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  1. Last 7 days
    1. Almost every ‘system as a whole’ is generated by a ‘generating system’. If we wish to make things which function as ‘wholes’ we shall have to invent generating systems to create them.

      Alexander 2011, p. 59; Alexander 1968, p. 605

  2. Jun 2024
    1. (~0:45)

      Justin mentions that a better way to think about learning is in systems rather than techniques. This is true for virtually anything. Tips & Tricks don't get you anywhere, it is the systems which bring you massive improvements because they have components all working together to achieve one goal or a set of goals.

      Any good system has these components working together seamlessly, creating something emergent; worth more than the sum of its parts.

    1. TensionThe ability to see like a data structure afforded us the technology we have today. But it was built for and within a set of societal systems—and stories—that can’t cope with nebulosity. Worse still is the transitional era we’ve entered, in which overwhelming complexity leads more and more people to believe in nothing. That way lies madness. Seeing is a choice, and we need to reclaim that choice. However, we need to see things and do things differently, and build sociotechnical systems that embody this difference.This is best seen through a small example. In our jobs, many of us deal with interpersonal dynamics that sometimes overwhelm the rules. The rules are still there—those that the company operates by and laws that it follows—meaning there are limits to how those interpersonal dynamics can play out. But those rules are rigid and bureaucratic, and most of the time they are irrelevant to what you’re dealing with. People learn to work with and around the rules rather than follow them to the letter. Some of these might be deliberate hacks, ones that are known, and passed down, by an organization’s workers. A work-to-rule strike, or quiet quitting for that matter, is effective at slowing a company to a halt because work is never as routine as schedules, processes, leadership principles, or any other codified rules might allow management to believe.The tension we face is that on an everyday basis, we want things to be simple and certain. But that means ignoring the messiness of reality. And when we delegate that simplicity and certainty to systems—either to institutions or increasingly to software—they feel impersonal and oppressive. People used to say that they felt like large institutions were treating them like a number. For decades, we have literally been numbers in government and corporate data structures. BreakdownAs historian Jill Lepore wrote, we used to be in a world of mystery. Then we began to understand those mysteries and use science to turn them into facts. And then we quantified and operationalized those facts through numbers. We’re currently in a world of data—overwhelming, human-incomprehensible amounts of data—that we use to make predictions even though that data isn’t enough to fully grapple with the complexity of reality.How do we move past this era of breakdown? It’s not by eschewing technology. We need our complex socio-technical systems. We need mental models to make sense of the complexities of our world. But we also need to understand and accept their inherent imperfections. We need to make sure we’re avoiding static and biased patterns—of the sort that a state functionary or a rigid algorithm might produce—while leaving room for the messiness inherent in human interactions. Chapman calls this balance “fluidity,” where society (and really, the tech we use every day) gives us the disparate things we need to be happy while also enabling the complex global society we have today.
    2. However, it’s not this particular system that failed but rather the mode of society that depends on rigid systems to function. Replacing one rigid system with another won’t work.
    3. The complexity of society today, and the failure of rigid systems to cope, is scary to many. Nobody’s in charge of, or could possibly even understand, all these complex technological systems that now run our global society.
    4. Now, nebulosity, complexity, and the breakdown of these systems is all around for everyone to see.
    5. The challenge with previous generations of tech—and the engineers who built them—is that they got stuck in the rigidity of systems.
    6. To boost its search engine rankings, Thai Food Near Me, a New York City restaurant, is named after a search term commonly used by potential customers. It’s a data layer on top of reality. And the problems get worse when the relative importance of the data and reality flip. Is it more important to make a restaurant’s food taste better, or just more Instagrammable? People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as “engagement” to the algorithms.These hacks are fundamentally about the breakdown of “the system.” (We’re not suggesting that there’s a single system that governs society but rather a mess of systems that interact and overlap in our lives and are more or less relevant in particular contexts.)
  3. May 2024
    1. for - recombination of proteins in higher level proteins - from - youtube - Evolution 2 podcast interview - book - Understanding Living Systems - Denis Noble - Ray Noble

      from - youtube - Evolution 2 podcast interview - book - Understanding Living Systems - Denis Noble - Ray Noble - https://hyp.is/OttWABYFEe--gLNFyeNyTw/docdrop.org/video/oHZI1zZ_BhY/

    1. we also challenge in the book The Very concept of selfishness itself

      for - book - Understanding living systems - challenging selfishness - critique - of Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene

      • Ray Noble points out a contradiction in Richard Dawkin's use of the word selfish in his "Selfish gene".
        • Unless there is purposefulness, choice and agency, there cannot be any concept of selfishness
    2. for - Denis Noble - Ready Noble - evolutionary biology - critique of Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene theory - critique of gene centrism - book - Understanding Living Systems - human agency

      summary - In this informative interview, brothers Denis and Ray Noble discuss their new book - Understanding Living Systems, and - dispel the 70 year old narrative of Gene centrism and the selfish gene as determining the high level behaviour of living organisms

    1. for - Oded Rechavi - neurobiology - gene centrism - critique - from - youtube podcast interview - book - Understanding Living Systems - Ray Noble - Denis Noble

      summary - Rechavi performed experiments with C Elegan and demonstrated that it possesses a type of neuron that - produces RNA that in response to elevated temperature change is transmitted to reproductive cells so that the offsprings encode it in the genome, and it is better adapted to deal with elevated temperatures

      question - How many species do this? Is it generally found throughout nature?

      from - outube podcast interview - book - Understanding Living Systems - Ray Noble - Denis Noble - https://hyp.is/OUlGVBXrEe-iaBeZhH_4DQ/docdrop.org/video/oHZI1zZ_BhY/

    1. organisms can actually go and use the chance and they're doing that all the time see the way our immune systems work shows that what happens when a new virus or new bacterium or new 00:02:56 anything else arrives

      for - key insight - living systems use chance to adapt

      key insight - living systems use chance to adapt - immune system defends against novel viruses - cancers grow - bacteria become resistant to antibiotics

    1. four 00:08:25 major common misunderstandings that have infected our understanding of what it is to be a living system

      for - molecular biology - paradigm shift - living system - 4 common misunderstandings - book - Understanding Living Systems - 4 common misunderstandings

      4 common misunderstandings of living systems - 1. The central dogma of molecular biology - one way causation - Genes (DNA) to - proteins to - organism - 2. The Weismann Barrier - 3. DNA as self-replicator - 4. Separation of Replicator (DNA) and Vehicle (Living cell) are completely separate

    2. biology Beyond The 00:00:19 genome

      for - book - Biology Beyond the Genome - author - scientist - biologist - Denis Noble - book - Understanding Living Systems

  4. Apr 2024
    1. Either system canbe s tart ed with a small li stof captions and be increasedscientifically.

      Scientific principles had bled so thoroughly into both culture and business that even advertising for filing systems in business in the 1930 featured their ability to be used and expanded scientifically.

    1. And the evidence is coming back with unexpected results. A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.

      This, too, is very logical. It is due to the nature of systems.

      When one component, or even a lot, get "upgraded" this does not result in the overall results being improved. A system works best when all components work together to one or multiple goals in seemless harmony, creating emergence.

      Therefore, if a component is out of place, even if it is better than its predecessor, it won't yield the correct results.

      So for the methods to have a large, positive, impact, the entire system needs to be transformed.

