https://typeshare.co/go-go-golems/posts/nobody-likes-boring-ai-content-how-to-write-unique-marketing-copy-with-chatgpt

Of course this is the basis of keeping a zettelkasten for writing as well. When you can pull up prior ideas as a bank of information to work from, you're never starting from scratch, which is difficult not only for ChatGPT, but for people in general.

Cross reference research on naming "white" things versus naming with a more specific prompt like "white" things in your refrigerator.

https://typeshare.co/go-go-golems/posts/under-the-hood-how-to-use-chatgpts-attention-mechanism-for-better-prompts

Karl Marx. Documentary. Thames Television, 1983. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JkyiHbBhss.

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archive-blog/2023/08/09/archive-senior-studio-projectionist-jim-smith-retires

https://time.com/4503609/shia-labeouf-weird-behavior-timeline/

reply to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5s6aek/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/IamOkei, I know you've got a significant enough practice that not much of what I might suggest may be helpful beyond your own extension of what you've got and how it is or isn't working for you. Perhaps chatting with a zettelkasten therapist may be helpful? Does anyone have "Zettelkasten Whisperer" on a business card yet?! More seriously, I occasionally dump some of my problems and issues into a notebook, unpublished on my blog, or even into a section of my own zettelkasten, which I never index or reconsult, as a helpful practice. Others like Henry David Thoreau have done something like this and there's a common related practice of writing "Morning Pages" that you can explore. My own version is somewhat similar to the idea of rubber duck debugging but focuses on my own work. You might try doing something like this in one of Bob Doto's cohorts or by way of private consulting sessions. Another free version of this could be found by participating in Will's regular weekly posts/threads "Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week" at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/. It's always a welcoming and constructive space. There are also some public and private (I won't out them) Discords where some of the practiced hands chat and commiserate with each other. Even the Obsidian PKM/Zettelkasten Discord channels aren't very Obsidian/digital-focused that you couldn't participate as an analog practitioner. I've even found that participating in book clubs related to some of my interests can be quite helpful in talking out ideas before writing them down. There are certainly options for working out and extending your own practice.

Beyond this, and without knowing more of your specific issues, I can only offer some broad thoughts which expand on some of the earlier discussion above.

I recommend stripping away Scheper's religious fervor, some of which he seems to have thrown over lately along with the idea of a permanent note or "main card" (something I think is a grave mistake), and trying something closer to Luhmann's idea of ZKII.

An alternate method, especially if you like a nice notebook or a particular fountain pen, might be to take all of your basic literature/fleeting notes along with the bibliographic data in a notebook and then just use your analog index cards/slips to make your permanent notes and your index.

Ultimately it's all a lot of the same process, though it may come down to what you want to call it and your broad philosophy. If you're anti-antinet, definitely quit using the verbiage for the framing there and lean toward the words used by Ahrens, Dan Allosso, Gerald Weinberg, Mark Bernstein, Umberto Eco, Beatrice Webb, Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff, or any of the dozens of others or even make up your own. Goodness knows we need a lot more names and categories for types of notes—just like we all need another one page blog post about how the Zettelkasten method works by someone who's been at it for a week. Maybe someone will bring all these authors to terms one day?

Generally once you know what sorts of ideas you're most interested in, you take fewer big notes on administrivia and focus more of your note taking towards your own personal goals and desires. (Taking notes to learn a subject are certainly game, but often they serve little purpose after-the-fact.) You can also focus less on note taking within your entertainment reading (usually a waste) and focusing more heavily on richer material (books and journal articles) that is "above you" in Adler's framing. You might make hundreds of highlights and annotations in a particular book, but only get two or three serious ideas and notes out of it ultimately. Focus on this and leave the rest. If you're aware of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, then spend the majority of your time on the grander permanent notes (10-20%), and a lot less time worrying about the all the rest (the 80-90%).

