380 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2022
    1. Testing if Google Chrome can make annotations on this Auto Hotkey documentation page.

      It (and Brave) can't make highlights or annotations for some reason. The prompt doesn't appear when text is highlighted, why is this? Is there a way to force the prompt to appear?

    1. Robert Amsler is a retired computational lexicology, computational linguist, information scientist. His P.D. was from UT-Austin in 1980. His primary work was in the area of understanding how machine-readable dictionaries could be used to create a taxonomy of dictionary word senses (which served as the motivation for the creation of WordNet) and in understanding how lexicon can be extracted from text corpora. He also invented a new technique in citation analysis that bears his name. His work is mentioned in Wikipedia articles on Machine-Readable dictionary, Computational lexicology, Bibliographic coupling, and Text mining. He currently lives in Vienna, VA and reads email at robert.amsler at utexas. edu. He is currenly interested in chronological studies of vocabulary, esp. computer terms.

      https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Amsler

      Apparently follow my blog. :)

      Makes me wonder how we might better process and semantically parse peoples' personal notes, particularly when they're atomic and cross-linked?

    1. it became clear that Fermat's Last Theorem could be proven as a corollary of a limited form of the modularity theorem (unproven at the time and then known as the "Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture"). The modularity theorem involved elliptic curves, which was also Wiles's own specialist area.[15][16]

      Elliptical curves are also use in Ed25519 which are purportedly more robust to side channel attacks. Could there been some useful insight from Wiles and the modularity theorem?

    1. I am not particularly strict about how I organize these. The point is to be able to find them again, which I can whether it's noted in the source or as a more detailed claim.

      Konik cites Raccoon Nation on PBS which indicates that a racoon's most heightened sense is it's sense of touch, a sense which is increased when the hands are wet or under water.

      Is this tied into the popular stories of raccoons which presumably like to "wash their food?" Is it really their sense of touch and affordances which come from that that presses this impression?

    1. It’s a basic question—what are children and young people in school for?
    2. Although Rousseau had an influence on a handful of European educators, itwould be misleading to imply that the impact on education of these new ideasabout learning through discovery was, at the time, profound.

      Did Rousseau have an influence on Maria Montessori? Where was the origin of her philosophy?

    1. Weare on record as holding that unlimited educational opportunity-or, speaking practically, educational opportunity thatis limited only by individual desire, ability, and need-is themost valuable service that society can provide for its members.

      This broadly applies to both oral and literate societies.

      Desire, ability, and need are all tough measures however... each one losing a portion of the population along the way.

      How can we maintain high proportions across all these variables?

    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. How do you make sure you don’t lose track of cards? I don’t make sure I don’t lose track of cards. As I said above and as some of the people below talk about, one of the joys of the system is when you surprise yourself, when you rediscover, when you find the perfect card while you were looking for something else.

      Oppenheimer doesn't keep track of specific cards (he didn't discuss how he files them, other than loosely together, potentially for specific projects) and finds that this creates a greater amount of surprise for him when searching for ideas within his system.

      Missing here is any sort of topic or subject headings.... double check this as it's a key to most systems.

    3. And improving the quality and quantity of material available to your brain when you sit down to create something—that is why we implement The Notecard System.

      Increasing the quantity and quality of ideas and materials one has at their disposal when one desires to create something new is one of the reasons for having a note taking system.

      memory, learning, sense making, improving understanding, improved creativity, and others are also at play... any others? we should have a comprehensive list eventually.

    4. “People always say of great athletes that they have a sixth sense,” Malcolm Gladwell says in Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. “But it’s not a sixth sense. It’s memory.” Gladwell then analogizes James’ exacting memory to Simon’s. In the way James has precise recall of basketball game situations, Simon has it of sounds and songs. “Simon’s memory is prodigious,” Gladwell says. “There were thousands of songs in his head. And thousands more bits of songs—components—which appeared to have been broken down and stacked like cordwood in his imagination.”

      In Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell comments on the prodigious memories of both Paul Simon with respect to sounds and Lebron James with respect to basketball game play.

      Where these sorts of situational memories built and exercised over time or were they natural gifts? Or perhaps natural gifts that were also finely tuned over time?

    1. e. T. F. T.

      What is this editor's actual name?

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

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  2. Oct 2022
    1. It is possible this Miscellany collection was assembled by Schutz as part of his own research as an historian, as well as the letters and documents collected as autographs for his interest as a collector;

      https://catalog.huntington.org/record=b1792186

      Is it possible that this miscellany collection is of a zettelkasten nature?

      Found via a search of the Huntington Library for Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten

    1. He had a separate bibliographical file,kept in six scantily filled drawers in his coat closet, and it is obvious

      that he used it little in later years. His author-title entries usually went into the main file, after the appropriate subject index cards.

      This is a curious pattern and not often seen. Apparently it was Paxson's practice to place his author-title entries into his main file following the related subject index cards instead of in a completely separate bibliographical file. He did apparently have one comprised of six scantily filled drawers which he kept in his coat closet, but it was little used in his later years.


      What benefits might this relay? It certainly more directly relates the sources closer in physical proximity within one's collection to the notes to which they relate. This might be of particular beneficial use in a topical system where all of one's notes relating to a particular subject are close physically rather than being linked or cross referenced as they were in Luhmann's example.

      A particular color of cards may help in this regard to more easily find these sources.


      Also keep in mind that Paxson's system was topical-chronological, so there may also be reasons for doing this that fit into his chronological scheme. Was he filing them in sections so that the publication dates of the sources fit into this scheme as well? This may take direct review to better known and understand his practice.

    1. Turner's sectionalism essays are collected in The Significance of Sections in American History, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1933. Turner's sectionalism thesis had almost as much influence among historians as his frontier thesis, but never became widely known to the general public as did the frontier thesis. He argued that different ethnocultural groups had distinct settlement patterns, and this revealed itself in politics, economics and society.

      Was sectionalism discussed or mentioned in Colin Woodard's American Nations (2011) as part of an underlying piece of his thesis about American history? It seems applicable.

    1. for as Dialectic will have shown all branches oflearning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledgeis one.

      How did we shift from inter-related subjects and "one knowledge" of rhetoric in the Middle Ages to such strict departmentalization in the academy to only now be moving back toward multi-disciplinary research?

    1. Émile flew offthe shelves in 18th-century Paris. In fact, booksellers found it more profitable torent it out by the hour than to sell it. Ultimately the excitement got too much forthe authorities and Émile was banned in Paris and burned in Geneva

      Émile: or On Education was so popular that it was rented out by the hour for additional profit instead of being sold outright. [summary]


      When did book rental in education spaces become a business model? What has it looked like historically?

    2. Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.

      Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?

      What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?

    3. Learning became firmly subject centred rather than child centred.

      What would schooling look like if it had been historically developed as child-centered rather than subject-centered.

    4. Out of our cleverness has emerged something almost more importantthan the cleverness itself. Out of it has come learning about how to share ideasand pass down skills and knowledge. Out of it has come education.