      This is why I don't want to upgrade a component of education at a time, but completely transform it once my theory of optimal education is complete. Like a phoenix, from the ashes we will rise. Burn it all down, and build it up again with an OODA loop at the core... The system needs to be in constant change, for without change, evolution cannot happen.

      Observation Orientation Decision Action

      This loop needs to be at the center of every system for "systems without the inherent capacity to change are doomed to die" -- Colonel John Boyd.

      Of course, the system will need to be designed with utmost care and based on countless amounts of research, reviewed by a multitude of world-class experts in numeral areas.

    1. Stated briefly the work of the intelligence department can be 50brought under the three heads: filing, indexing and summarising.

      For Kaiser, his "intelligence department" has three broad functions: summarizing, indexing, and filing.

  5. Mar 2024
    1. It was said (76) that it isimpossible to devise a system wliich could be applied universally,the card registers give a very clear illustration of tliis.

      This is a restatement that a particular system should be customized to its users.

      There is potential that a system could be applied universally, but it requires a very large amount of data and metadata to suit the needs of a greater number of people and use cases. It also requires a reasonable amount of work in practical use to make it operate as expected.

      The Mundaneum was likely close on paper and Google comes close to this, but still isn't perfect.

      quote via ¶76 and 92

    2. In each class the individual articles or the folders containing anumber of articles belonging to the same firm are numbered con-secutively, CI, C2, Tl, T2 etc. that is : a new series of consecutivenumbers is started with each initial letter. The correspondenceof Smith & Co. may for instance be in a folder marked C34, thecatalogues of Jones Bros, may be numbered T89. But theremay be a hundred letters to and from Smith & Co. and a dozencatalogues from Jones Bros, so that it will be necessary to dividefurther until each specific article will have a specific numberby which it can be quoted exclusively reserved to it. This isdone by suffixing the date to the previous numbers thus : C34-3VII7or T89-1906 etc. The former refers to a letter of Smith & Co.dated July the third 1907, the latter refers to a catalogue ofJones Bros, of 1906. No matter how large the files will becomein time, the meaning of these numbers will remain the same, andthere can be no other articles bearing these numbers. If a numberor numbers refer to more than one article, confusion is invariablythe result

      Kaiser lays out an alphanumeric system for indexing materials using letters, numbers, and even dates and importantly suggests a 1-1 and onto relationship (though not in these terms) to prevent confusion.

      Compare with Niklas Luhmann's system.

    1. By 1700, we should note, slaves comprised half the population of thesouthern portion of the Carolina colony, an imbalance that widened to 72percent by 1740. Beginning in 1714, a series of laws required that for everysix slaves an owner purchased, he had to acquire one white servant.Lamenting that the “white population do not proportionally multiply,”South Carolina lawmakers had one more reason to wish that a corps ofLeet-men and women had actually been formed. Encouraged to marry andmultiply, tied to the land, they might have provided a racial and class barrierbetween the slaves and the landed elites.13
    2. Slavery was thus a logicaloutgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emergedfrom three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment ofindentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breedchildren so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.
    1. Katherine Sarafian,a producer who’s been at Pixar since Toy Story, tells me she prefers to envision triggering theprocess over trusting it—observing it to see where it’s faltering, then slapping it around a bitto make sure it’s awake. Again, the individual plays the active role, not the process itself. Or,to put it another way, it is up to the individual to remember that it’s okay to use the handle,just as long as you don’t forget the suitcase.
    1. By jumping into unfamiliar areas of code, even if you do not "solve" the bug, you can learn new areas of the code, tricks for getting up to speed quickly, and debugging techniques.

      Building a mental model of the codebase, as Jennifer Moore says over at Jennifer++:

      The fundamental task of software development is not writing out the syntax that will execute a program. The task is to build a mental model of that complex system, make sense of it, and manage it over time.

  6. Feb 2024
  7. Jan 2024
    1. Only reprints (without any alterations)retain the original call number, all revises or new editions howeversmall the alterations should be given a new call number, butdecimals may be used with advantage.

      Though referring to catalogs and office literature, in 1908 it was known that using decimals would allow one to distinguish between slightly different versions of indexable items without running out of "space" for new additions.

    2. Call Numbers

      Interesting to see a mix of numbers and letters in the indexing system here from 1908.

      Numbers for companies and dates and letters as tags for a variety of business purposes as well as for month indicators.

    1. I've sketched it out elsewhere but let's memorialize the broad strokes here because we're inspired at the moment... come back later and add in quotes from Luhmann and other sources (@Heyde1931).

      Luhmann was balancing the differences between topically arranged commonplaces and the topical nature of the Dewey Decimal System (a standardized version across thousands of collections) and building neighborhoods of related ideas.

      One of the issues with commonplace books, is planning them out in advance. How might you split up a notebook for long term use to create easy categories when you don't know how much room to give each in advance? (If you don't believe me, stop by r/commonplacebooks where you're likely to see this question pop up several times this year.) This issue is remedied when John Locke suggests keeping commonplaces in chronological order of their appearance and cross-indexing them.

      This creates a new problem of a lot of indexing and increased searching over time as the commonplace book scales. Translating to index cards complicates things because they're unattached and can potentially move about, so they don't have the anchor effectuated by their being bound up in a notebook. But being on slips allows them to be more easily shuffled, rearranged, and even put into outlines, which are all fantastic affordances when looking for creativity or scaffolding things out into an article or book for creation.

      As a result, numbering slips creates a solid anchor by which the cards can be placed and always returned for later finding and use. But how should we number them? Should it be with integers and done chronologically? (1, 2, 3, ..., n) This is nice, but makes a mish-mash of things and doesn't assist much in indexing or finding.

      Why not go back to Dewey, which has been so popular? But not Dewey in the broadest sense of using numbers to tie ideas to concrete categories. An individual's notes are idiosyncratic and it would be increasingly rare for people to have the same note, much less need a standardized number for it (and if they were standardized, who does that work and how is it distributed so everyone could use it?) No, instead, let's just borrow the decimal structure of Dewey's system. One of the benefits of his decimal structure is that an infinity of new books can be placed on ever-expanding bookshelves without needing to restructure the numbering system. Just keep adding decimal places onto the end when necessary. This allows for immense density when necessary. But, importantly, it also provides some fantastic level of serendipity.

      Let's say you go to learn about geometry, so you look up the topic in your trusty library card catalog. Do you really need to look at the hundreds of records returned? Probably not. You only need the the Dewey Decimal Number 516. Once you're at the shelves, you can browse through that section to see what's there and interesting in the space. You might also find things on the shelves above or below 516 and find the delights of topology and number theory or abstract algebra and real analysis. Subjects you might not necessarily have had in mind will suddenly present themselves for your consideration. Even if your initial interest may have been in Zhongmin Shen's Lectures on Finsler geometry (516.375), you might also profitably walk away with James E. Humphreys' Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory (512.55).

      So what happens if we use these decimal numbers for our notes? First we will have the ability to file things between and amongst each other to infinity. By filing things closest to things which seem related to each other, we'll create neighborhoods of ideas which can easily grow over time. Related ideas will stay together while seemingly related ideas on first blush may slowly grow away from each other over time as even more closely related ideas move into the neighborhood between them. With time and careful work, you'll have not only a breadth of ideas, but a massive depth of them too.