In the example above relating to Marx, you can breeze through some low level introductory material for context, but nothing is going to beat reading Marx himself a few times. The notes you make on his text will have tremendously more value than the ones you took on the low level context. A corollary to this is that you're highly unlikely to earn a Ph.D. or discover massive insight by reading and taking note posts on Twitter, Medium, or Substack (except possibly unless your work is on the cultural anthropology of those platforms).

A lot of the zettelkasten spaces focus heavily on the note taking part of the process and not enough on the quality of what you're reading and how you're reading it. This portion is possibly more valuable than the note taking piece, but the two should be hand-in-glove and work toward something.

I suspect that most people who have 1000 notes know which five or ten are the most important to where they're going and how they're growing. Focus on those and your "conversations with texts" relating to those. The rest is either low level context for where you're headed or either pure noise/digital exhaust.

If you think of ideas as incunables, which notes will be worth of putting on your tombstone? In other words: What are your "tombstone notes"? (See what I did there? I came up with another name for a type of note, a sin for which I'm certainly going to spend a lot of time in zettelkasten purgatory.)

reply to Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5nzic6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

If you've not come across it before you'll likely find Adler & Van Doren (1972) for reading a useful place to start, especially their idea of syntopical reading. Umberto Eco (2015) is also a good supplement to a lot of the internet-based and Ahrensian ZK material. After those try Mills.

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011. https://amzn.to/45IjBcV. (audiobook available; or a video synopsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c)

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

​

Should it help, I often find that audiobook versions of books or coursework sources like The Great Courses (often free at local libraries, through Hoopla, or other sources), or the highest quality material from YouTube/podcasts listened to at 1.5 - 2x speed while you're walking/commuting can give you quick overviews and/or inspectional reads at a relatively low time cost. Short reminder notes/keywords (to search) while listening can then allow you to do fast searches of the actual texts and/or course guidebooks for excerpting and note making afterwards. Highly selective use of the audiobook bookmarking features let you relisten to short portions as necessary.

As an example, one could do a quick crash course/overview of something like Marx and Communism over a week by quickly listening to all or parts of:

• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-rise-of-communism-from-marx-to-lenin
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/communism-in-power-from-stalin-to-mao
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/legacies-of-great-economists
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/modern-intellectual-tradition-from-descartes-to-derrida

These in combination with sources like Oxford's: Very Short Introduction series book on Marx (which usually have good bibliographies) would allow you to quickly expand into more specialized "handbooks" (Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, Sage) on the subject of Marx and from there into even more technical literature and journal articles. Obviously the deeper you go, the slower things may become depending on the depth you're looking to go.

reply to u/Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/knowledge_that_is_excluded_from_synthesis/

What is your purpose/need/desire to turn all this material into individual zettels or atomic ideas? If you've read the material, taken some literature notes, and reviewed them a bit, don't you broadly now know and understand the methodology? If this is the point and you might only need your notes/outline to review occasionally, then there's nothing else you need to do. If you're comparing other similar methodologies and comparing and contrasting them, then perhaps it's worth breaking some of them out into their own zettels to connect to other things you're working on. Perhaps you're going to write your own book on the topic? Then having better notes on the subject is worthwhile. If you don't have a good reason or gut feeling for why you would want or need to do it, taking hundreds of notes from a book and splitting them all into interconnected atomic notes is solely busy work.

It's completely acceptable to just keep your jumble of literature notes next to your bibliographic entry for potential future reference or quick review if necessary. Perhaps you've gotten everything you need from this source without creating any permanent notes? Or maybe only one or two of the hundreds are actually valuable to your potential long term goals?<br /> It's really only the material you feel that is relevant to your longer term goals, research, and synthesis needs that's worthwhile breaking out into permanent notes/zettels.

syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5lr0mz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Just as Adler and Van Doren (1972) suggest that most books are only worth a quick inspectional read and fewer are worth a deeper, analytical read, most (fleeting) notes, highlights, and annotations you make are only worth their quick scribble while vanishingly few others are worthy of greater expansion and permanent note status. You might also find by extension that some of the most valuable work you'll do is syntopical reading and the creation of high value syntopical notes which you can weave into folgezettel (sequences of notes) that generate new knowledge.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that everything needs to be a perfect, permanent note. If you're distilling and writing one or two good permanent notes a day, you're killing it; the rest is just sour mash.

