought

He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.

Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.

Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.

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

https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/designing-a-workflow-for-thinking

Quick preface of Steven Johnson's forthcoming series of essays on thinking strategies.

As a strategy for avoiding shiny object syndrome, one can make a routine of making a "creative inventory" of one's tools.

There is generally a high switching cost, so tools need to be an order of magnitude more useful, beneficial, or even fun to make it worthwhile.

https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/Stationery.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Mount</span> in Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought | MZLabs (<time class='dt-published'>11/30/2022 13:11:31</time>)</cite></small>

Cleaned up quote:

I think one of the [the] things that really separates us from the high primates is that [uh] we're tool builders. And I read a [uh] study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The Condor used the least energy to move a kilometer and [uh] humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not [not] too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. So [uh] that didn't look so good, but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle blew the Condor away—completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me. [uh] What a computer is to me is: it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.<br /> —Steve Jobs in Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. Documentary. Krainin Productions, 1990.

Snippet from full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

The one shining moment in the whole essay and they don't seem to realize where the benefit or use actually was. They finally had a reason to have taken notes and the ideas shone here. But they've written off the tools because they didn't understand when to use them.

Hammers are cool, but unless you're a professional carpenter, you don't carry it around all the time and use it constantly to hammer things. The same is true of note taking as a tool. You might use it regularly if you're a writer or an academic perhaps, but for hourly use in your day-to-day? Almost definitely not.

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Research_fellowship

Seeing this a bit late...

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1601640985858957312.html

Example of a literature review/research workflow using online repositories (like Google Scholar, Scopus, Clarivate, etc.), Zotero, Research Rabbit, and Obsidian.

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us....

It's interesting because this way of thinking is eminently compatible with the zettelkasten way of thinking e.g. don't necessarily set out with a hypothesis in mind that you're trying to prove but rather explore until something interesting emerges.

http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/

An online version of Howard Rheingold's 1985 book.

https://github.com/shaunabanana/snowball

https://github.com/shaunabanana/intrigue

https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=%E2%80%9CHoward%20Rheingold%E2%80%9D&sort_by_date=0&scope=episode&offset=0&language=Any%20language&len_min=0

reply to Bob Doto on https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/z3f8kb/comment/ixlocl7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Do you have something particular on Saroyam for this? I found The Pronouns by Jackson Mac Low, but only tangential hits on Saroyam.

Similar useful efforts, though not in as clear-cut card format are: * Project Zero's thinking routines: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines * Untools: https://untools.co/

https://untools.co/

Tools for better thinking Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Howard Rheingold</span> in Howard Rheingold: "Y'all know about "Tools for …" - Mastodon (<time class='dt-published'>11/13/2022 17:33:07</time>)</cite></small>

Looks similar to Project Zero https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

https://app.tana.inc/

What sorts of prompts or questions could teachers and learners use on a regular basis, similar to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, to improve their learning environments, creativity, and learning outcomes?

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

So much to unpack here.

Similar to experiments I've seen by Henry James Korn (esp. The Pontoon Manifesto), John Irwin, etc.

Similarities to means of forcing Llullan combinatorial creativity, but in alternate form.

I personally did something akin to this when I was a child sometime between 9 and 12 with our family tape recorder. Did I do so because it was simply a creativity tool, which is generally how I used it, in my environment, or had Brian Eno and others' influences seeped into the culture encouraging this? Where does zeitgeist start and stop?

https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2015/01/22/volcanoes-and-ambiguity/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis </span> in 📑 The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>11/18/2022 19:54:00</time>)</cite></small>

https://theinformed.life/2022/10/23/episode-99-mark-bernstein/

Listened to this yesterday (2022-11-17).

https://dainty-sable-264aa3.netlify.app/project/project_plan

Athens Research is winding down their note taking application.

Potentially the first of more to come?

Athens the OSS project is winding down. The company is still operating, but taking time to reset and explore new ideas. Open to chats and convos. Thanks all ❤️ https://t.co/Y7ROM86WSy

— Jeff Tang 🏛 (Ohio) (@tangjeff0) November 11, 2022

scathing, but broadly true...

Robert Green's definition of creativity sounds like it's related to diffuse thinking processes. read: https://billyoppenheimer.com/august-14-2022/

Often note taking, and reviewing over those notes is more explicit in form for creating new ideas.

Come back to explore these.

https://dainty-sable-264aa3.netlify.app/project/measuring_thinking_tools.html

Openness should be broken out into smaller subsections to highlight the importance of supporting standards as a primary item by itself. Many of these axes are easier, low-hanging fruit that developers will iterate on anyway. Focusing on the harder and more subtle features like standards is a better way to go for the audience that can really use this now.

Many of these axes are better for a commercial market.

What is this editor's actual name?

My first guess is "Tools for Thought", but that can't be right. 🤣

another in a long line of using analogizing thinking to food digestion.... I saw another just earlier today.

Sönke Ahrens roughly quoted this passage or one like it (check the reference), but I criticized it for not being inclusive of indigenous people or oral methods. Luhmann, however, went further and was at least passively more inclusive by saying that one needs to be able to "notch differences" to be able to think, and this is a much better framing.

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

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

https://www.indxd.ink/

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

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

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

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

https://www.explainpaper.com/

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

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

cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

https://natto.dev/invite/nHQEKx_T

Demo page for Tools for Thought Rocks!

https://www.val.town/

Val Town is a collaborative notebook for APIs

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

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