      The use of decimal numbering provides us with a few additional affordances:

      1 (Neighborhoods of ideas) 1.1 combinatorial creativity Neighborhoods of ideas can help to fuel combinatorial creativity and forge new connections as well as insight over time. 1.2 writing One might take advantage of these growing neighborhoods to create new things. Perhaps you've been working for a while and you see you have a large number of cards in a particular area. You can, to some extent, put your hand into your box and grab a tranche of notes. By force of filing, these notes are going to be reasonably related, which means you should be able to use them to write a blog post, an article, a magazine piece, a chapter, or even an entire book (which may require a few fistfuls, as necessary.)

      2 (Sparse indexing) We don't need to index each and every single topic or concept into our index. Because we've filed things nearby, if a new card about Finsler geometry relates to another and we've already indexed the first under that topic, then we don't need to index the second, because our future selves can easily rely on the fact that if we're interested in Finsler geometry in the future, we can look that up in the index, and go to that number where we're likely to see other cards related to the topic as well as additional serendipitous ideas related to them in that same neighborhood.

      You may have heard that as Luhmann progressed on his decades long project, broadly on society and within the area of sociology, he managed to amass 90,000 index cards. How many do you suppose he indexed under the topic of sociology? Certainly he had 10s of thousands relating to his favorite subject, no? Of course he did, but what would happen over time as a collection grows? Having 20,000 indexed entries about sociology doesn't scale well for your search needs. Even 10 indexed entries may be a bit overwhelming as once you find a top level card, hundreds to thousands around it are going to be related. 10 x 100 = 1,000 cards to flip through. So if you're indexing, be conservative. In the roughly 45 years of creating 90,000 slips, Luhmann only indexed two cards with the topic of "sociology". If you look through his index, you'll find that most of his topical entries only have pointers to one or two cards, which provide an entryway into those topics which are backed up with dozens to hundreds of cards on related topics. In rarer, instances you might find three or four, but it's incredibly rare to find more than that.

      Over time, one will find that, for the topics one is most interested in, the number of ideas and cards will grown without bound. Here it makes sense to use more and more specific topics (tags, categories, taxonomies) all of which are each also sparsely indexed. Ultimately one finds that in the limit, the categories get so fractionalized that the closest category one idea has with another is the fact that they're juxtaposed closely by number. The of the decimal expansion might say something about the depth or breadth of the relationship between ideas.

      Something else arises here. At first one may have the tendency to associate their numbers with topical categories. This is only natural as it's a function at which humans all excel. But are those numbers really categories after a few weeks? Probably not. Treat them only as address numbers or GPS coordinates to be able to find your way. Your sociology section may quickly find itself with invasive species of ideas from anthropology and archaeology as well as history. If you treat all your ideas only at the topical level, they'll be miles away from where you need them to be as the smallest level atomic ideas collide with each other to generate new ideas for you. Naturally you can place them further away if you wish and attempt to bridge the distance with links to numbers in other locations, but I suspect you'll find this becomes pretty tedious over time and antithetical when it comes time to pull out a handful and write something. It's fantastically easier to pull out a several dozen and begin than it is to go through and need to pull out linked cards in a onesy-twosies manner or double check with your index to make sure you've gotten the most interesting bits. This becomes even more important as your collection scales.

    1. The physicistsStephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher introduced me, in the early1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learnedabout complex systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the bi-ologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineerand device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the in-credible possibilities of molecular electronics.

      some of Bill Joy's intellectual history here mirrors much of my own...

    1. Der Ausbau der Windenergie in Deutschland hat sich unter der Ampelkoalition beschleunigt. Es werden aber im Augenblick nur etwa halt so viele Anlagen gebaut, wie es nach den Plänen der Bundesregierung nötig wäre. In den südlichen Bundesländern ist der Ausbau viel zu langsam. Genehmigungsverfahren z.B. für den Transport dauern zu lange. https://taz.de/Ausbau-der-Windenergie/!5983011/

    1. I built the system out of necessity–because after trying my hand at the big names in personal productivity systems for years, I couldn’t quite get them to work for me. Out of that frustration, The Today System was born.

      Mike Sturm ostensible created the Today System for his own use.

      Is the system productized? Is he charging something for it or just proselytizing it?

  8. Dec 2023
    1. history is always the result of a lot of causes coming together you know 00:29:22 you have this metaphor of the chain of events and this is a terrible metaphor for there is no chain of events a chain of events imagines that every event is a link connected to one previous event and 00:29:36 to one subsequent event so there is a war there is one cause for the war and there will be one consequence it's never like that in history every event is more like a tree there is an entire system of 00:29:50 roots that came together to create it and it has a lot of fruits with lots of different influences
      • for: insight - history - complexity, bad metaphor - chain of events

      • insight: complexity and history

        • chain of events is a bad metaphor for things that occur in history
        • the complexity of history is that many causes come together too being about an event
        • likewise, when that event occurs, it is the cause of many different consequences
        • linear vs systems thinking
      • adjacency between

        • history
        • emptiness
        • Indra's net
      • adjacency statement
        • history reflects emptiness
        • Indra's net extended into historical events
    2. what you're referring to is the idea that people come together and through language culture and story they have narratives that then create their own realities like the 00:12:04 sociologist abely the sociologist wi Thomas said if people think people believe things to be real then they are real in their consequences
      • for: Thomas Theorem, The definition of the situation, William Isaac Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thomas, definition - Thomas Theorem, definition - definition of the situation, conflicting belief systems - Thomas theorem, learned something new - Thomas theorem

      • definition: Thomas Theorem

      • definition: definition of the situation
        • "The Thomas theorem is a theory of sociology which was formulated in 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas:

      If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.[1]

      In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behavior.|

    1. If I had a dollar for every organizational system I have tried, I could treat myself to a steak dinner in a fancy restaurant. (Hey! That’s not a bad ideal!) I’ve tried notebook organizers, card files, flip charts, a stop watch, and numerous labeling gadgets. I’ve tried refrigerator magnets, the buddy system, lots of books, and a bunch of classes and seminars. All of these were good tools and some of them had great ideas, but none of them worked for me. (p27)

    2. I accomplished a couple of other things on that first day back into reality. First, with an evil Grinch-like smile | uprooted every household management system | had ever tried, and tore up every single 3x5 card in them. Then one by one, | roasted and toasted them in the fireplace until they were gone, gone, gone. Next, with equally fiendish delight, | speared my $35 namebrand notebook organizer with a marshmallow fork, and | roasted it too. It melted into oblivion, all but it’s ugly metal spine. Next, | prayed for my attitude and for help. And finally, | marched myself into Wal-mart and bought my first clear plastic bin, a two pound sack of M&M's, and a loaf of white bread. For better or worse, we have been pretty happy campers at my house ever since. (p6)

    1. many people are complex systems thinkers even though they don't know it
      • for: example - systems thinking, quote -: many people are complex systems thinkers

      • quote:

        • many people are complex systems thinkers even though they don't know it
      • Thomas Homer-Dixon
      • date: 2023

      • examples: complex systems clichés

        • the whole of greater than the sum of its parts
          • nonlinearities
        • the straw that broke the camels back
          • emergence
      • comment

        • the first one could be that systems are not the same as just all the parts
        • the second one could also represent Tipping points and nonlinearities of complex systems
  9. Nov 2023
    1. The nightmares of AI discrimination and exploitation are the lived reality of those I call the excoded

      Defining 'excoded'

    2. AI raises the stakes because now that data is not only used to make decisions about you, but rather to make deeply powerful inferences about people and communities. That data is training models that can be deployed, mobilized through automated systems that affect our fundamental rights and our access to whether you get a mortgage, a job interview, or even how much you’re paid. Thinking individually is only part of the equation now; you really need to think in terms of collective harm. Do I want to give up this data and have it be used to make decisions about people like me—a woman, a mother, a person with particular political beliefs?