As ever, practice to see what works best for your needs.

Michael Sheen returned OBE to air views on royal family<br /> by Kevin Rawlinson<br /> Tue 29 Dec 2020 11.41 EST<br /> https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/dec/29/michael-sheen-gave-back-obe-to-air-views-on-royal-family

Scott continues in his efforts not to make any main notes, but is pushing the indexing of ideas where they live directly in books using only a topic in his index and a page number.

He calls this practice, which he himself practices, sacrilegious. 00:00:27

What happened to pushing knowledge-building?!?

This is the second video I've seen him do this. (Previously: https://hypothes.is/a/28AkYFadEe6ZH_MjTZlnLQ). So his Antinet zettelkasten is now primarily an index and bibliographic cards with fleeting notes. He's specifically leaving out any of what he has previously called main notes.

And of course hello to you too my freaking-youtuber-zettelkasten-freeblie-seeking-shit-weasels.<br /> —Scott Scheper 00:00:16

What a way to encourage people...

https://www.aaanativearts.com/winabojo-birch-tree

Winabojo has blessed the birch tree for the good of the human race. And this is why lightning never strikes the birch tree, and why anything wrapped in the bark will not decay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrN0kaE6DkY<br /> Is The Zettelkasten Method Really The Best Personal Knowledge Management System? by Anthony Metivier

meh...

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/0221-usps-to-dedicate-star-ribbon-forever-stamp.htm

Propaedeutic is a lovely word.

-via https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/17c6pr0/marxism_for_beginners/

There's a close similarity between the Streets of Laredo and the sean-nós ballad Bard of Armagh.

-via https://soundcloud.com/mike-olaughlin/streets-of-laredo-bard-of-armagh-irish-same-tune-alternating-verses-1-112716-112716-214-am?in=tracy-281320433/sets/sean-nos-irish-for-old-style

reply to u/daneb1 and u/qnnnp at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17a0ze0/comment/k5pdgdf/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Hans Blumemberg's zettelkasten click-bait is apparently a thing!?! 🤣🤪Thanks u/Idaneb1, I feel seen, but I'll bet I'm one of only two or three who would fall for it. I had already read all of the underlying linked source material, so the quote wouldn't have helped in my case.

u/qnnnp, you're going to have to go a lot deeper for those two clicks next time. Plow through https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/collections/EP7GRG2W (or better yet, sources that aren't on it) and get back to us with something exciting! We can't wait to see what pops out.

Only for fun, I'll raise your joker with my joker "flush". 🃏♦️♣️♥️♠️🗃️ #JokerZettelClickBaitWarningFTW #ShowUsAllYourCards

via César A. Hidalgo at https://twitter.com/cesifoti/status/1715367744776908830

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqLmxY0m5AQ

the idea of such an absurd song in a very serious setting just seemed so funny to me passionate choristers interpretive dance string quartet bowing away all taking itself very seriously and then the song is about shia labeouf being a cannibal i found out recently that's called bathos serious and absurd juxtaposed (00:09:49)

Dictionary definition:

(especially in a work of literature) an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.

Rob Cantor, singer

The whispered name "Shia LaBeouf" becomes the kernel of the song "Shia LaBeouf".

David Lynch would be proud how the resultant product stayed true to the kernel of the idea.

https://spiritof58wales.bigcartel.com/products

Tim Williams' shop 'The Spirit of 58' in Bala, Gwynedd was set up in 2010 and helped to popularize the Welsh bucket hat craze.

Dating back to the late 1600s, the Welsh tradition of carving a lovespoon for the eye of one's affection is the origin of the word "spooning".

via https://www.cadwyngifts.com/pages/information-about-love-spoons

Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it;<br /> —Jonathan Swift, “The Examiner, From Thursday Nov 2 to Thursday Nov 9, 1710.” In The Examiner [Afterw.] The Whig Examiner, edited by Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, Vol. 15. London: John Morphew, near Stationers Hall, 1710.

found via https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

with variations on "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes." attributed variously to Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Francklin, Fisher Ames, Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Winston Churchill, Terry Pratchett?

