Building a Knowledge System That Enhances Rather Than Replaces Thought

166 点作者 nsavage5 个月前

14 条评论

After trying out a bunch of digital zettelkasten tools, I just went back to paper.This take may be a bit hot, but I actually think paper and pen is already the optimal maxima for thinking—not for retrieval, mind you, but for helping us produce new thoughts. Zettelkasten (at least the way Luhmann used it) is meant for this purpose—it is not a system for storing information and retrieving it but rather for supporting the creation of new connections.The computer aided tools are suboptimal for this because they lack the good constrains of paper (severely limiting the search space) and the good features (seamless ability to incorporate a variety of representational modes, text, image, equation, with zero overhead, and the ability to organize things freely in space). As much as the digital knowledge base sounds good in theory, I don't think it will ever be as optimal for generation of thought. If all you want to do is summon existing information, digital tools are evidently superior. I personally think a hybrid system where one "thinks" on paper and "archives" digitally (after the thinking is done) might be best, but ultimately, we will be most productive with whatever system we actually enjoy using.

评论 #42581117 未加载

评论 #42583823 未加载

评论 #42588936 未加载

评论 #42591711 未加载

评论 #42597407 未加载

评论 #42586690 未加载

评论 #42584828 未加载

评论 #42588636 未加载

评论 #42589435 未加载

评论 #42587855 未加载

Terr_5 个月前

> From Socrates worrying that writing would destroy memory [...] Think of it as a partnership: the computer handles the organizational heavy lifting, while you focus on the thinking.I'm less worried about memory per se and more about failing to think, or getting brainwashed/ring-led by a system with its own biases and quirks. Any sufficiently complex organizing is thinking!Perhaps the simplest example is when quantities (numbers, easy to record) get a mental weight that overshadows and hides their dimensions (the definitions, what they really mean.) For example, a tendency to automatically assume a rising GDP number is an unqualified good sign.Stuff like LLMs bring that into newer and more-dangerous territory, because the model also contains uncountable subtle biases from its training data, and even if you know it isn't aligned (heh) with your own mental models you can't reliably change it. Much like false-memories implanted by interrogators, patterns in those systems can and will leak into the users. Whenever we can't "think about how our thinking is being changed", I'd say that's axiomatically bad.

评论 #42579711 未加载

visarga5 个月前

> When you're dealing with ten notes, it's trivial to dump them into an LLM and generate connections. With a hundred notes, it's still manageable. But what happens when you hit 10,000 notes? Or a million? We quickly run into the limitations of context windows and processing capacity. Vector search helps narrow things down, but it's prone to missing important connections that a human mind might naturally make.I run into the same problem. I made a RAG system and imported 15 years of reddit and HN content (my own message logs) + 2 years of LLM chats, totaling about 80MB of text. I can use it to retrieve fragments but there is duplication, and almost all duplicate fragments have slightly different approaches. How do I merge all of them, and how do I get a deduplicated taxonomy? I got about 290K unique keywords extracted from the text, it doesn't fit into LLMs.I am gravitating towards building graphs of ideas, and having a way to generate unique (non duplicate) new ideas while ingesting new text.

评论 #42581756 未加载

评论 #42580962 未加载

vouaobrasil5 个月前

> What parts of note-taking should we digitize? What aspects should remain firmly in human hands? And most importantly, how do I create a tool that enhances rather than replaces human thought?My personal philosophy is to use the most primitive methods possible and only use technology when there really is a strong need to go to the next level. It exposes what I really need, what are the weaknesses, etc. For example, I take all my notes with pen and paper. But if I find that I'm really referring back to something, I might write it up in a document. I don't see the point in digitizing everything right away if I'm never going to use what I write.Moreover, writing things first by hand helps me remember them better and "feel" the knowledge through my hands.Same thing with photography. I don't tend to use the burst mode on my camera unless I REALLY need it. When it comes to accomplishing things, I found (personally) that asceticism with tools is best.

评论 #42579724 未加载

评论 #42586375 未加载

randomcatuser5 个月前

> create something that thoughtfully augments human intelligence rather than replacing itI htink this is a really cool design space, particularly with the framing of the purpose of Zettelkasten as reflecting your personal understanding of the world, your views, rather than a cold, dead categorization of facts and objects.How can we design software systems that enhance our sensemaking?- Encouraging us to ask more questions, or write down our thoughts? You can imagine the AI bringing snippets to your attention, asking: "What do you make of this?" or "How might we connect these?"- Augmenting our notes? Finding nubs of thought, and presenting research/articles to help us develop those lines some more- Collaboration suggestions? People who wrote about the same things?

gmuslera5 个月前

Try to build bridges, not roads. Sometimes your flow is interrupted or is inefficient because you are searching for the right word, or have a small understanding of a concept. or a better way to express a concept. Try to have a tool that does that small push. but without overwhelming you with data and disrupt your own process.You usually are not writing for someone else, but for you, and the reward is the process you went through more than the final text. Maybe the user want to go with an AI all the way in, or not, but it must be user decision,and by default it should be something small and not intrusive.