      Gary Thomas posits that it's our cleverness which birthed education. Isn't it more likely our extreme ability to mimic others which is more likely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective?

      Were early peoples really "teaching" each other how to make primitive hand axes? Or did we first start out by closely mimicking our neighbors?

    1. I would put creativity into three buckets. If we define creativity as coming up with something novel or new for a purpose, then I think what AI systems are quite good at the moment is interpolation and extrapolation.

      Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, classifies creativity in three ways: interpolation, extrapolation, and "true invention". He defines the first two traditionally, but gives a more vague description of the third. What exactly is "true invention"?

      How can one invent without any catalyst at all? How can one invent outside of a problem's solution space? outside of the adjacent possible? Does this truly exist? Or doesn't it based on definition.

    1. Wheredoes meaning come from?
    2. Intellectual readiness involves a minimumlevel of visual perception such that the child can take in andremember an entire word and the letters that combine to formit. Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly andto use several sentences in correct order.

      Just as predictive means may be used on the level of letters, words, and even whole sentences within information theory at the level of specific languages, does early orality sophistication in children help them to become predictive readers at earlier ages?

      How could one go about testing this, particularly in a broad, neurodiverse group?

    3. The Activity and Art of Reading 15 If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself.

      What effect might this have on the learning process of purely oral cultures?

    1. Max Raisin (1881–1957),reflected that lessons often devolved into ‘reading several events with dates out of alittle notebook’ (Raisin, 1952: 147; Hertzman, 1985: 83-8).

      Max Raisin indicated that Gotthard Deutsch read several events with dates out of a little notebook during lectures. Was this really a notebook or possibly a small stack/deck of index cards? The could certainly be easily mistaken....

      Check these references

    2. The index frames a figure who may at first glanceseem a curious or even comedic caricature of a certain positivist historical tradition, butone who also imparted to his students a sense of the magnitude of Jewish history, andwho straddled a mechanical pursuit of individual ‘facts’ with a certain attention to novelmethods and visions of comprehensively encyclopedic information.

      From where did Deutsch learn his zettelkasten method? And when? Bernheim's influential Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889) was published long after Deutsch entered seminary in October 1876 and 9 years before he received his Ph.D. in history in1881.

      One must potentially posit that the zettelkasten method was being passed along in (at least history circles) long before Bernheim's publication.

      I'm hoping that Lustig isn't referring to zettelkasten when he says "novel methods", as they weren't novel, even at that time. Deutsch certainly wasn't the first to have comprehensive encyclopedic visions, as Zettelkasten practitioner Konrad Gessner preceded him by several centuries.

      I'm starting to severely question Lustig's familiarity with these particular traditions....

    1. Adams H. B. (1886) Methods of Historical Study. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University.

      Where does this fit with respect to the zettelkasten tradition and Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos?

    2. It may seem a curious relic of positivistic history, but closer examination allows us to interrogate the materiality of scholarly labor.

      Given the time period (1859-1921), what was the potential influence, if any, on Deutsch and his methods by historical methods writers and the evolution of the science of history by Ernst Bernheim or Seignobos/Langlois from that same period?

    3. Indeed, Deutsch’s index is massive but middling, especially when placed alongside those of Niklas Luhmann, Paul Otlet, or Gershom Scholem.

      Curious how Deutsch's 70,000 facts would be middling compared to Luhmann's 90,000? - How many years did Deutsch maintain and collect his version?<br /> - How many publications did he contribute to? - Was his also used for teaching?

      Otlet didn't create his collection alone did he? Wasn't it a massive group effort?

      Check into Gershom Scholem's collection and use. I've not come across his work in this space.

    4. Does Deutsch’s index constitute a great unwritten work of history, as some have claimed, or are the cards ultimately useless ‘chips from his workshop’?

      From his bibliography, it appears that Deutsch was a prolific writer and teacher, so how will Lustig (or others he mentions) make the case that his card index was useless "chips from his workshop"? Certainly he used them in writing his books, articles, and newspaper articles? He also was listed as a significant contributor to an encyclopedia as well.

      It'd be interesting to look at the record to see if he taught with them the way Roland Barthes was known to have done.

    1. The nature of physics problem-solvingBelow are 29 sets of questions that students and physicists need to ask themselves during the research process. The answers at each step allow them to make the 29 decisions needed to solve a physics problem. (Adapted from reference 33. A. M. Price et al., CBE—Life Sci. Edu. 20, ar43 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-12-0276.)A. Selection and planning1. What is important in the field? Where is the field heading? Are there advances in the field that open new possibilities?2. Are there opportunities that fit the physicist’s expertise? Are there gaps in the field that need solving or opportunities to challenge the status quo and question assumptions in the field? Given experts’ capabilities, are there opportunities particularly accessible to them?3. What are the goals, design criteria, or requirements of the problem solution? What is the scope of the problem? What will be the criteria on which the solution is evaluated?4. What are the important underlying features or concepts that apply? Which available information is relevant to solving the problem and why? To better identify the important information, create a suitable representation of core ideas.5. Which predictive frameworks should be used? Decide on the appropriate level of mechanism and structure that the framework needs to be most useful for the problem at hand.6. How can the problem be narrowed? Formulate specific questions and hypotheses to make the problem more tractable.7. What are related problems or work that have been seen before? What aspects of their problem-solving process and solutions might be useful?8. What are some potential solutions? (This decision is based on experience and the results of decisions 3 and 4.)9. Is the problem plausibly solvable? Is the solution worth pursuing given the difficulties, constraints, risks, and uncertainties?Decisions 10–15 establish the specifics needed to solve the problem.10. What approximations or simplifications are appropriate?11. How can the research problem be decomposed into subproblems? Subproblems are independently solvable pieces with their own subgoals.12. Which areas of a problem are particularly difficult or uncertain in the solving process? What are acceptable levels of uncertainty with which to proceed at various stages?13. What information is needed to solve the problem? What approach will be sufficient to test and distinguish between potential solutions?14. Which among the many competing considerations should be prioritized? Considerations could include the following: What are the most important or most difficult? What are the time, materials, and cost constraints?15. How can necessary information be obtained? Options include designing and conducting experiments, making observations, talking to experts, consulting the literature, performing calculations, building models, and using simulations. Plans also involve setting milestones and metrics for evaluating progress and considering possible alternative outcomes and paths that may arise during the problem-solving process.B. Analysis and conclusions16. Which calculations and data analysis should be done? How should they be carried out?17. What is the best way to represent and organize available information to provide clarity and insights?18. Is information valid, reliable, and believable? Is the interpretation unbiased?19. How does information compare with predictions? As new information is collected, how does it compare with expected results based on the predictive framework?20. If a result is different from expected, how should one follow up? Does a potential anomaly fit within the acceptable range of predictive frameworks, given their limitations and underlying assumptions and approximations?21. What are appropriate, justifiable conclusions based on the data?22. What is the best solution from the candidate solutions? To narrow down the list, decide which of those solutions are consistent with all available information, and which can be rejected. Determine what refinements need to be made to the candidate solutions. For this decision, which should be made repeatedly throughout the problem-solving process, the candidate list need not be narrowed down to a single solution.23. Are previous decisions about simplifications and predictive frameworks still appropriate in light of new information? Does the chosen predictive framework need to be modified?24. Is the physicist’s relevant knowledge and the current information they have sufficient? Is more information needed, and if so, what is it? Does some information need to be verified?25. How well is the problem-solving approach working? Does it need to be modified? A physicist should reflect on their strategy by evaluating progress toward the solution and possibly revising their goals.26. How good is the chosen solution? After selecting one from the candidate solutions and reflecting on it, does it make sense and pass discipline-specific tests for solutions to the problem? How might it fail?Decisions 27–29 are about the significance of the work and how to communicate the results.27. What are the broader implications of the results? Over what range of contexts does the solution apply? What outstanding problems in the field might it solve? What novel predictions can it enable? How and why might the solution be seen as interesting to a broader community?28. Who is the audience for the work? What are the audience’s important characteristics?29. What is the best way to present the work to have it understood and to have its correctness and importance appreciated? How can a compelling story be made of the work?
    2. why is there so little correlation between students’ performance in their physics courses and their ability to do physics research?
    3. The experts often noted that research breakthroughs came from recognizing the significance of some additional information that other researchers had overlooked.