Addison, Joseph, and Jonathan Swift. The Examiner [Afterw.] The Whig Examiner. London: John Morphew, near Stationers Hall, 1710.

https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/event/11338479

See Inside the First Museum Retrospective Dedicated to John Waters’s Unparalleled Contributions to Cinema—and Bad Taste<br /> "Pope of Trash" at the Academy Museum documents the director's films, obsessions, and creative processes.<br /> by Min Chen, October 14, 2023<br /> https://news.artnet.com/art-world/john-waters-pope-of-trash-academy-museum-2366964

May have to crash this to claim my spot....

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

During shmita, the land is left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity, including plowing, planting, pruning and harvesting, is forbidden by halakha (Jewish law).

The sabbath year (shmita; Hebrew: שמיטה, literally "release"), also called the sabbatical year or shǝvi'it (שביעית‎, literally "seventh"), or "Sabbath of The Land", is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah in the Land of Israel and is observed in Judaism.

Google is free, do not pay to learn about anything...

This quote is a feature of toxic capitalism, which should be efficient enough to allow a person to quickly obtain another job to thereby make the issue moot.

Part of it is tied into identity as well.

Kemp, Angie, Lee Skallerup Bessette, and Kris Shaffer. “What Do You Do with 11,000 Blogs? Preserving, Archiving, and Maintaining UMW Blogs—A Case Study.” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, May 16, 2019. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/what-do-you-do-with-11000-blogs-preserving-archiving-and-maintaining-umw-blogs-a-case-study/.

https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist

https://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/

Ian MacKaye and Citizen Archiving by Butch Lazorchak<br /> May 8, 2013 https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2013/05/ian-mackaye-and-citizen-archiving/

The flip side of the collector's fallacy....

this!

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

Domain of One's Own as a form of digital nachlass.

Preserving Harvard’s Blogging History by Matt Mullenweg<br /> October 2, 2023 https://ma.tt/2023/10/preserving-harvards-blogging-history/

https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/suche?filter%5B0%5D%5Bfacet_creator_personal%5D=Lichtenberg%2C%20Georg%20Christoph

Digitized and available, though not part of a larger project toward Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's notes specifically.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/the-dawn-of-everything/

https://www.libraryhistorybuff.org/cardcatalog-evolution.htm

reply to u/Flubber78769 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17ajd34/ive_been_struggling_with_duplicate_notes_within/

This is the value of actually indexing your content. You can do a quick search around the index entries which provides a natural check against duplication, but importantly it'll let you think about those ideas again and spend your time more profitably by expanding upon them instead.

Occasionally I'll find duplication from one source to the next which provides some support about an idea's value or spread over time, especially when I'm tracking usage of a thing, so it's not always the case that duplication is automatically a bad thing.

source: 1900, Moltkes Militärische Werke: II. Die Thätigkeit als Chef des Generalstabes der Armee im Frieden. (Moltke’s Military Works: II. Activity as Chief of the Army General Staff in Peacetime) Zweiter Theil (Second Part), Aufsatz vom Jahre 1871 Ueber Strategie (Article from 1871 on strategy), Start Page 287, Quote Page 291, Publisher: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, Berlin, Germany. (Google Books Full View) link

compare with: https://hypothes.is/a/GWE5OG2EEe6kL6Ni1VcN9g

source: 1984, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XI: Columbia University, Editor Louis Galambos et al, Letter from: Dwight Eisenhower, Letter to: Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Date: December 31, 1950, Start Page 1516, Quote Page 1516, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.

via https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/

similar to plan your work and work your plan

Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan. <br /> —Memindex price list booklet circa 1913 https://www.ebay.com/itm/166293242710

Surely this was in use prior to this version...