      Adding your data to AI models is a collective decision

  10. everbookforever.com everbookforever.com
    1. https://everbookforever.com/

      Everbook appears to be a variation on some of the GTD, PKM, and productivity traditions done on larger loose slips of paper (instead of notebook style) with an incredibly lovely leather folder. There's a lot to like here for those stuck between love of slips and notebooks. Its reminiscent of project planning and to do methods using ring binders or FiloFaxes.

  11. Oct 2023
    1. Each page just has a page number at the top corner, as far as I can see. The German Wikipedia entry says that from notebook E, he numbered the front pages with Arabic numerals and the back pages with Roman numerals, so his notes began at both ends and met in the middle of the book. This is clear in the original, but hard to understand. And he would at least have been able to refer to his notes in the form {volume letter, page number}.It seems he didn’t number consecutive entries himself, but that in later Lichtenberg scholarship there developed an editorial convention to do so. After his death they only published his ‘aphorisms’, organised by theme, and later re-organised by date, but still missing his scientific and other writings.
    1. Zunächst war ich ein Jahr am Oberverwaltungsgericht Lüneburg zurOrganisation eines Referenz-Systems für Verwaltungsgerichtsent-scheidungen; das Gericht sollte sehen können, was an obergerichtli-chen Entscheidungen jeweils vorlag

      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?

    1. when building on unenclosable P2P systems like Holochain, it’s actually possible to have it both ways: clean-energy projects that have the resources for large-scale impact and are not at risk of becoming corrupt in protection of proprietary business interests.
      • for: competitive advantage, competitive advantage - unencloseable carriers in energy systems
      • competitive advantage: unencloseable carriers
        • when building on unenclosable P2P systems like Holochain,
        • it’s actually possible to have it both ways:
          • clean-energy projects that have the resources for large-scale impact and
          • are not at risk of becoming corrupt in protection of proprietary business interests.
  12. Sep 2023
    1. 08:00 his sword technique was adaptable, mendable, consistent with the complex nature of reality, that changes constantly, not resisting change but adapting self to it

      • see zk on how a more dynamic approach to productivity and systems can help us reflect reality more closely, ever changing
    1. Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in GermanI believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell,messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, whereeverything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entryafter the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts witheach man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitatedby scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everythingas I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be enteredin another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, andthe ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connectionsand explanations of the material that flow from it. [46]

      —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776


      In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.

      Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.

      It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.

      Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.


      Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?

  13. Aug 2023
    1. these are the seven main thrusts of the series
      • for: societal design, designing societies, societal architecture, transforming society, whole system change, SSO, social superorganism, John Boik

      The seven main ideas for societal design: 1. societal transformation - is necessary to avoid catastrophe 2. the specific type of transformation is science-based transformation based on entirely new systems - de novo design - 3. A practical way to implement the transformation in the real world - it must be economical, and doable within the short time window for system change before us. - Considering a time period of 50 years for total change, with some types of change at a much higher priority than others. - The change would be exponential so starting out slower, and accelerating - Those communities that are the first to participate would make the most rapid improvements. 4. Promoting a worldview of society as a social superorganism, a cognitive organism, and its societal systems as a cognitive architecture. 5. Knowing the intrinsic purpose of a society - each subsystem must be explained in terms of the overall intrinsic purpose. 6. The reason for transformation - Transformation that improves cognition reduces the uncertainty that our society's intrinsic purpose is fulfilled. 7. Forming a partnership between the global science community and all the local communities of the world.

    2. all that sense making and problem 00:14:18 solving has been siloed
      • for: whole system approach, system approach, systems thinking, systems thinking - societal design, societal design, John Boik, societal design - evolutionary approach, designing societies - evolutionary approach -paraphrase
        • currently, all societal systems function as silos
        • how does the total system change and achieve new stable states?
        • advocating for designing societal systems so that the cognitive architectures of the different component systems can all serve the same purpose
        • design a fitness evaluation score Rather than tackling problems in individual silos, John is promoting an integrated approach.

      This is wholly consistent with the underpinnings of SRG Deep Humanity praxis that stresses the same need for multi-disciplinary study and synthesis of all the various parts of the SSO.into one unified Gestalt to mitigate progress traps. https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FAnalysis%2F2019%2F09%2F20%2FRonald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FCulture%2F2018%2F10%2F12%2FHumanity-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world

    1. Dana (Donella) Meadows Lecture: Sustainable Systems

      deep insight -systems thinking - system behaviour comes out of the system, its interrelationships, its goals, not the elements of the people or actors in it

  14. Jul 2023
    1. Converting Commonplace Books? .t3_14v2ohz._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/ihaveascone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14v2ohz/converting_commonplace_books/

      Don't convert unless you absolutely need to, it will be a lot of soul-crushing make work. Since some of your practice already looks like Ross Ashby's system, why not just continue what you've been doing all along and start a physical index card-based index for your commonplaces? (As opposed to a more classical Lockian index.) As you browse your commonplaces create index cards for topics you find and write down the associated book/page numbers. Over time you'll more quickly make your commonplace books more valuable while still continuing on as you always have without skipping much a beat or attempting to convert over your entire system. Alternately you could do a paper notebook with a digital index too. I came across 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 commonplace/zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

  15. Jun 2023
    1. But everything changes when degrees I and IV are treated as sev-enths, which is a quality only associated with the fifth degree in tonal harmony.This makes any hypothesis of assimilation impossible.The link between the function and the quality of a chord, which is organic in atonal situation, does not exist in blues. Indeed, let us look at the first degree withfour sounds: C-E-G-B b. All four notes belong to the scale as it has been defined.But this is neither true with the fourth degree (F-A-C-E b), as A does not belongto the scale, nor the fifth (G-B-D-F), which involves a B natural and a D that donot appear in the scale. This lack of organic link between the scale of referenceand how chords are built is a fundamental difference between blues and worksusing the tonal system.

      there is also no link between the quality of a chord and its function in blues harmonic system (I and IV chords are both 7th-chords)

    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20230616140838/https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/16/george-washington-university-professor-antisemitism-palestine-dc

      psychoanalysis was the guided internal journey of individuals, in the nineties CBT displaced this (visible in the sessions I did at the time), and now a new wave of psychoanalysis comes in that doesn't only take the individual as focus, but also the impact of the structures and systems around yourself. That's an interesting evolutionary sketch of the field.

      To me this article is as much about power and generations as it is about a lack of a professional field being able to apply its own expertise to itself.

      culture war as generational war and but also US specific perhaps. Also the culture war seems to be precisely about taking the individual vs the collective influence on the individual. The old guard feeling individually blamed for things that the new guard says is a collective thing to reckon with. Where again the responses of each are seen through the other lens. There's now no way to resolve that easily. Change happens when the old people die said Howard. Seems to be at issue here too.

    1. Growing literature has shown that powerful NLP systems may encode social biases; however, the political bias of summarization models remains relatively unknown.