      Breakthroughs in problem solving and basic research often come from recognizing the significance of overlooked information.


      How is this additional information gleaned in these cases? Through combinatorial creativity, chance, other? Can methods for pushing these sorts of additional information be created in the problem solving process?

    1. Thesis to bear out (only tangentially related to this particular text):

      Part of the reason that index card files didn't catch on, especially in America, was that they didn't have a solid/concrete name by which they went. The generic term card index subsumed so much in relation to library card catalogues or rolodexes which had very specific functions and individualized names. Other cultures had more descriptive names like zettelkasten or fichier boîte which, while potentially bland within their languages, had more specific names for what they were.

    2. For the second time Goutor mentions using different size cards for different note types, but doesn't specifically advise for it or provide a reason. Perhaps his advice for consistency and card size applies only to cards of particular types? (p28)

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/XPphjkNZEe2s3i9VV4qt1g


      Incidentally he also specifically mentions 7x9" cards here too. How frequently used were these as a standard?

    3. As is common in the tradition of the zettelkasten, Goutor advises "that each note-card should contain only one item of information, whether a quotation, a summary, or anything else". (p28) He ascribes this requirement to his earlier need for clarity. (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/SfWFwENIEe2KfGMbR5n7Qg)

      He indicates that while it may seem wasteful to have only one item on each card that the savings in time, efficiency in handling, classification, and retrieval will more than compensate for the small waste.

      This sort of small local waste being compensated for by a larger global savings and efficiency can be seen in the design of the shipping container industry as discussed in Mark Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 2008). Was this the exact sort of efficiency mentioned by Ahrens'? (Compare at https://hypothes.is/a/t4i32IXoEeyF2n9jQxu6BA)

    4. Goutor defines self-help notes as notes which one would use to refresh their memory about what remains to be done or researched, problems that remain to be solved, or information which is needed to be researched or found. (p26) These are akin in some sense to what I call "open questions". He also indicates that these notes might be triggered by one's daily activities or occasional musings which relate to one's project but occur outside of its active pursuit. In this sense, they have a similar feel to the idea of Ahrens' fleeting notes, but in Goutor's practice they aren't defined as occurring while one is doing active reading or research.

      He suggests that one keeps these notes in a separate area so that they might be systematically and regularly visited for review, further research, or answering as the opportunities to do so present themselves. Once the questions have been answered and appropriate notes updated or added, these self-help notes can be discarded.

    1. Mosca backs up histhesis with this assertion: It's the power of organization thatenables the minority always to rule. There are organizedminorities and they run things and men. There are unorganizedmajorities and they are run.

      In a democracy, is it not just rule by majority, but rule by the most organized that ends up dominating the society?

      Perhaps C. Wright Mills' work on the elite has some answers?

      The Republican party's use of organization to create gerrymandering is a clear example of using extreme organization to create minority rule. Cross reference: Slay the Dragon in which this issue is laid out with the mention of using a tiny amount of money to careful gerrymander maps to provide outsized influences and then top-down outlines to imprint broad ideas from a central location onto smaller individual constituencies (state and local).

    1. I saw this ad for Storyteller Tactics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiybhKcA3ZV/?hl=en. The pitchman indicates that he distilled down a pile of about 25 books into a deck of informative cards which writers can use in their craft. Rather than sell it as a stand alone book, it's a set of cards (in digital format too) that they're selling for a order of magnitude more than they could have gotten for a book format.

      They're advertising for a product from https://pipdecks.com/. They're essentially selling custom zettelkasten collections of cards for niche topics! Who else is going to sell sets of cards like this? Anyone else seen examples of zettelkasten-like products like this?

  3. Sep 2022
    1. Unemployed workers are much more likelyto fall into poverty in countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan,compared with countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland.

      Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

      Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

      What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

    2. David Brady and colleagues have shown this to be empirically the case across29 rich democracies. The authors focused on four major risks of poverty—loweducation, single motherhood, young adults heading a household, and unem-ployment. They found that although the prevalence of these risks in the UnitedStates is actually below the average in other countries, the rate of poverty inthe United States is the highest. The reason is that “the penalties for risks inthe United States are the highest of the 29 countries. An individual with allfour risks has an extremely heightened probability of being poor in the UnitedStates.”

      How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

      What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

      Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

    3. What is abnormal about this situation is not that people experience theseevents, but that we have collectively chosen as a society to punish these normallife events so severely

      Why???

    4. One reason for this is that poverty is not something that people wish to ac-knowledge or draw attention to. Rather, it is something that individuals andfamilies would like to go away. As a result, many Americans attempt to concealtheir economic difficulties as much as possible.22 This often involves keeping upappearances and trying to maintain a “normal” lifestyle. Such poverty downthe block may at first appear invisible. Nevertheless, the reach of poverty iswidespread, touching nearly all communities across America.

      Middle Americans, and particularly those in suburbia and rural parts of America that account for the majority of poverty in the country, tend to make their poverty invisible because of the toxic effects of extreme capitalism and keeping up appearances.

      Has this effect risen with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and the idea of "living one's best life"? How about the social effects of television with shows like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" which encourage conspicuous consumption?


      More interesting is the fact that most of these suburban and rural poverty stricken portions of the country are in predominantly Republican held strongholds.

      Is there a feedback mechanism that is not only hollowing these areas out, but keeping them in poverty?

    5. In 1990, 15.1 percent of the poor were residingin high- poverty neighborhoods. That figure dropped to 10.3 percent by 2000,rose to 13.6 percent for 2010, and then fell to 11.9 percent for 2015.

      Is there a long term correlation between these rates and political parties? Is there a potential lag time between the two if there is?

    6. three-fourths of Americans will encounterpoverty or near- poverty (150 percent below the official poverty line).4

      Open question:<br /> Why is the word "below" used with numbers like "150 percent below the poverty line" when in fact this number indicates near, but above, poverty based on my reading?