Three Questions About Note-Taking Systems by ANDREI SUKHOVSKII<br /> OCT 11, 2023<br /> https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/three-questions-about-note-taking

very low level....

https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/a-joker-in-zettelkasten

meh...

Annotations at https://docdrop.org/video/qRSCKSPMuDc/

Zettelkasten section at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRSCKSPMuDc&t=2246s

Hans Blumenberg and his Zettelkasten by Andrei Shukhovskii https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/hans-blumenberg-and-his-zettelkasten

nothing new to me...

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-68

https://joonhyeokahn.substack.com/p/demystify-zettelkasten

If you've not already spent some time with the idea, this short one pager is unlikely to "demystify" anything. Yet another zk one-pager, and not one of the better ones.

Jacob's use of a stone as a massebah wasn't forbidden because it was dedicated to Yahweh.

Massebah for pagan worship: - Exodus 23:24 (https://hypothes.is/a/r3m5QmyDEe6SC8eLYcJE1Q) - Hosea 10:1 (https://hypothes.is/a/4PK2GGyDEe6wZg_r2YpVCA ) - 2 Kings 18:4 - 2 Kings 23:14

Massebah for worship of Yahweh: - Genesis 28:18 Jacob's pillow (https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ)<br /> - Genesis 31:44-45 Jacob and Laban's covenant - Exodus 24:4 - Joshua 24:25-27

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/r3m5QmyDEe6SC8eLYcJE1Q

In neighboring cultures in which both have oral practices relating to massebah, one is not just destroying "sacred stones" to stamp out their religion, but it's also destroying their culture and cultural memory as well as likely their laws and other valuable memories for the function of their society.

View this in light also of the people of Israel keeping their own sacred stones (Hosea 10:1) as well as the destruction of pillars dedicated to Baal in 2 Kings 18:4 and 2 Kings 23:14.

(Link and) Compare this to the British fencing off the land in Australia and thereby destroying Songlines and access to them and the impact this had on Indigenous Australians.

It's also somewhat similar to the colonialization activity of stamping out of Indigenous Americans and First Nations' language in North America, though the decimation of their language wasn't viewed in as reciprocal way as it might be viewed now. (Did colonizers of the time know about the tremendous damage of language destruction, or was it just a power over function?)

Use of massebah for remembrance of a name...

Potentially used for other factors? translation? context?

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/oqgH4mx9Ee68_dMgihgD0A (Rachel's massebah in Genesis 35:19-20)

Use of a standing stone or massebah (pillar) to mark a grave in Genesis 35:19-20.

Certainly could have been other than to simply mark a location and may have been used to mark and remember the knowledge of Rachel as well as the family's experiences with Rachel, a practice which is still commonplace when visiting burial locations.

Relationship to the first two commandments against worshiping other gods and the use of idols?

How does this relate to the standing stone found in the room at Khirbet Qeiyafa from the time of David?

Dates of this text with respect to Khirbet Keiyafa?

connect this to:

The helps whereof by this art memorative, they would prove to be as effectual, by these conceived fictions in the eye of the mind,12 as those we remember by the visible eye of the body, for example whereof say they, concerning the latter we read in the holy Scriptures of 12 stones, that were erected in the river Jordan in memory of the wonderful transpassage of the Israelites, Josh. 24.27.—The Memory Arts in Renaissance England by William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams

Description of the arrangement? Circle? Further or suggested usage?

Link to Genesis 28:18: https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ

Mariottini, Claude. “Standing Stones in the Old Testament.” Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament (blog), September 20, 2021. https://claudemariottini.com/2021/09/20/standing-stones-in-the-old-testament/.

Commonplaces: standing stones in the Old Testament!

A quote to further @amandamull's excellent research on groupings of three and beverages at work that I saw on the Atlantic archive today: "One [martini] is all right, two is too many, three is not enough."—James Thurber via https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,939759,00.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/the-correct-number-of-desk-beverages/595927/

Syndication link: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1714054816715153757

Mull, Amanda. “Always Have Three Beverages.” The Atlantic, August 12, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/the-correct-number-of-desk-beverages/595927/.