      NLP systems, language (use) itself, encodes/holds bias.

      Summarization apparently also.is not bias free.

      Goals: Our systematic characterization provides a framework for future studies of bias in summarization.

    1. Quarter Sawn Tiger Oak 6 Drawer Card Catalog Vintage American Business Systems

      https://www.ebay.com/itm/256099662210

      American Business Systems Co. at 212 Summer Street, Boston, MA manufactured six drawer wooden card indexes some time circa early 1900s.

  16. May 2023
  17. view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org
    1. To prevent fraud, Bob Brown, a founding partner of The CPA Solution, said businesses should focus on building strong systems that have checks and balances rather than relying on individuals who act as star employees.
  18. Apr 2023
    1. All we make and offer up to each other freely is stolen ten times over by those who have much grander visions of enclosure.

      Ah, but we do have the grander visions of enclosure. "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around." That's Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, from a few decades ago. But similar sentiments come from countless other sources, from Lakota "all our relations" to Amish sentiments toward technology, etc. Point is there are many, even just in the USA (which drives so much of this), peoples to ally with and sources to draw on in crafting a broader collective story (and thus practices and institutions) which place life's (including humans') needs at the center and economic "needs" in service to them, rather than the other way around.

  19. Mar 2023
    1. 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.

      Original .pdf converted with docdrop.org for OCR annotation on 2023-03-24.

      annotation target: urn:x-pdf:3c1f14d64c91cf4b513efa16df4ed90d

      Annotations: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A3c1f14d64c91cf4b513efa16df4ed90d

    1. 9/8b2 "Multiple storage" als Notwendigkeit derSpeicherung von komplexen (komplex auszu-wertenden) Informationen.

      9/8b2 "Multiple storage" as a necessity of<br /> storage of complex (complex<br /> evaluating) information.

      Fascinating to see the English phrase "multiple storage" pop up in Luhmann's ZKII section on Zettelkasten.

      This note is undated, though being in ZKII likely occurred more than a decade after he'd started his practice. One must wonder where he pulled the source for the English phrase rather than using a German one? Does the idea appear in Heyde? It certainly would have been an emerging question within systems theory and potentially computer science ideas which Luhmann would have had access to.

    1. Hierbei handelt es sich um eine Sammlung von Notizen, die Luhmann vermutlich zwischen 1952 und 1961 angelegt hat (mit einzelnen späteren Nachträgen; Notizen insbesondere zum Themenkomplex Weltgesellschaft wurden allerdings noch bis ca. 1973 durchweg in diese Sammlung eingestellt). Die insgesamt ca. 23.000 Zettel verteilen sich auf die ersten sieben physischen Auszüge des Kastens sowie auf kleinere Registerabteilungen, die im 17. Auszug der zweiten Sammlung (physischer Auszug 24) stehen. Die Notizen sind im Wesentlichen in der Zeit entstanden, als Luhmann als Rechtsreferendar in Lüneburg bzw. als Regierungsrat im Kultusministerium in Niedersachen gearbeitet hat und dokumentieren seine Lektüre verwaltungs- bzw. staatswissenschaftlicher, philosophischer und zunehmend auch organisationstheoretischer sowie soziologischer Literatur.

      According to the Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, Luhmann began his first zettelkasten in 1952 likely when he was working as a legal trainee in Lüneburg or as a government councilor in the Ministry of Education in Lower Saxony.

      This timeframe would have been just after Johannes Erich Heyde had published the 8th edition of Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens in 1951.

      Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/Jn9elsk5Ee2hsLP5WWBEBw on dates of NL ZK - https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA aktenzeichen - https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA Clemens Luhmann link

    1. The ‘top level’ category was too fixed, and it was hard to know when you needed a new category i.e. 1004 versus 1003/3.

      The problem here is equating the "top level" number with category in the first place. It's just an idea and the number is a location. Start by separating the two.

    1. A Zettelkasten is a system of notes that fit the criteria of being a system. Being alive vs. being a machine is a good metaphor to understand the difference. A Zettelkasten is alive, a conventional note taking system is a machine.

      I'm not the only one to think of zettelkasten as "living"...

  20. Feb 2023
    1. When an idea feels like too much work to write down, you just told yourself it wasn’t valuable enough.
    2. They write a bunch of crap down that they wish they’d be able to do (secretly knowing they never will) and then their task manager gets overwhelming and they drop it because there is too much noise. This is why systems like Bullet Journal thrive in a digital world. When something is too hard to migrate to a new page or notebook, you just said it’s not worth doing and you let it go. Bullet Journal is a no-first system.

      Bullet journaling works well in a noisy world because it forces people to confront what they're eventually not going to do anyway and gets them to drop it rather than leaving it on an ever-growing list.

      Carrying forward to do lists manually encourages one to quit things that aren't going to get done.

    1. Ever since President Reagan decided to stop enforcing U.S. anti-monopoly laws, the easy solution to competitive threat is to simply buy the competitor.

      Note for historical purposes.

    1. Crises in energy, economics, medicine, education, and so forth can all be seen as “stuck” in patterns. Co-dependent systems require co-evolution. How can we shift these patterns?

      = stuck systems - comments - co-dependent systems which are stuck - are similar to computer programs that execute in parallel but reach a condition called "lock" - when circular feedback loops between subroutines - keep them stuck in a perpetual, non-computing loop - require co-evolutionary work across all the dependent systems to shift out of stuck

    1. Staff and studentsare rarely in a position to understand the extent to which data is being used, nor are they able todetermine the extent to which automated decision-making is leveraged in the curation oramplification of content.

      Is this a data (or privacy) literacy problem? A lack of regulation by experts in this field?

  21. Jan 2023
    1. run on a wide variety of hardware - desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, watches

      Curious if he means can run on different devices or an installation spans multiple devices. I'm interested in considering the operating system as a control plane for many devices. Additionally multi-user support for sharing hardware.

    1. A term recommended by Eve regarding an interdisciplinary approach that accounts for multiple feedback loops within complex systems. Need to confer complex systems science to see if ADHD is already addressed in that domain.

    1. record-keeping of animal behaviour in systematic units of time and incorporating at least one verb.
    2. Sumerologists place the origins of the development of writing around 3300 bc in the pictograms associated with abstract marks representing numbers; ‘the writing system invented or developed … of a pictographic character; its signs were drawings’ and cuneiform gradually developed out of this, which ‘is a script, not a language’ (Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop1999, 10: our emphases).
    3. One common definition of ‘writing’ is that it is written language, i.e. not only acts as a notational system but one which has a connection to the phonetic form of the language spoken by the writer (Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop1999).
    4. We appreciate this is a long span of time, and were concerned why any specific artificial memory system should last for so long.

      I suspect that artificial memory systems, particularly those that make some sort of logical sense, will indeed be long lasting ones.

      Given the long, unchanging history of the Acheulean hand axe, as an example, these sorts of ideas and practices were handed down from generation to generation.

      Given their ties to human survival, they're even more likely to persist.

      Indigenous memory systems in Aboriginal settings date to 65,000 years and also provide an example of long-lived systems.

    5. Francesco d'Errico has done much to advance our understanding of artificial/ external memory systems.
    6. These may occur on rock walls, but were commonly engraved onto robust bones since at least the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic and African Late Stone Age, where it is obvious they served as artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively, exosomatic devices in which number sense is clearly evident (for definitions see d’Errico Reference d'Errico1989; Reference d'Errico1995a,Reference d'Erricob; d'Errico & Cacho Reference d'Errico and Cacho1994; d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017; Hayden Reference Hayden2021).

