35 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. If you want to share your wiki with someone, you can just email them the file and be virtually assured they can open it.

      ... which is not a bad implementation of mind uploading given current technical constraints.

    2. TiddlyWiki is free as in freedom. Unlike proprietary tools like Evernote, Roam Research, and OneNote, you have complete freedom to use TiddlyWiki for any purpose you want, share it with others, and modify it if you need or want to. You will never lose access to your notes because a company decided the service wasn't profitable anymore. If you're planning to write a lot of notes, this should be non-negotiable.

      This is the key feature you should consider before deciding how to implement your ZettelkastenIsForLifeNotJustForChristmas.

    3. Most notes systems fail at the seemingly elementary requirement of matching the way you think.

      This makes me want to create RoundPegRoundHole. But then I'm not sure whether this should be in h. or tw. I would lean towards a public tw which has the feeling of TV Tropes in that it's a database of patterns. Perhaps that's the use case of publishing a subset of a tw/Zettelkasten.

      The other (meta) thought this generated was how the decision of whether to be public or private interrupts the pleasant flow that comes from knowing exactly where to put a note and how to divide a thought. This is what experience tiddlywiki fluency is trying to capture.

    4. Categories and hierarchies are sometimes unfairly maligned. In reality, they are powerful supplemental tools for thinking; sometimes, in order to think about a topic, we need to add additional order to a set of ideas to reduce them to a level of complexity we're capable of thinking about, and these tools give us that ability. But as a general-purpose organization method, these tools are terrible: they prevent ideas from being effectively used outside their original context and force us to collapse distinctions that we might prefer to maintain. For notes to reach their full potential, we need to allow them to relate in a greater variety of ways. Further, we don't naturally think in hierarchies except when we are tackling a specific problem; we think in links and webs of ideas.
    5. Grok TiddlyWiki

      Takes a while to grok without a guide. Maybe this is that guide!

    1. For those who have been interested in my public Zettelkasten wiki in the past (or might be interested in it now), I've just put up an extensive discussion of Zettelkasten and how I've implemented it in my TiddlyWiki on my YouTube channel

      Origin story of TW implementation.

    1. Zettelkasten example using my preferred toolchain.

      Possibly the quickest way to get the technique under your fingers by browsing the author's example.

    1. How to Take Smart Notes

      Which edition did you read?

    2. How to use the slip box system to write bottoms-up

      This is the second time I've seen people refer to "the 8 point summary". I don't recall seeing this in the 2017 edition. Maybe it was added in the second ed.

    3. Clusters are sequences of notes where order emerges.

      I struggled to locate this definition in the 2017 edition of the book, either because it isn't there, or because it doesn't have an index.

    1. You can’t do this so easy in the digital version.

      In TiddlyWiki this just means having > 1 tiddler visible.

    2. Structure Notes are not limited to hierarchical structures like the nested list from above. Structure notes can also have sequential structures. Imagine the following line of argumentation: a -> b -> c, therefore a -> c. A Structure Note could capture this sequence and link each step of the sequence to a Zettel which expands on it. An example, with annotations to point out each step: (a) The stimulation of surface cold receptors is (b) the main driver of cold adaptation.[[202005201056]] Cold showers stimulate the surface cold receptors sufficiently.[[202005201057]] Therefore, (c) cold showers are a viable method of practicing cold adaptation training.[[202005201058]] The links via [[ID]] refer to Zettels that are compilations of evidence for each statement. The structure of the arguments guides this Structure Note.

      So this is a way to abstract elements in Toulmin's approach to argument construction from the data which instantiates the specific point being argued.

    3. To make the most of a connection, always state explicitly why you made it. This is the link context. An example link context looks like this:

      Doable in TiddlyWiki as it's just guidance on how to write tiddlers.

    4. The most important aspect of the body of the Zettel is that you write it in your own words.

      Writing in your own words also helps you to confirm you understand others' ideas.

    5. Luhmann’s numbering system allowed to make sequences and intersperse notes between adjacent notes through adding another character to the end

      This brings to mind git branches.

    6. To figure out what the atoms are, it helps when we ask ourselves what we want the molecules that we create from our note atoms to look like.

      The atoms and molecules simile again ...

    1. In practical terms, he's talking about structure notes which consist of an outline of links to other existing notes.

      Structure notes is a technical term. They're "meta-notes" in that they're notes that point to other notes containing content.

      This seems to be what Ahrens means by a "sequence". I guess there's one explicit sequence defined by notes and their forward/back links, but structure notes can create used to arbitrary sequences.

      This also seems to be the key mechanism by which a linear narrative is created.