    7. Could the maintenance of these mythsactually be useful for particularly powerful constituencies? Does the contin-uation of these myths serve a purpose or function for other segments of theAmerican population? If so, who and what might that be?
    1. Experiments on Twitter by Bjarke Mønsted and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Southern California indicate that information is transmitted via “complex contagion”: when we are repeatedly exposed to an idea, typically from many sources, we are more likely to adopt and reshare it. This social bias is further amplified by what psychologists call the “mere exposure” effect: when people are repeatedly exposed to the same stimuli, such as certain faces, they grow to like those stimuli more than those they have encountered less often.

      This seems slightly different than the mere-exposure effect that Ahrens (2017) delineated. Are they same/different/related, but contextually different?

    2. In a set of groundbreaking studies in 1932, psychologist Frederic Bartlett told volunteers a Native American legend about a young man who hears war cries and, pursuing them, enters a dreamlike battle that eventually leads to his real death. Bartlett asked the volunteers, who were non-Native, to recall the rather confusing story at increasing intervals, from minutes to years later. He found that as time passed, the rememberers tended to distort the tale's culturally unfamiliar parts such that they were either lost to memory or transformed into more familiar things.

      early study relating to both culture and memory decay

      What does memory decay scale as? Is it different for different levels of "stickiness"?

    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 text fills a gap in the professional literature concerning revision because currently,according to Harris, there is little scholarship on “how to do it” (p. 7).

      I'm curious if this will be an answer to the question I asked in Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output Processes?

    1. I’m not sure how to explain the photograph — that might be a cardfile, not a shoebox. The number of blue lines per card in the Pale Fire passage suggests that John Shade used 6 x 4 cards. It looks like Nabokov in the car has 6 x 4s too.

      What size index cards did Vladimir Nabokov use?

      See also: series of Nabokov photos of him and index cards.

    1. The primary motivation behind categorical reading methods isto dissect each paper's structure and central argument using theabove conceptual model (Figure 1).

      This appears to be the closed definition in the paper for the idea of categorical reading methods. They only provide one example without any comparison or contrast for better contextualization.

      What is a more concrete idea for this particular term?

    2. Not related to this text, but just thinking...

      Writing against a blank page is dreadful and we all wish we would be visited by the muses. But writing against another piece of text can be incredibly fruitful for generating ideas, even if they don't necessarily relate to the text at hand. The text gives us something to latch onto for creating work.

      Try the following exercise:<br /> Write down 20 things that are white.<br /> (Not easy is it?)

      Now write down 20 things in your refrigerator that are white?<br /> (The ideas come a lot easier don't they, even if you couldn't come up with 20.)

      The more specific area helped you anchor your thoughts and give them a positive direction. Annotating against texts in which you're interested does this same sort of anchoring for your brain when you're writing.

      Is there research on this area of concentration with respect to creativity?

    3. More effective structured note-taking systems,such as Cornell Notes or REAP, increase students' critical readingskills, including synthesis, analysis, and evaluation (Ahmad, 2019)

      More effective than what? Just highlighting? What does Ahmad show? Is there a hierarchy of strategies that have been cross tested with larger groups? What effect does a depth and breadth of neurodiverse subjects show, for example?


      This is the my first encounter with REAP.

      REAP is an acronym for Read, Encode, Annotate, Ponder.


      Has anyone done direct research on commonplacing or zettelkasten techniques to show concrete data to compare them with other currently more popular techniques like Cornell notes or REAP?

      Read for potential methods and set up for a potential meta study: Ahmad, S. Z. (2019). Impact of Cornell Notes vs. REAP on EFL secondary school students’ critical reading skills. International Education Studies, 12(10), 60-74

    1. Robert King Merton

      Mario Bunge indicated that he was directly influenced by American Sociologist Robert Merton.

      What particular areas did this include? Serendipity? Note taking practices? Creativity? Systems theory?

    1. It would be very interesting to have information on the methodsof work of the great scholars, particularly those who undertooklong tasks of collection and classification. Some information ofthis kind is to be found in their papers, and occasionally in theircorrespondence. On the methods of Du Cange, see L. Feugfere, Mudesur la vie et les ouvrages de Du Gomge (Paris, 1858, 8vo), pp. 62 sqq_,

      Indeed! I find myself having asked this particular question in a similar setting/context before!!!

    2. of private librarianship which make up the half ofscientific work." ^

      Renan speaks of "these points

      Renan, Feuilles detachees (Detached leaves), p. 103

      Who is Renan and what specifically does this source say?

      It would seem that, like Beatrice Webb, the authors and Renan may all consider this sort of note taking method to have a scientific underpinning.

  4. Aug 2022
    1. What edition of this book did Luhmann have/use?

      His edition will establish a potential lower threshold for the point in his life at which he used it (ie college, law school, other).

      What differences are there between the edition I've read portions of and this 10th edition exist? Did Luhmann's edition have this same outline/contents page in this form? Does my analysis still stand if this changes?

    1. Not to be neglected apart from the keyword is also a short date. This may seem superfluous atfirst glance. Refering to Leibniz’ hand-written bequest, which has been equipped with dates,proves how valuable a date can become.

      What's the story behind Leibniz' hand-written bequest? Apparently it was commonplace enough that it's not explained here.

    1. Correspondingly,the far-reaching studies of language that were carried out under the influence ofCartesian rationalism suffered from a failure to appreciate either the abstractnessof those structures that are “present to the mind” when an utterance is producedor understood, or the length and complexity of the chain of operations that relatethe mental structures expressing the semantic content of the utterance to thephysical realization.

      What are the simple building blocks of thought and speech that make it so complex in aggregate?

    2. And this system of linguistic competenceis qualitatively different from anything that can be described in terms of thetaxonomic methods of structural linguistics, the concepts of S-R psychology,or the notions developed within the mathematical theory of communication orthe theory of simple automata.

      What are the atomic building blocks that would allow stimulus-response psychology to show complex behaviors?

    1. ManuelRodriguez331 · 8 hr. agotaurusnoises wrote on Aug 20, 2022: Technik des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens by Johannes Erich HeydeThe idea of grouping similar notes together with the help of index cards was mainstream knowledge in the 1920'er. Melvil Dewey has invented the decimal classification in 1876 and it was applied to libraries and personal note taking as well.quote: “because for every note there is a systematically related one in the immediate vicinity. [...] A good, scholarly book can grow out of the mere collection of notes — not an ingenious one, indeed" [1]The single cause why it wasn't applied more frequently was because of the limitation of the printing press. In the year 1900 only 100 scholarly journals were available in the world. There was no need to write more manuscripts and teach the art of Scientific Writing to a larger audience.[1] Kuntze, Friedrich: Die Technik der geistigen Arbeit, 1922

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wrytqj/comment/ilax9tc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Index card systems were insanely popular in the early 1900's for note taking and uses of all other sorts (business administration, libraries, etc.). The note taking tradition of the slip box goes back even further in intellectual history with precedents including miscellanies, commonplace books, and florilegia. Konrad Gessner may have been one of the first to have created a method using slips of rearrangeable paper in the 1500s, but this general pattern of excerpting, note taking and writing goes back to antiquity with the concept of locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

      What some intellectual historians are hoping for evidence of in this particular source is a possible origin of the idea of the increased complexity of direct links from one card to another as well as the juxtaposition of ideas which build on each other. Did Luhmann innovate this himself or was this something he read or was in general practice which he picked up? Most examples of zettelkasten outside of Luhmann's until those in the present, could be described reasonably accurately as commonplace books on index cards usually arranged by topic/subject heading/head word (with or without internal indices).