      Abstract marks have appeared on rock walls and engraved into robust bones as artificial memory systems (AMS) and external memory systems (EMS).

    7. Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication.
    1. Excellent article on the complex nature of rape. The key point for me is that too many people think it's always a black-and-white matter. In fact, the boundary between rape and not-rape is not that crisp. There is a boundary layer here. I think that if more people realized every boundary is really a boundary layer, there would be fewer conflicts about such matters.

  22. Dec 2022
    1. Systems-thinking competence is the ability to collectively analyze complex systems across different domains (society, environment, economy, etc.) and across different scales (local to global), thereby considering cascading effects, inertia, feedback loops and other systemic features related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.
    1. 7.106.1 of 5 State of the School 2019

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp818Ml3C2w&list=PLuJbg6eLC7Y2nU_KhrWZX8zGg-yl_L-_T

      At the opening of the video he describes his numbering system: 7.106.1 is shorthand for 7th year, 106th day, video number 1. This is a chronological numbering for tracking things and not a relational sort of numbering often seen in zettelkasten contexts.

    1. It’s tempting to believe incredible human-seeming software is in a way superhuman, Block-Wehba warned, and incapable of human error. “Something scholars of law and technology talk about a lot is the ‘veneer of objectivity’ — a decision that might be scrutinized sharply if made by a human gains a sense of legitimacy once it is automated,” she said.

      Veneer of Objectivity

      Quote by Hannah Bloch-Wehba, TAMU law professor

    1. It used to be that organizations looking to pick up signals of change in realms outside of their project — system-level change — had a limited set of methods to use. Some might have tried outcome mapping or harvesting, or used developmental evaluation; more often than not, such changes went unmeasured. Now, there is a wider set of methodological options, each specialized for certain functions, such as tracing how the organization’s efforts might have contributed to a policy or influence win. A few examples are ripple effect mapping, outcome harvesting, sentinel indicators, process tracing and the what else test.

      Examples of methods for evaluating systems change

  23. Nov 2022
    1. This is a good example of how undesirable social facts (i.e., that some people will homeless) can undermine the overall health of the society. I added a comment to the article to explain in more detail the systems-level effects.

    1. 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'> <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

    1. At the root of deadlines’ pointlessness is the fact that you can’t control outcomes. You can only control the processes that generate those outcomes.
    1. It seemed to me that you could understand cultures by analyzing their interconnected components. Cultures have their own language, objects, and knowledge; their own stories, aesthetics, practices, people, and places that all make sense together in a coherent way. They have behaviors they condone and reward, and behaviors they deem unworthy. And each has its own moral sensibility.

      A Systems Thinking approach to understand culture.

    1. The paradox of information systems[edit] Drummond suggests in her paper in 2008 that computer-based information systems can undermine or even destroy the organisation that they were meant to support, and it is precisely what makes them useful that makes them destructive – a phenomenon encapsulated by the Icarus Paradox.[9] For examples, a defence communication system is designed to improve efficiency by eliminating the need for meetings between military commanders who can now simply use the system to brief one another or answer to a higher authority. However, this new system becomes destructive precisely because the commanders no longer need to meet face-to-face, which consequently weakened mutual trust, thus undermining the organisation.[10] Ultimately, computer-based systems are reliable and efficient only to a point. For more complex tasks, it is recommended for organisations to focus on developing their workforce. A reason for the paradox is that rationality assumes that more is better, but intensification may be counter-productive.[11]

      From Wikipedia page on Icarus Paradox. Example of architectural design/technical debt leading to an "interest rate" that eventually collapsed the organization. How can one "pay down the principle" and not just the "compound interest"? What does that look like for this scenario? More invest in workforce retraining?

      Humans are complex, adaptive systems. Machines have a long history of being complicated, efficient (but not robust) systems. Is there a way to bridge this gap? What does an antifragile system of machines look like? Supervised learning? How do we ensure we don't fall prey to the oracle problem?

      Baskerville, R.L.; Land, F. (2004). "Socially Self-destructing Systems". The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, actors, contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 263–285

    1. What Is a Blockchain Oracle? A blockchain oracle is a secure piece of middleware that facilitates communication between blockchains and any off-chain system, including data providers, web APIs, enterprise backends, cloud providers, IoT devices, e-signatures, payment systems, other blockchains, and more. Oracles take on several key functions: Listen – monitor the blockchain network to check for any incoming user or smart contract requests for off-chain data. Extract – fetch data from one or multiple external systems such as off-chain APIs hosted on third-party web servers. Format – format data retrieved from external APIs into a blockchain readable format (input) and/or making blockchain data compatible with an external API (output). Validate – generate a cryptographic proof attesting to the performance of an oracle service using any combination of data signing, blockchain transaction signing, TLS signatures, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) attestations, or zero-knowledge proofs. Compute – perform some type of secure off-chain computation for the smart contract, such as calculating a median from multiple oracle submissions or generating a verifiable random number for a gaming application. Broadcast – sign and broadcast a transaction on the blockchain in order to send data and any corresponding proof on-chain for consumption by the smart contract. Output (optional) –  send data to an external system upon the execution of a smart contract, such as relaying payment instructions to a traditional payment network or triggering actions from a cyber-physical system.

      Seems related to the paradox of information systems. Add to Anki deck

    1. evolution of my processes.

      A note taking practice is almost always an evolving process with a variety of different pressures and variables in how it takes form.

      List out these variables and pressures.

    2. The Notecard System

      This is almost pitched as a product with the brand name "The Notecard System".

    1. On the general organisation of memory see Ashby 1967, p103. It is therefore important that one is not dependent on a myriad of point-by-point accesses, but to be able to rely on relations between notes, i.e. on references that make more available at once than one has in mind when following a search impulse or fixating on a thought

      Fascinating to see Ashby pop up in Luhmann's section on zettelkasten in part because Ashby had a similar note taking practice, though part notebook/part index card based, and was highly interested in systems theory.

  24. Oct 2022
    1. The question often asked: "What happens when you want to add a new note between notes 1/1 and 1/1a?"

      Thoughts on Zettelkasten numbering systems

      I've seen variations of the beginner Zettelkasten question:

      "What happens when you want to add a new note between notes 1/1 and 1/1a?"

      asked at least a dozen times in the Reddit fora related to note taking and zettelkasten, on zettelkasten.de, or in other places across the web.

      Dense Sets

      From a mathematical perspective, these numbering or alpha-numeric systems are, by both intent and design, underpinned by the mathematical idea of dense sets. In the areas of topology and real analysis, one considers a set dense when one can choose a point as close as one likes to any other point. For both library cataloging systems and numbering schemes for ideas in Zettelkasten this means that you can always juxtapose one topic or idea in between any other two.

      Part of the beauty of Melvil Dewey's original Dewey Decimal System is that regardless of how many new topics and subtopics one wants to add to their system, one can always fit another new topic between existing ones ad infinitum.

      Going back to the motivating question above, the equivalent question mathematically is "what number is between 0.11 and 0.111?" (Here we've converted the artificial "number" "a" to a 1 and removed the punctuation, which doesn't create any issues and may help clarify the orderings a bit.) The answer is that there is an infinite number of numbers between these!