Syse, Glenna. “People, Aug. 15, 1960.” Time, August 15, 1960. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,939759,00.html.

https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/little-bird/preview/trailer-xqovtl

reply to u/6_squids at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/178nr6j/simple_problem/

Functional groups are certainly a top down categorization of these structures that some have found useful over time. But what if you wrote about them in other ways from a bottom up perspective? Perhaps you might discover other useful and intriguing ways of categorizing them? While your textbook is trying to present an organized method, you might find some interesting insight by looking at them in other ways. Be willing to play around and experiment—not coincidentally, this is what a good organic chemist should be trained to do.

https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_buckley_why_i_gave_my_teenage_daughter_a_vibrator?language=en

https://fez-o-rama.com/blogs/fez-o-blog/the-elder-sign-on-tweed

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0896Q51QM?binding=kindle_edition&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_bs_series_rwt_tkin&qid=1697421707&sr=1-3

https://www.r-m.de/en-us/bikes/

http://www.philsoc.eu/turban.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20150526000343/http://www.philsoc.eu/turban.html

https://udenver.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuceuspzkuE9VomnEaGva1HH1ra_iS4Eua?ref=jessestommel.com#/registration

Some related ideas that are suggesting some sort of thesis for improving the idea of ungrading: - We measure the things we care about. - In Education, we care about learning and understanding, but measuring these outside of testing and evaluation is difficult at best (therefor ungrading). - No one cares about your GPA six months after you graduate. - Somehow we've tied up evaluations and grades into the toxic capitalism and competition within US culture. Some of this is tied into educational movements related to Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harvards Eliot. - Hierarchies instituted by the Great Chain of Being have confounded our educational process.

Adler and Van Doren's minimal bar of a college education is that it produce competent syntopical readers.

One could argue that Adler and Van Doren would lump social media into the sources of amusement category.

compare with historical objectivity, scientific objectivity, other definitions of objectivity in general.

Every book, while holding the same words, will be different based on the context and needs of the individual reader.

Aristotle on the unity of a work.

source?

This is also an art of putting notes together to make an article or book.

How are they defining "multiplicity" here? There seems to be a tacit definition with respect to being in opposition to "unity" (of a work), but not an explicit one. It also seems to be a shaded meaning with respect to the more common one.

unity: essence, core, coherence, oneness

They use the word "multiplicity" in the usual sense of large number or multitude on p55: "The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not a plurality of distinct habits."

They also revisit it in the upcoming section: "Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book" on p88

Perhaps its just me but there's a linguistic "softness" of the uses of unity and multiplicity here with respect to 2023. Though these two opposites fit the dictionary definitions of their words, is it possible that this softness is the result of a sort of historical linguistic shift I'm feeling in these words? I can't quite put my finger on it, but perhaps it's the relationship of unity to religion? Neither seem to be frequently used these days.

The Ngram Viewer shows peaks for the use of unity in 1660 and 1960 of almost 75% higher usage compared to a broader historical average. It is generally waning since. Multiplicity has about 1/4 the use of unity and has remained flat over time. What caused the peaks in the use of "unity" during these periods? This 1972 use was on the downslope of the 1960s peak. Was it used in the 1940 version?

The 20th century increase in the use of unity begins around 1914 and may have been related to political shades of meaning going into WWI with another marked rise in the lead up to WW2.

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

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

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

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

The first several rules of reading a book analytically follow the same process of writing a book as suggested in the snowflake method.

Analogy of reading (and learning) to teaching.

Outlines will show similarities to fractals because of their building block simplicity which can grow to show emergent complexity.

SINGLE SENTENCE, OR AT MOST A FEW SENTENCES ( A SHORT PARAGRAPH )

p. 75-76

There always seems to be a duality of "rules" and "art" I see in almost every representation of the idea of art.

Thesis: To practice an art, there are always rules which one is following. Often the rules may be unwritten or hidden, but they are being followed on some level.