      Perhaps it was Luhmann's familiarity with Aktenzeichen (German administrative "file numbers") prior to his academic work which inspired the dramatically different form his index card-based commonplace took? See: https://hyp.is/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA/www.wikiwand.com/de/Aktenzeichen_(Deutschland)

      Is it possible that he was influenced by Beatrice Webb's ideas on note taking from Appendix C of My Apprenticeship (1924) which was widely influential in the humanities and particularly sociology and anthropology? Would he have been aware of the work of historians Ernst Bernheim followed by Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/DLP52hqFEe2nrIMdrd4U7g) Did Luhmann's law studies expose him to the work of jurist Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) who wrote about his practice in his autobiography and subsequently influenced generations of practitioners including Jean Paul and potentially Hegel?

      There are obviously lots of unanswered questions...

    1. https://universitylifecafe.k-state.edu/bookshelf/academicskills/indexcardstudysystem.html

      Natalie Umberger is writing about an "index card study system" in an academic study skills context, but it's an admixture of come ideas from Cornell Notes and using index cards as flashcards.

      The advice to "Review your notes and readings frequently, so the material is 'fresh.' " is a common one (through at least the 1980s to the present), though research on the mere-exposure effect indicates that it's not as valuable as other methods.

      How can we stamp out the misconception that this sort of review is practical?

    1. The system of card indexing was propagated by a French Person called Abb’e Jean Rozier (1734-93). The index is prepared by allotting a separate card to each piece of information. The required information are written on the cards. All cards are of uniform size and are arranged in alphabetical, numerical or geographical order.

      https://www.preservearticles.com/business/what-is-card-indexing-and-explain-its-advantages-and-disadvantages/1740

      This source is questionable in it's sourcing and seems to mix several different methods and systems, so we'll need to treat it with a massive grain of salt.

      It does Mention Abb'e Jean Rozier (1734-93) as a historical figure related to propagating a system of card indexing which is a new name to me and thus worth looking into.

      Is Abb'e here a title? (potentially the French translation of the English abbot which is correctly abbé, so this may have had a typo.)

      The dates of life given would indicate that this is not the balloonist/scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Pil%C3%A2tre_de_Rozier

    1. ZKZur Kenntnisnahme (German: For Information)

      On an acronym search for "what is a ZK?" # Google provides a mini chart of optings including

      ZK for Zur Kenntnisnahme which translates from German as "for information".

      Is this directly related to zettelkasten culturally, or just a broad cultural thing?

  5. Jul 2022
    1. I have been using that system for >15 years pretty successful and taught it to my students in the research and scientific writing courses. It works well in psychology and the social sciences and humanities, but might be of limited use in engineering.

      u/0xKaishakunin I'm curious where you learned your system? And if you know, who taught them? Did you pick it up from book, teachers/professors, other? What age or grade level did you acquire it? How specific was the instruction? Was it described or demonstrated?

    1. But online information has a very weak link to memory.

      Why is memory for online pieces weaker for most?

      Is it the lack of sense of "physical" location for helping to store it? What about the seemingly ephemeral character of online data?

    1. During the seventeenth century, this associative view vanished and was replaced by more literallydescriptive views simply of the thing as it exists in itself.

      The associative emblematic worldview prevalent prior to the seventeenth century began to disappear within Western culture as the rise of the early modern period and the beginning of the scientific revolution began to focus on more descriptive modes of thought and representation.


      Have any researchers done specific work on this shift from emblematic to the descriptive? What examples do they show which support this shift? Any particular heavy influences?

      This section cites:<br /> William B. Ashworth, Jr. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westfall, eds #books/wanttoread<br /> which could be a place to start.


      Note that this same shift from associative and emblematic to descriptive and pedantic coincides not only with the rise of the scientific revolution but also with the effects of rising information overload in a post-Gutenberg world as well as the education reforms of Ramus (late 1500s) et al. as well as the beginning of the move away from scholasticism.


      Is there any evidence to support claims that this worldview stemmed from pagan traditions and cultures and not solely the art of memory traditions from ancient Greece? Could it have been pagan traditions which held onto these and they were supplemented and reinforced by ecclesiastical forces which used the Greek traditions?


      Examples of emblematic worldview: - particular colors of flowers meant specific things (red = love, yellow = friendship, etc.) We still have these or remants - Saints had their associative animals and objects - anniversary gifts had associative meanings (paper, silver, gold, etc.) We still have remnants of these things, though most are associated with wealth (gold, silver, platinum anniversaries). When did this tradition actually start? - what were the associative meanings of rabbits, turtles, and other animals which appear frequently in manuscript marginalia? (We have the example of the bee (Latin: apes) which where frequently used this way as being associated with the idea of imitation.) - other broad categories?

    2. This perspective has been called an “emblematic worldview”; it is clearly visible in the iconography ofmedieval and Renaissance art, for example. Plants and animals are not merely specimens, as in modernscience; they represent a huge raft of associated things and ideas.

      Medieval culture had imbued its perspective of the natural world with a variety of emblematic associations. Plants and animals were not simply specimens or organisms in the world but were emblematic representations of ideas which were also associated with them.

      example: peacock / pride

      Did this perspective draw from some of the older possibly pagan forms of orality and mnemonics? Or were the potential associations simply natural ones which (re-?)grew either historically or as the result of the use of the art of memory from antiquity?

    1. Peter Drucker, the distinguished commentator onorganisation and management, has popularised theterm “knowledge worker” to describe the role of agrowing percentage of employees in businessorganisations: “The manual worker is yesterday..,..The basic capital resource, the fundamentalinvestment, but also the cost centre for a developedeconomy is the knowledge worker who puts to work

      what he has learned in systematic education, that is, concepts, ideas and theories, rather than the man who puts to work manual skill or muscle, ” [5]. 5. Drucker, P. F. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices, Harper & Row; New York, 1973.

      Influential management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker helped to popularize the concept of the "knowledge worker" by way of his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (Harper & Row, 1973).


      Who/where is the origin of the neologism/idea of "knowledge worker"?

    1. various bibliographic catalog from the end of the '800 and '900 (from Paul Otlet/Henry La Fontaine Munaneum to Ranganathan faceted classification system passing through Niklas Luhmann, Carl Sagan and many others

      Look into Henry La Fontaine, Mundaneum, Ranganathan's faceted classification system.