      This is much more explicit by writing these numbers as:<br /> 0.110<br /> 0.111

      Naturally 0.1101 is between them (along with an infinity of others), so one could start here as a means of inserting ideas this way if they liked. One either needs to count up sequentially (0, 1, 2, 3, ...) or add additional place values.

      Decimal numbering systems in practice

      The problem most people face is that they're not thinking of these numbers as decimals, but as natural numbers or integers (or broadly numbers without any decimal portions). Though of course in the realm of real numbers, numbers above 0 are dense as well, but require the use of their decimal portions to remain so.

      The tough question is: what sorts of semantic meanings one might attach to their adding of additional place values or their alphabetical characters? This meaning can vary from person to person and system to system, so I won't delve into it here.

      One may find it useful to logically chunk these numbers into groups of three as is often done using commas, periods, slashes, dashes, spaces, or other punctuation. This doesn't need to mean anything in particular, but may help to make one's numbers more easily readable as well as usable for filing new ideas. Sometimes these indicators can be confusing in discussion, so if ever in doubt, simply remove them and the general principles mentioned here should still hold.

      Depending on one's note taking system, however, when putting cards into some semblance of a logical sort-able order (perhaps within a folder for example), the system may choke on additional characters beyond the standard period to designate a decimal number. For example: within Obsidian, if you have a "zettelkasten" folder with lots of numbered and named files within it, you'll want to give each number the maximum number of decimal places so that when doing an alphabetic sort within the folder, all of the numbered ideas are properly sorted. As an example if you give one file the name "0.510 Mathematics", another "0.514 Topology" and a third "0.5141 Dense Sets" they may not sort properly unless you give the first two decimal expansions to the ten-thousands place at a minimum. If you changed them to "0.5100 Mathematics" and "0.5140 Topology, then you're in good shape and the folder will alphabetically sort as you'd expect. Similarly some systems may or may not do well with including alphabetic characters mixed in with numbers.

      If using chunked groups of three numbers, one might consider using the number 0.110.001 as the next level of idea between them and then continuing from there. This may help to spread some of the ideas out as surely one may have yet another idea to wedge in between 0.110.000 and 0.110.001?

      One can naturally choose almost any any (decimal) number, so long as it it somewhat "near" the original behind which one places it. By going out further in the decimal expansion, one can always place any idea between two others and know that there will be a number that it can be given that will "work".

      Generally within numbers as we use them for mathematics, 0.100000001 is technically "closer" by distance measurement to 0.1 than 0.11, (and by quite a bit!) but somehow when using numbers for zettelkasten purposes, we tend to want to not consider them as decimals, as the Dewey Decimal System does. We also have the tendency to want to keep our numbers as short as possible when writing, so it seems more "natural" to follow 0.11 with 0.111, as it seems like we're "counting up" rather than "counting down".

      Another subtlety that one sees in numbering systems is the proper or improper use of the whole numbers in front of the decimal portions. For example, in Niklas Luhmann's system, he has a section of cards that start with 3.XXXX which are close to a section numbered 35.YYYY. This may seem a bit confusing, but he's doing a bit of mental gymnastics to artificially keep his numbers smaller. What he really means is 3000.XXX and 3500.YYY respectively, he's just truncating the extra zeros. Alternately in a fully "decimal system" one would write these as 0.3000.XXXX and 0.3500.YYYY, where we've added additional periods to the numbers to make them easier to read. Using our original example in an analog system, the user may have been using foreshortened indicators for their system and by writing 1/1a, they may have really meant something of the form 001.001/00a, but were making the number shorter in a logical manner (at least to them).

      The close observer may have seen Scott Scheper adopt the slightly longer numbers in the thousands (like 3500.YYYY) as a means of remedying some of the numbering confusion many have when looking at Luhmann's system.

      Those who build their systems on top of existing ones like the Dewey Decimal Classification, or the Universal Decimal Classification may wish to keep those broad categories with three to four decimal places at the start and then add their own idea number underneath those levels.

      As an example, we can use the numbering for Finsler geometry from the Dewey Decimal Classification wikipedia page shown as:

      ``` 500 Natural sciences and mathematics

      510 Mathematics
      
          516 Geometry
      
              516.3 Analytic geometries
      
                  516.37 Metric differential geometries
      
                      516.375 Finsler geometry
      

      ```

      So in our zettelkasten, we might add our first card on the topic of Finsler geometry as "516.375.001 Definition of Finsler geometry" and continue from there with some interesting theorems and proofs on those topics.

      Of course, while this is something one can do doesn't mean that one should do it. Going too far down the rabbit holes of "official" forms of classification this way can be a massive time wasting exercise as in most private systems, you're never going to be comparing your individual ideas with the private zettelkasten of others and in practice the sort of standardizing work for classification this way is utterly useless. Beyond this, most personal zettelkasten are unique and idiosyncratic to the user, so for example, my math section labeled 510 may have a lot more overlap with history, anthropology, and sociology hiding within it compared with others who may have all of their mathematics hiding amidst their social sciences section starting with the number 300. One of the benefits of Luhmann's numbering scheme, at least for him, is that it allowed his system to be much more interdisciplinary than using a more complicated Dewey Decimal oriented system which may have dictated moving some of his systems theory work out of his politics area where it may have made more sense to him in addition to being more productive on a personal level.

      Of course if you're using the older sort of commonplacing zettelkasten system that was widely in use before Luhmann's variation, then perhaps using a Dewey-based system may be helpful to you?

      A Touch of History

      As both a mathematician working in the early days of real analysis and a librarian, some of these loose ideas may have occurred tangentially to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716), though I'm currently unaware of any specific instances within his work. One must note, however, that some of the earliest work within library card catalogs as we know and use them today stemmed from 1770s Austria where governmental conscription needs overlapped with card cataloging systems (Krajewski, 2011). It's here that the beginnings of these sorts of numbering systems begin to come into use well before Melvil Dewey's later work which became much more broadly adopted.

      The German "file number" (aktenzeichen) is a unique identification of a file, commonly used in their court system and predecessors as well as file numbers in public administration since at least 1934. We know Niklas Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, before beginning a career in Lüneburg's public administration where he stayed in civil service until 1962. Given this fact, it's very likely that Luhmann had in-depth experience with these sorts of file numbers as location identifiers for files and documents. As a result it's reasonably likely that a simplified version of these were at least part of the inspiration for his own numbering system.

      Your own practice

      At the end of the day, the numbering system you choose needs to work for you within the system you're using (analog, digital, other). I would generally recommend against using someone else's numbering system unless it completely makes sense to you and you're able to quickly and simply add cards to your system with out the extra work and cognitive dissonance about what number you should give it. The more you simplify these small things, the easier and happier you'll be with your set up in the end.

      References

      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.

      Munkres, James R. Topology. 2nd ed. 1975. Reprint, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1999.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanus_pagination

      Stephanus pagination is a system of reference numbers used in editions of Plato based on the three volume 1578 edition of Plato's complete works published by Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne) and translated by Joannes Serranus (Jean de Serres).

      See also: - Bekker numbering (for Aristotle) - Diels-Kranz numbering (for early pre-Socratics)

    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140708133632/http://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-cards-poic-system/

      Brief explanation of the Pile of Index Cards system, but without significant depth.