Is there art which doesn't have any rules?

first appearance of "unity" in the book (outside of community and opportunity).

In Re: to folgezettel or not? in an unlogged chat:

Zettelkasten (slips) or not (commonplaces, notebooks, paper, files, other), you're going to have a variety of related ideas which you'll juxtapose, especially if you're regularly writing. Those who practice folgezettel are putting in some of the work/heavy lifting from the start versus those who don't and are leaving the work until some later point closer to composition. Folgezettel also helps to encourage the emergence of ideas, but requires work to do so. This doesn't mean that this emergence or new ideas may not arrive without Folgezettel and/or Zettelkasten, but one needs to have some process or affordances which help to foster them. Victor Margolin's process put more of his work on the back end in comparison to Luhmann, but his version obviously works all the same. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

Machine translation:

No. I started the Zettelkasten out of the simple thought that I have a bad memory. First of all, I put pieces of paper in books on which I wrote notes, so the covers of the books got ruined. Then I helped myself with folders, but when they got thicker I couldn't find anything in them. In 1952 or 1953, I started my Zettelkasten because I realized that I had to plan for a life and not for a book.

There's some missing interstitial space here about how precisely he came to it outside of the general motivation for the thing in general.

52/53 would have been after law school and in his administrative days and before his trip to Harvard in 61.

sofort weiß, wie es geht. Wenn ich einen Moment stocke, lege ich die Sache beiseite und mache etwas anderes.

Was machen Sie dann'?

Na, andere Bücher schreiben. Ich arbeite immer gleichzeitig an mehreren verschiedenen Texten. Mit dieser Methode, immer an mehreren Dingen zu arbeiten, habe ich nie Blockierungen.

Rough translation:

— I have to tell you: I never force anything, I only do what comes easy to me. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.

(Interviewer): What do you do then?

Well, write other books. I always work on several different texts at the same time. With this method of always working on multiple things, I never have any blockages.

waren. Diese Technik, so glaube ich, erklärt auch, warum ich überhaupt nicht linear denke und beim Bücherschreiben Mühe habe, die richtige Kapitelfolge zu finden, weil eigentlich ja jedes Kapitel in jedem anderen Kapitel wieder vorkommen müßte

Niklas Luhmann's process for writing from his box

Machine translation:

Q: When you start writing an essay, how do you put your note box to work?

I first make a plan for what I want to write and then take out what I can use from the note box.

Q: In contrast to a builder who only assembles prefabricated parts, a scientist must also have new ideas that are not already contained in the individual parts. Ideas like these don't come from a note box?

But. For example, I have a large set of notes on the term "functional differentiation", I also have a set of notes on "self-referential systems", and I have a large set of notes on "binarity". At the moment I am giving a lecture on ecological problems in modern societies, and my work consists of sifting through pieces of paper from the three conceptual areas outlined and combining them so that I can say something substantive on this topic. The new ideas then arise from the different possible combinations of the pieces of paper for the individual terms. Without the notes, just by thinking about it, I wouldn't come up with ideas like that. Of course my mind is required to record the ideas, but it cannot be held solely responsible for them. In this respect, I work like a computer, which can also be creative in the sense that by combining input data it produces new results that could not have been predicted. I think this technique also explains why I don't think linearly at all and why I have trouble finding the right sequence of chapters when writing books, because every chapter should actually appear in every other chapter.

An interviewer asked Luhmann if every thought that went through his head was saved into his zettelkasten, and Luhmann replied yes. This is obviously a level of conversational hyperbole.

Luhmann indicates that most of his zettelkasten notes are his own thoughts, but some are quotes, which he uses rarely.

Ha! Even university committee meetings in the late XX C were apparently as bad as they still are today.

In this interview, Lumnann indicates that he learned a number of organizational tricks while studying law.

What specifically were these? Relation to his ZK?

Any relation to Bruno First's memory work which grew out of his legal studies in the early 1900s?