      See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification

      What was Carl Sagan's system?

    1. Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.

      Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.

      Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?

      https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/

  6. Jun 2022
    1. "The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office. "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book."

      How might we design better digital reading interfaces that take advantage of a wider range of modes of thinking and reading?

      Certainly adding audio to the text helps to bring in benefits of orality, but what other axes are there besides the obvious spatial benefits?

    2. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension.

      If digital user interfaces and navigational difficulties inhibited reading comprehension in the modern age, what did similar interfaces do to early reading practices?

      What methods do we have to tease out data of these sorts of early practices?

      What about changes in modes of reading (reading out loud vs. reading quietly)?

      I'm reminded of this as a hyperbolic answer, but still the root question may be an apt one:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

    3. How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?
    1. so that your human,fallible, endlessly creative first brain can do what it does best.Imagine. Invent. Innovate. Create.

      Is this really what our brain does best?

      What about on evolutionary timescales? Is this what brains were meant to do?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. But systems of schooling and educational institutions–and much of online learning– are organized in ways that deny their voices matter. My role is to resist those systems and structures to reclaim the spaces of teaching and learning as voice affirming. Voice amplifying.

      Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

      There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

      Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

      Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

      Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)


      My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

    1. So, i started researching where the capitalization of said pronoun came from and was quite stunned to find that it was always capitalized because it always appeared as the first word in a sentence, never stuck in the middle. And then, when it started appearing in the middle, it started getting capitalized out of convention and because people worried that it would get lost in script. Of course, "It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case" (journalist Sydney J. Harris).

      If it's true that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized instead of the more commonly capitalized "you", does this help to underline some of the self-centeredness show by most of the English speaking West?

    1. The second was “makedance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of theso-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship andsubsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profitorganizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL orNBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. Iwanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in thecommercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for theproject, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watchedthem float to the bottom of the Joel box.

      Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?

      How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?

    2. before you can think out of the box, you have tostart with a box

      Can it be?! Twyla Tharp has an entire chapter in her book on creativity that covers a variation of the zettelkasten note taking concept!!!


      Does the phrase "thinking outside of the box" make a tacit nod to the idea of using a card index (or the German zettelkasten) for note taking, sense making, and thinking?

    1. certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.

      Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

      Are we training thinkers or doers?

    1. ZK II: Note 9/8 9/8 Zettelkasten 1 as a cybernetic system Combination of disorder and order, of lump formation and unpredictable combination realized in ad hoc access. Precondition: waiver of fixed order. The upstream differentiation: search aids vs. content; Registers, questions, ideas vs. Existing forms and partly makes superfluous what must be assumed in terms of inner order .

      Niklas Luhmann thought of the zettelkasten as a cybernetic system.

      He considers a precondition of its creation is that it ought to waive any "fixed order", allow for search, and the asking of questions.


      There are only the outlines of brief and scant thoughts here however, which would have required significant amounts of additional context not contained on the card. As a result one would require additional underpinning to understand what Luhmann means here as the card definitively couldn't have been directly or easily reused for future writing beyond the basic sketch outline he provides. What proportion of cards have brief thought sketches like this versus more fully thought out and directly reusable ideas within his system? Does Schmidt provide any guidance here without reading portions of the larger corpus? How does this differ from the guidance of Ahrens?

      (Translation from German to English via Google)

    1. essentially all neuroscientists agree that our understanding of the brain is nowhere near the level that it could be used to guide curriculum development.

      This looks like an interesting question...

  7. May 2022
    1. The use of physical location, even in an imagined environment, as a memory aid likely arose as a result of the fact that so much of the essential information stored in memory can be linked to foraging-type behaviours.

      I've thought this before, and sees like I've possibly read, though not captured it. Is there any solid proof of this fact?

      Rat studies of mazes show this sort of spacial memory, but are there similar learned studies in lower animals? C. elegans, drosophila, slime molds, etc.?

    1. the underprivileged are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held responsible for their dental condition.

      How does this happen?

      Is it the idea of "personal responsibility" and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" philosophy combined with lack of any actual support and/or education?

      There has to be a better phrase or word to define the perverse sort of philosophy espoused by many in the Republican party about this sort of "personal responsibility".

      It feels somewhat akin to the idea of privatize profits and socialize the losses. The social loss is definitely one that is pushed off onto the individual, but who's profiting? Is it really so expensive to fix this problem? Isn't the loss to society and public health akin to the Million Dollar Murray problem?

      Wouldn't each individual's responsibility be better tied to the collective good as well as their own outcomes? How can the two be bound together to improve outcomes for everyone all around?

    1. in human memory they call it external context um so we have 00:35:59 so the external context for instance is the the spatial cues and the other items that are kind of attached to the note right

      Theory: The external context of one's physical surroundings (pen, paper, textures, sounds, smells, etc.) combined with the internal context, the learner's psychological state, mood, etc., comprises a potentially closed system where each part props up the other for the best learning outcomes.

      Do neurodiversity effects help/hinder this process? What if people are missing one or more of these bits of contextualization? What does the literature look like in this space? Research?

    1. A spike in fears about new immigrants and newly emancipated black people reproducing at higher rates than the white population also prompted more opposition to legal abortion.

      Were fears about immigrants and Black people in the late 1800's milieu of evolutionary theory and beginning of eugenics thought influential in the growing debate about abortion?

    1. We reduce risk in the shaping process by solving open questions before we commit the project to a time box.

      We don't give a project to a team that still has rabbit holes or tangled interdependencies.

  8. Apr 2022
    1. allow Jakobson to explain why the first person and its cognates are both thelast linguistic acquisition of the child and the first linguistic loss of the aphasiac.Jakobson’s first essays to be translated into French came out in 1963. Barthesrefers to them, the very same year, in the preface to the Critical Essays where heidentifies (if one may say so) both positively and negatively with those two invalidspeaking subjects whom, for not having yet (or having no longer) access to thefirst person, he promotes as models or examples for the writer, granted one differ-ence: the writer takes responsibility for not uttering the “I” that both the childand the aphasiac are constitutionally unable to use.

      Is it broadly true that the first person and cognates are the last acquisitions of children and among the first losses of aphasiacs?

    1. Shenkar wouldlike to see students in business schools and other graduate programs taking

      courses on effective imitation.

      If imitation is so effective, what would teaching imitation to students look like in a variety of settings including, academia, business, and other areas?

      Is teaching by way of imitation the best method for the majority of students? Are there ways to test this versus other methods for broad effectiveness?

      How can we better leverage imitation in teaching for application to the real world?

    1. Ton has asked some good questions about social annotation using @Hypothes_is. I've annotated with some of my ideas. I'm also curious what others' practices look like.

      https://twitter.com/ton_zylstra/status/1513219186524368896

      Come give your answers in the margins: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/04/three-questions-about-annotating-in-hypothesis/


      syndication links: - twitter - zylstra.org

    2. https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/04/three-questions-about-annotating-in-hypothesis/

      Thanks for asking these questions Ton! I've been meaning to spend some time writing up my use cases and methods for this for a while, and your questions have created a scaffold for getting a large chunk of it done in some bite sized pieces. Now I should be able to roll up my answers into an article, do some light editing and be on my way.