    2. I’m with Iris (and Jane) about the PoIC system — I don’t understand how the system works once it is set up. It’s a shame as it might be very useful. Ideally, I’d like to set it up with notebooks in Evernote instead of actual index cards and boxes (the last thing I need in my life is more paper clutter). That way it would be easily searchable, too).

      As is apparently often in describing new organizing systems (commonplace books, zettelkasten, PoIC, etc.), not everyone is going to understand it the first time, or even understand what is going on or why one would want to use it.

      This post by Susan is such an example.

      Susan does almost immediately grasp that this might be something one could transfer into a digital system however, particularly for the search functionality.

    1. https://youtu.be/ILuSxUYYjMs

      Luhmann zettelkasten origin myth at 165 second mark

      A short outline of several numbering schemes (essentially all decimal in nature) for zettelkasten including: - Luhmann's numbering - Bob Doto - Scott Scheper - Dan Allosso - Forrest Perry

      A little light on the "why", though it does get location as a primary focus. Misses the idea of density and branching. Touches on but broadly misses the arbitrariness of using the comma, period, or slash which functions primarily for readability.

    1. In a recent paper published in Nature Climate Change, scientists found that major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now ‘inevitable’ even if the burning of fossil fuels were to halt overnight. Using satellite observations of Greenland ice loss and ice cap from 2000 to 2019, the team found the losses will lead to a minimum rise of 27 cm regardless of climate change.

      A great example of the lag that large, complex systems exhibit when responding to significant input changes.

      Lag is something that humans are woefully weak at recognizing and understanding. This, and other systems concepts are what we need to add to the curriculum at all levels of education, to change this very significant shortcoming of "common knowledge".

  25. Sep 2022
    1. re all filed at the same locatin (under “Rehmke”) sequentially based onhow the thought process developed in the book. Ideally one uses numbers for that.

      While Heyde spends a significant amount of time on encouraging one to index and file their ideas under one or more subject headings, he address the objection:

      “Doesn’t this neglect the importance of sequentiality, context and development, i.e. doesn’t this completely make away with the well-thought out unity of thoughts that the original author created, when ideas are put on individual sheets, particularly when creating excerpts of longer scientific works?"

      He suggests that one file such ideas under the same heading and then numbers them sequentially to keep the original author's intention. This might be useful advice for a classroom setting, but perhaps isn't as useful in other contexts.

      But for Luhmann's use case for writing and academic research, this advice may actually be counter productive. While one might occasionally care about another author's train of thought, one is generally focusing on generating their own train of thought. So why not take this advice to advance their own work instead of simply repeating the ideas of another? Take the ideas of others along with your own and chain them together using sequential numbers for your own purposes (publishing)!!

      So while taking Heyde's advice and expand upon it for his own uses and purposes, Luhmann is encouraged to chain ideas together and number them. Again he does this numbering in a way such that new ideas can be interspersed as necessary.

    2. Many know from their own experience how uncontrollable and irretrievable the oftenvaluable notes and chains of thought are in note books and in the cabinets they are stored in

      Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

      This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

      (link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

      Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

      Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

      But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

      But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

      (Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

      Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

      One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

    1. Anders Hejlsberg: Let's start with versioning, because the issues are pretty easy to see there. Let's say I create a method foo that declares it throws exceptions A, B, and C. In version two of foo, I want to add a bunch of features, and now foo might throw exception D. It is a breaking change for me to add D to the throws clause of that method, because existing caller of that method will almost certainly not handle that exception. Adding a new exception to a throws clause in a new version breaks client code. It's like adding a method to an interface. After you publish an interface, it is for all practical purposes immutable, because any implementation of it might have the methods that you want to add in the next version. So you've got to create a new interface instead. Similarly with exceptions, you would either have to create a whole new method called foo2 that throws more exceptions, or you would have to catch exception D in the new foo, and transform the D into an A, B, or C. Bill Venners: But aren't you breaking their code in that case anyway, even in a language without checked exceptions? If the new version of foo is going to throw a new exception that clients should think about handling, isn't their code broken just by the fact that they didn't expect that exception when they wrote the code? Anders Hejlsberg: No, because in a lot of cases, people don't care. They're not going to handle any of these exceptions. There's a bottom level exception handler around their message loop. That handler is just going to bring up a dialog that says what went wrong and continue. The programmers protect their code by writing try finally's everywhere, so they'll back out correctly if an exception occurs, but they're not actually interested in handling the exceptions. The throws clause, at least the way it's implemented in Java, doesn't necessarily force you to handle the exceptions, but if you don't handle them, it forces you to acknowledge precisely which exceptions might pass through. It requires you to either catch declared exceptions or put them in your own throws clause. To work around this requirement, people do ridiculous things. For example, they decorate every method with, "throws Exception." That just completely defeats the feature, and you just made the programmer write more gobbledy gunk. That doesn't help anybody.

      The issue here seems to be the transitivity issue. If method A calls B which in turn calls C, then if C adds a new checked exception B needs to add it even if it is just proxying it and A is already handling it via "finally". This seems like an issue of inference to me. If method B could dynamically infer its checked exceptions this wouldn't be as big of an issue.

      You also probably want effect polymorphism for the exceptions so you can handle it for higher order functions.

    1. Of course, training and supervisionhelped users learning the general techniques for hypermedia authoring, but they tended to avoid(or lose interest in) the more sophisticated formalisms

      What affordances were they given in exchange for the formalisms?

    2. Many times he struggled to create a title for his note; heoften claimed that the most difficult aspect of this task was thinking of good titles

      Avoid requiring canonical naming

    3. This level of formalization enablesthe system to apply knowledge-based reasoning techniques to support users by performing taskssuch as automated diagnosis, configuration, or planning.

      What I'm getting so far is that the formalization is what gives the users affordances to certain features. I'd imagine sophisticated data mining techniques (such as text-search, classification, etc) can alleviate this partially but is always going to be useful. It would be beneficial to opt into the formalism explicitly for the affordances and maintain bidirectional linking between non-formalized representations. In other words, you want the ability to create a formalized view.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2HegcwDRnU

      Makes the argument that note taking is an information system, and if it is, then we can use the research from the corpus of information system (IS) theory to examine how to take better notes.

      He looks at the Wang and Wang 2006 research and applies their framework of "complete, meaningful, unambiguous, and correct" dimensions of data quality to example note areas of study notes, project management notes (or to do lists) and recipes.

      Looks at dimensions of data quality from Mahanti, 2019.


      What is the difference between notes and annotations?

    1. This post is a classic example of phenomenon that occurs universally. One person devises something that works perfectly for them, be it a mouse trap design, a method of teaching reading or … an organisation system. Other people see it in action and ask for the instructions. They try to copy it and … fail. We are all individuals, and what works for one does not work for all. Some people reading this post go “wow, cool!” Others go “What…???” One size does not fit all. Celebrate the difference! The trick is to keep looking for the method that works for you, not give up because someone else’s system makes your eyeballs spin!

      all this, AND...

      some comes down to the explanations given and the reasons. In this case, they're scant and the original is in middling English and large chunks of Japanese without any of the "why".

    2. This method, devised by Japanese economist Noguchi Yukio, utilizes manilla envelopes and the frequency with which you work on certain projects to organize your projects.

      The Noguhchi Filing System is a method developed by Noguchi Yukio, a Japanese economist, that organizes one's projects using envelopes and sorts them based on the frequency upon which you work on them.