    2. In practical terms, he's talking about structure notes which consist of an outline of links to other existing notes. They are used to group notes together into a cohesive argument. In a paper zettelkasten note IDs could be used to create these lists directly in the slip box (sometimes referred to as folgezettel). The disadvantage of doing so this way is that notes can only belong to one line of thought. With structure notes, which are independent of the placement of notes within the system, any given note may belong to multiple lines of thought.
    3. I think you just need to loosen up and put notes in the dang box. It didn't make sense to me either until I started writing jokes in this form. Maybe you just need to make sure you're actually interested in the stuff you're taking notes in (or have a use for it.)I would write sequences of jokes as I thought of them. As I got to a certain number of jokes, the system itself became self sustaining. Rather than having to think of jokes, I would have loads of ideas which I could further explore (this goes back to the author's idea of not starting with a blank slate.) I could add to the end of a sequence or I could branch a sequence. At any point in any of these sequences, I could branch off a node. As the network grows bigger, then I could remix jokes by combining completely different concepts. One otherwise unrelated node connects to another otherwise unrelated node and they form a new sequence. Now I have interconnection, a real network.
    4. That's the key to understand the paragraphs you've quoted. The reason for a Zettelkasten over a Wiki is 'text production' ... because a Zettelkasten, which is designed according to Luhmann's method, also depicts the chains of thought that precede the ideas or of which they are a part. And this in turn simplifies the text production -- one simply combines the different chains of thoughts that are recalled by the notes.
    1. Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens’ delineation of Luhmann’s method

      For my money, a lot of the magic is in the smartnote categories; knowing what fleeting, literature and permanent notes are is the basis for recognising and almost automatically doing what you should be doing now.

      This is similar to the gardening categories I use: cold compost (annual weeds), submerge (perennial weeds), stones, rubbish. You need a container on hand for each of these as they turn up at random. The benefit of this is that you eliminate the decision-making process which interferes with a gardening task and it's associated potential flow state. This is very much like the cognitive outsourcing aspect of GTD.

    2. I think it would be massively helpful if users had stronger examples of what these explicit creation workflows looked like, particularly at the longer end of creation of chapters or even book length spaces.

      This is the acid test of whether the process is working.

    3. in posting online they still seem lost in attempting to put the lowest level ideas into active practice.

      Which are the "lowest level ideas"? I wonder if there are some critical mid-level ideas being overlooked which are preventing the output process, e.g. forming critical mass by categorising notes as fleeting, permanent, or distinct (pp41-42).

    4. Ahrens’ generally excellent book
    5. I’ve seen Eminem demo his slip box to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes.
    1. They get to see everything, and nothing

      This reminds me of esoteric transmission, in the sense that the ghost is only visible to those who are already prepared to see it.

      It's also fitting that tantra is often narrowly equated with tantric sex.

    1. The appendix of the 2nd edition (PDF)

      This is interesting, but I'd also like to see examples of how permanent notes evolve from their associated fleeting and literature notes.

    2. the first edition

      The first edition isn't directly identified, but I believe it's the one published in 2017.

    1. “The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same format.”
    1. I've tried to keep a Zettleksaten several times now with no real luck. My most recent try was using TiddlyWiki, with each Tiddler being an entry, usually containing a single piece of information. Perhaps it's the way TiddlyWiki is laid out, but I didn't particularly find the filing system to be of any real benefit to me. After my 30 day experiment I had nearly 1,000 Tiddlers and the majority were interlinked. When I would click through the hyperlinks I wouldn't necessarily have any particular 'a-ha' moments that these articles on Zettlekastens typically try to convince you will happen when you use this filing system.Perhaps I went about it all wrong, but I loved the theory but didn't find the particular application useful. I also found absolutely no examples of a real life Zettelkasten online anywhere.

      Here's a real-life example using Obsidian. I suspect the success is in the use rather than the tool, and I would go for TiddlyWiki.

    1. I’m edging towards a new book, which is pretty formless at the moment, so I need a better solution for keeping my writing ‘chunks’ organised. I started playing around with a new piece of database software called Obsidian after recording an episode about it for the On The Reg podcast with my co-host Dr Jason Downs. Obsidian makes your notes more useful by ‘linking your thinking’. Basically, any word in an Obsidian note can become a link to another note, so, over time, your notes become like your own personal wikipedia. Obsidian also makes a cool visualisation of all the links between your notes, so you can surf through them, visually. Pages are represented as nodes; pages which have a lot of incoming links become bigger in the visual graph, literally showing you where an idea is ‘growing’:

      I'm not sold on Obsidian. I think TiddlyWiki has equivalent (and more) features (albeit requiring plugins for graphing), a more robust architecture, and a more open license.

      Horses for courses I guess, but depending on Obsidian's evolution, I suspect other writers might end up looking for alternatives.

    1. how was I ever able to organise my thoughts without atomising them

      Yes! This is the killer feature of TiddlyWiki. I think of it as some kind of intrinsic reward associated with cognitive outsourcing/offloading. Don't hear this mentioned often.

      These "atoms" also seem like the fruit of the insight process, e.g. the moment when Leo Szilard conceived nuclear fission whilst waiting to cross the road near Russell Square. Oh! I just noticed the atom pun! Entirely accidental.

      The "atomising" aspect is also key to making "molecules".

    1. This whole rabbit hole that led to discovering hypothes.is originated because I wanted to suggest TiddlyWiki to an Obsidian user. It seems all roads lead to @chrisaldrich!