With heavy early interest in anthropology, sociology and philosophy including Malinowski, it's more likely that Luhmann would have been trained in historical methods which included the traditions of note taking using card indices of that time.

In the early 1950s, Luhmann spent a year at the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court organizing a reference system for the administrative court decisions to enable researchers to see what decisions had been made in the higher courts.

Though he had begun his zettelkasten during his studies, this referencing system may have influenced the structure of his own note taking system.

Can we pin the dates on these practices down more closely?

"Biography, Attitudes, Zettelkasten" was published under the title "The Zettelkasten costs me more time than writing books" in the Frankfurter Rundschau on Saturday, April 27, 1985, p. ZB 3, abridged.

To some extent, Luhmann felt that his books wrote themselves. He spent an inordinate amount of time writing out notes and filing them into his zettelkasten. The writing portion consisted primarily of typing out the manuscript and after writing it, he usually didn't revise it.

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/LG--lGpmEe6yvy8lp7nfPw

Luhmann felt that he spent more time working with his zettelkasten than the amount of time it took him to write his papers or books.

Luhmann attributed his productivity to the use of his zettelkasten.

During his studies Niklas Luhmann began using his zettelkasten in the early 1950s.

Luhmann, Niklas. Archimedes und wir: Interviews. Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1987.

Bump, Philip. “Analysis | The Terrorizing Style in American Politics.” Washington Post, September 14, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/14/romney-political-violence-republicans/.

The threat of physical violence is silencing those in power even on the right. We're already at war except for the bullets.

https://frankenlog.com/how-it-works/

https://frankenlog.com/

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204498240406

Offered for $1,200 on 2023-10-13 for local pick up from Scranton, PA. A Barrister/stackable card index/filing cabinet with a two drawer card index section, a letter filing section and a cabinet section with a lower section with legs.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087JDPY7F?binding=paperback

https://www.ebay.com/itm/385498338372

30 drawer card catalog in 2 parts with two writing drawers in the middle and a matching table stand. In mediocre shape and has two replaced drawers (metal and/or plastic, not wood). Drawers are maed in all wood

Listed at $1,5000 for over 3 months. $50 per drawer.

2023-10-12: Still listed for sale. Local pick up only from Brentwood, CA

cost per drawer: $50

Listed in late summer/early fall 2023.

Art Metal Company card catalog (drawer sizes maybe 6x9" index cards? with 32 3/4 W x 38 3/4" H x 18 1/2" D). Possibly sectional with top and short leg sections, two sections of 3x2 drawers and a storage section with two doors. Nice patina.

Listed originally at $1,200 and put on sale in early October 2023 for $960. Local pick up in Savannah, GA.

Cost per drawer: $85.71 ($68.57 on sale)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/325827924222

18 drawer library card catalog listed for sale at $1,800 and local pick up in Cabot, AR. Fairly standard looking early century mounted onto a small stand that looks like a repurposed table carriage with legs. (Wood on the two parts is different. Missing 7 drawer pulls, no card catalog rods.

Cost per drawer: $100

https://newrepublic.com/article/176138/twitter-went-evil-musk-misinformation

https://wildrye.com/your-blog-as-a-commonplace-book/

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

https://www.ebay.com/itm/186111284362

I love this old two drawer card index which has a custom label set into the top that reads, "Index to Plans". The label is done in large lettering across the top, almost the way old school stores would do gold lettering with a nice thick black drop shadow.

https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/10/11/activitypub/

Good job Matthias!

Grabe, Mark. “Tags and Stories in My First and Second Brains.” Substack newsletter. Mark’s Substack (blog), October 11, 2023. https://markgrabe.substack.com/p/tags-and-stories-in-my-first-and.

Mark Grabe's synopsis of Roger Shank on storytelling.

Roger Shank's definition of an expert

quote from Christoph Adami at https://twitter.com/ChristophAdami/status/1711583362647814485

Re: George Ellis https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03061-y

Physicists and quantum mechanics as solution to consciousness.

See also: Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner R. Loewenstein