Rochus5 个月前

> It's reminiscent of Luhmann's original zettelkasten system, where physical proximity created a kind of "neighbor effect" that digital systems struggle to replicate.That's what outliners are good for. You automatically generate context and proximity when adding/indenting outline items. And we have the thing called hypertext for cross-referencing and navigation. I think Luhmann's zettelkasten is a quite poor concept in comparison, because the cards are small and don't adjust to the size of a topic, so we have to split topics, and we have to take care of identification and referencing the cards ourselves. When translating zettelkasten to digital, then at least we can get rid of some of these limitations, but we still don't have all the advantages of outliners.In my experience, it is purely a matter of habit whether you write down ideas or thoughts by hand on paper or enter them directly into an outline on the computer. Before I had tools like Ecco or my own CrossLine (<a href="https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline/">https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline/</a>), I also produced a lot of notes on paper. After a few years of working with these tools, I got rid of paper completely. With CrossLine, I also solved the problem of linking to other documents or emails, so that I can link any information or put it in the necessary context. And it scales well. I have outline files with thousands of notes, minutes, concepts, specifications and the like, everything cross-referenced and full-text searchable. I can still reproduce e.g. meetings or paths to decicions taken ten or more years ago with little effort.

le-mark5 个月前

Recently I’ve been imaging a world where social media algorithms were tuned to help people instead of “driving engagement” with ever more outrage bait. Oh you’re watching clips about machining and by your data profile you’re an uneducated adult? Here are some trade school, financial assistance, and self help links to nudge you toward a better life! What a world that would be.

评论 #42580473 未加载

uludag5 个月前

This article touches on a tension I've been feeling too with the rise of LLMs. I feel that analogies can be drawn to time management and systems of productivity, like GTD. Like in a GTD system, you almost need the various projects, tasks, next steps, deadlines, commitments, etc. to live in your head so you can make intuitive decisions about what you should be working on at the moment; something that AI almost by definition can't do, since your subjectivity is essential in this process, but in certain ways may be able to assist.

评论 #42579098 未加载

Kalq5 个月前

With regards to zettelkasten, I've always worndered where serendipitous discovery of notes goes from being actually worthwhile to frequently getting distracted but justifying it as productive.

pxeger15 个月前

I write with a similar approach to zettelkasten. My technique is purely digital. Paper is too easy to lose, damage, or not have on you when you need it, compared to a digital file that can be copied, synced, and backed up.I keep everything in just one long file, which I think gives a similar feeling to what the article describes about notecards - by using folds and reordering where necessary it’s quite easy to always have whatever you want visible; there’s nothing forcibly hidden from you by a file structure.I use plain text (with a tiny bit of custom syntax highlighting) in vim, because I like the simplicity and it fits my needs. But I think a one-file approach could work fine in a Markdown or WYSIWYG format.

j455 个月前

I never had the impression it was all or nothing between paper and not.. everything can end up in one place for beting connected.

henning5 个月前

it's hard to understand what problem this person wants to solve.is a version controlled directory of Markdown files + grep enough? or a super trivial wiki Rails app that will turn WikiText into links that you could probably prototype in an hour or less? why or why not?

评论 #42581571 未加载

kavasmlikon5 个月前

excellent article. IMHO it tackles the gist of what personal knowledge management should be about.true learning/understanding (and intellectual depth for that matter) seems like something that (due to neurocognitive reasons) cannot possibly be achieved only through the process of reading, but is rather a function of the reader's quality of elaboration on what has been read. this inherently requires the reader's wilĺingness to invest work in the form of structured thought and cognitive effort as part of the reading process, which in turn - again due to neurocognitive reasons - for somewhat non-trivial thought and intellectual endeavors requires systematic note-taking and writing (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM</a>). as a result, pure reading vs the reader's quality of elaboration on what they have read makes the difference between "feeling smarter" and actually "becoming smarter" as Sönke Ahrens (<a href="https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes" rel="nofollow">https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes</a>) puts it.I fully agree with the "Zettelgarden Philosophy" on note-taking as described in this article - it recognises the real purpose and value of personal knowledge management which is based on notes that embody personal comments, thoughts, insights and connections to other concepts/ideas rather than mere facts and summaries pulled out from articles. Though, my "tooling philosophy" differs in that I prefer to have my digital zettelkasten stored in simple text-files so that I can leverage the freedom and flexibility of text as a universal interface (grep for search/filter, git for version-control, unison for syncing across devices and operating systems, export/publishing through static site generators, etc) rather than being locked in and bound to the limitations of a monolithic tool (<a href="https://roamresearch.com/" rel="nofollow">https://roamresearch.com/</a>, <a href="https://obsidian.md/" rel="nofollow">https://obsidian.md/</a>, <a href="https://www.notion.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.com/</a>, etc) which <a href="https://zettelgarden.com/" rel="nofollow">https://zettelgarden.com/</a> seems to be a kind of.> "We need tools that respect the importance of human engagement while eliminating the friction that gets in the way of thinking and creating." my tool of choice has been org-roam (<a href="https://www.orgroam.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.orgroam.com/</a>) - it combines the power of emacs (for powerful, efficient text-editing) and org-mode (as a way to structure content in simple text-files) and adds the very missing layer for personal knowledge management on top: a powerful cross-referencing system incl. bidirectional linking between individual notes/nodes/zettles. to me, bidirectional linking seems like a crucial feature for personal knowledge management systems (something that the WWW at its inception as a "collaborative" knowledge management system probably should have adopted, but Tim-Berners Lee opted for the much easier, rapid implementation of one-way links (see Jaron Lanier <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCvf2DZzKX0&t=3009s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCvf2DZzKX0&t=3009s</a>, and Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project)at the end of the day, a tool is just a tool and only as useful as the user is capable of using it. I found the usefulness of my zettelkasten depends largely on the quality of my note-taking process, which is a learning process in itself. I found Ahrens' book and this blog post very helpful in teaching / reminding me of the real purpose and value of personal notes.