    1. published under the title‘An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments’, which firstappeared in Le Monde in 1973, Barthes describes the method thatguides his use of index cards:I’m content to read the text in question, in a ratherfetishistic way: writing down certain passages,moments, even words which have the power tomove me. As I go along, I use my cards to writedown quotations, or ideas which come to me, asthey do so, curiously, already in the rhythm of asentence, so that from that moment on, things arealready taking on an existence as writing. (1991:181)

      In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.


      Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

    1. to record the 300- odd sermonshe delivered, the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) relied on his sec-retaries to take notes during his sermons, which Bernard then revised and madepublic. But other listeners in attendance also came away with notes from the ser-mons, from which some circulated unauthorized versions.6

      If Bernard of Clairvaux had secretaries take notes during his sermons for later revision and circulation, how did he compose them in the first place? Were they outlined and delivered mnemonically/orally with some extemporaneous embellishment?

    1. I believe we serve our students better by helping them find a note-taking system that works best for them.

      Are there other methods of encouraging context shifts that don't include note taking (or literacy-based) solutions? What would an orality focused method look like? How might we include those methods in our practices?

    2. Studies have shown that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who take notes on a laptop (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Carter, Greenberg, & Walker, 2017).

      Students who take notes by hand learn more than those who do so on a laptop.

      Exactly how were these studies laid out? What sorts of revision and follow up were followed in each case? Was it truly an apples to apples comparison?

  9. Mar 2022
    1. nicholas lerman is a sample of one 01:09:54 and if the zerocarton is a tool for thinking there are all these other thinkers out there who are thinking um and do we know how they're thinking how their 01:10:07 how you know what note systems are they using i'd like to i'd like to be able to place lerman yeah amongst all these others and and sort of in the zerocast and 01:10:23 see what others are doing as well and yeah i mean if there was one project i would have loved to do is going around 01:10:36 asking everyone i whose work i admire how do you do it how do you do it exactly what do you do in the morning how do you sit down how do you digest the books you're reading 01:10:48 um i was obsessed with the idea and it's just because i'm too shy to follow up on that

      Some discussion of doing research on zettelkasten methods and workflows.


      What do note taking methods and processes look like for individual people?


      What questions would one ask for this sort of research in an interview setting (compared to how one would look at extant physical examples in document-based research)? #openquestions


      Link this to the work of Earle Havens on commonplace books through portions of history.

    1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incorrect-use-information-theory-rafael-garc%C3%ADa/

      A fascinating little problem. The bigger question is how can one abstract this problem into a more general theory?

      How many questions can one ask? How many groups could things be broken up into? What is the effect on the number of objects?

    1. Important tools are still needed for group formation and discussion within communities of tens, thousands, and millions of people. Participation in democratic political processes are appealing, but ensuring informed participation, respect for opposing views, and adequate time for deliberation will be difficult. A major research effort would help to grapple with complex issues of thousand of active participants in discussion groups. How would an electronic Robert's Rules of meetings help to keep orde r, permit caucusing of subgroups, support voting, and allow objections to be aired?

      Highlights of some important humanist problems that haven't had nearly enough work on the internet. Instead we allow rampant capitalism of certain areas without forcing companies to spend time working at the harder problems.

    1. In a study published in 2020, for example, Macedonia and a group of sixcoauthors compared study participants who had paired new foreign-languagewords with gestures to those who had paired the learning of new words withimages of those words. The researchers found evidence that the motor cortex—the area of the brain that controls bodily movement—was activated in thegesturing group when they reencountered the vocabulary words they hadlearned; in the picture-viewing group, the motor cortex remained dormant. The“sensorimotor enrichment” generated by gesturing, Macedonia and hercoauthors suggest, helps to make the associated word more memorable

      Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.

      It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.

    1. Ask and ye shall receive!

      https://uxdesign.cc/the-power-of-seeing-only-the-questions-in-a-piece-of-writing-8f486d2c6d7d

      I made a web tool that takes a piece of writing and strips out everything but the questions: https://t.co/i8FsoFwPt4<br><br>Here's the first chapter of Moby Dick<br><br>Quite fascinating to see this aspect of a literary style pic.twitter.com/tHrHA7jsdW

      — Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) February 27, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Link to [[searching for questions while reading]]

  10. Feb 2022
    1. Trying to find research on sketchnoting during presentations. Research directly comparing sketchnoting and more traditional notetaking does not seem to exist. References to dual coding theory do not count. Why is this popular?
    1. The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn.

      No evidence for this statement, but does bring up some good questions:

      When does learning start?

      What does the process look like?

      What are the ingredients or building blocks?

      How do we define learning?

      How do we better encourage learning

    2. You may remember from school the difference between an exergonicand an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need toadd energy to keep the process going. In the second case, thereaction, once triggered, continues by itself and even releasesenergy.

      The build up of complexity which results in the creation of life with increasing complexity must certainly be endergonic if the process is to last for any extensive length of time. Once the process becomes exergonic or reaches homeostasis, then the building of complexity and even life itself will cease to exist.

      Must this always be true? Proof? Counter examples?

    3. Even ifyou decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you willimprove your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just bydoing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.

      Is there evidence that this is true?

    4. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipatedanyway.

      If the best ideas are the ones we haven't anticipated, how are we defining "best"? Most surprising from an information theoretic perspective? One which creates new frontiers of change? One which subsumes or abstracts prior ideas within it? Others?

    5. Just followyour interest and always take the path that promises the mostinsight.

      What specific factors does one evaluate for determining what particular paths will provide actual (measurable) insight?

      Most people have a personal gut reaction about which directions to go in heuristically, but can these heuristics be broken down explicitly to enable better evaluating them? How can they be used to avoid cognitive biases?

    6. Make permanent notes.

      The important part of permanent notes are generating your own ideas and connecting (linking them densely) into your note system. The linking part is important and can be the part that most using digital systems forget to do. In paper zettelkasten, one was forced to create the first link by placing the note into the system for the first time. This can specifically be seen in Niklas Luhmann's example where a note became a new area of its own or, far more likely, it was linked to prior ideas.

      By linking the idea to others within the system, it becomes more likely that the idea can have additional multiple contexts where it might be used and improve the fact that context shifts will prove more insight in the future.

      Additional links to subject headings, tags, categories, or other forms of taxonomy will also help to make sure the note isn't lost completely into the system. Links to the bibliographical references within the system are helpful as well, especially for later citation. Keep in mind that these categories and reference links aren't nearly as valuable as the other primary idea links.

      One can surely collect ideas and facts into their system, but these aren't as important or as interesting as one's own ideas and the things that are sparked and generated by them.

      Asking questions in permanent notes can be valuable as they can become the context for new research, projects, and writing. Open questions can be incredibly valuable for one's thinking and explorations.

    7. We need a reliable and simple external structure tothink in that compensates for the limitations of our brains

      Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.


      Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?

    8. Good students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar forthemselves as they focus on what they haven’t learned andmastered yet. This is why high achievers who have had a taste ofthe vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from whatpsychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are notreally up to the job, even though, of all people, they are (Clance andImes 1978; Brems et al. 1994).

      He's saying here that smart, high achievers are more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome specifically because they've read more broadly and know what they're doing.

      Does the psychology research indicate this? Is there a higher incidence of imposter syndrome at the higher end of the spectrum in part because ones' knowledge of the Known Unknown Framework is dramatically expanded?

      Look into these sources for more detail on this question.

    1. In an effort to get the notes that existed out there in my files into my head, I tried using algorithmic “spaced repetition” to memorize them all via a handful of flashcard apps like Memrize and Anki. But very soon the predictable happened: I missed a day here, a weekend there, and the daily flashcard quota became a wildly varying imposition on my time. I realized that in a few months, let alone years, at this rate most of my time would be spent on the maintenance of memories. I, as others have found, would be too busy maintaining these memories to use them.

      Work out mathematically at what rate the accumulation of notes would outstrip one's ability to memorize them solely using spaced repetition of a few generations.

    1. https://dancohen.org/2019/07/23/engagement-is-the-enemy-of-serendipity/

      Dan Cohen talks about a design change in the New York Times app that actively discourages exploration and discovery by serendipity.

      This is similar to pulling out digital copies of books you're looking for instead of going to the library, tracking down the book on the shelf and in the process seeing and experiencing the books on the shelf which are nearby, or even the book that catches your eye across the aisle, wasn't in your sphere of search or interest, but you pick it up anyway.

      How can we bring this sort of design back to digital experiences?

      It's not just the algorithmic feeds which are narrowing our interests and exposure, but the design of our digital spaces as well.

    1. In crowded housing markets in large cities, house flipping is often viewed as a driver of inequality.

      If house flipping is viewed as a driver of inequality in crowded housing markets in larger cities, what spurs it on? What do the economics look like and how can the trend be combatted?

      What effect does economic speculation have?

    2. “When I moved to Kansas,” Roberts said, “I was like, ‘holy shit, they’re giving stuff away.’”

      This sounds great, but what are the "costs" on the other side? How does one balance out the economics of this sort of housing situation versus amenities supplied by a community in terms of culture, health, health care, interaction, etc.? Is there a maximum on a curve to be found here? Certainly in some places one is going to overpay for this basket of goods (perhaps San Francisco?) where in others one may underpay. Does it have anything to do with the lifecycle of cities and their governments? If so, how much?

  11. Jan 2022
    1. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logicalargumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment,whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing tomyth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour,insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to whichone privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetoricaltradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumeddispositions of their audience.

      A list of means of persuasiveness:

      • use of logical argumentation
      • appeal to sentiment
      • whipping up passions
      • deploying poetic metaphors
      • appeal to mythology, proverbial or ancient wisdom
      • irony
      • indirection
      • humor
      • insult
      • prophecy/revelation
      • appeal to the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs (pathos, ethos, etc.)
      • presumed disposition of the audience

      What others are there?

      Certainly Donald Trump didn't use logical argumentation. He didn't even frame things as being for something so much as being against other things.

    1. But this is not the main reason. The other three programs try to achieve the connection or linking between different topics or cards (mainly) by assigning keywords. But this is not what Luhmann's approach recommended. While he did have a register of keywords, this was certainly not the most important way of interconnecting his slips. He linked them by direct references (Verweisungen). Any slip could refer directly to the physical and unchanging location of any other slip.

      Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten had three different forms of links.

      • The traditional keyword index/link from the commonplace book tradition
      • A parent/child link upon first placing the idea into the system (except when starting a new top level parent)
      • A direct link (Verweisungen) to one or more ideas already in the index card catalog.

      Many note taking systems are relying on the older commonplace book taxonomies and neglect or forego both of the other two sorts of links. While the second can be safely subsumed as a custom, one-time version of the third, the third version is the sort of link which helps to create a lot of direct value within a note taking system as the generic links between broader topic heading names can be washed out over time as the system grows.


      Was this last link type included in Konrad Gessner's version? If not, at what point in time did this more specific direct link evolve?

  12. Dec 2021
    1. political self-consciousness sort of 00:55:29 receding as one goes further back in time there was a book published in 1946 by the Dutch archaeologist Henry Frank Ford's called befall philosophy which 00:55:42 was about the the ancient Middle East Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that sort of thing but he wasn't actually arguing that these people didn't have the capacity for philosophy he was simply 00:55:55 pointing out that they didn't have an explicit written tradition of speculative thought like that of the ancient Greeks so that when they did speculate they did it in other ways 00:56:07 through images through discourse on the nonhuman world etc etc to find the idea that there have actually ever been individuals who didn't possess any capacity for philosophical reflection

      Henri Frankfort in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946) (later retitled Before Philosophy) argued that non-literate people had philosophy and speculative thought, they just didn't have a written method of expressing it.

      Open questions: How might they have expressed it other than orally? How might one tease these ideas out of the archaeological record? Does Frankfort provide evidence?

    1. Why did we end up being absolutely convinced that inequality and hierarchy are the inevitable, necessary price to pay for all the goods that social complexity can deliver?

      This is a great question!

  13. Nov 2021
    1. from the river and lay down again in the rushes and kissed the grain-givingsoil.

      Odysseus staggered from the river and lay down again in the rushes and kissed the grain-giving soil.

      This reference to "grain-giving soil" reminds me of this quote:

      History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.<br/>—Les Merveilles de l'Instinct Chez les Insectes: Morceaux Choisis (The Wonders of Instinct in Insects: Selected Pieces) by Jean-Henri FabreJean-Henri Fabre (Librairie Ch. Delagrave (1913), page 242)

      ref: quote

      Culturally we often see people kneeling down and kissing the ground after long travels, but we miss the prior references and images and the underlying gratitude for why these things have become commonplace.

      "Grain-giving" = "life giving" here specifically. Compare this to modern audiences see the kissing of the ground more as a psychological "homecoming" action and the link to the grain is missing.

      It's possible that the phrase grain-giving was included for orality's sake to make the meter, but I would suggest that given the value of grain within the culture the poet would have figured out how to include this in any case.

      By my count "grain-giving" as a modifier variously to farmland, soil, earth, land, ground, and corn land appears eight times in the text. All these final words have similar meanings. I wonder if Lattimore used poetic license to change the translation of these final words or if they were all slightly different in the Greek, but kept the meter?

      This is an example of a phrase which may have been given an underlying common phrasing in daily life to highlight gratitude for the life giving qualities, but also served the bard's needs for maintaining meter. Perhaps comparing with other contemporaneous texts for this will reveal an answer?

    1. When we look at the Zettelkasten, it looks quite inconspicuous and small and doesn't give away the secret. The outer appearance is trivial, so what is it then that made Luhmann refer to it as his second brain.

      the translation for "second brain" is direct? Does he provide a source for where this was recorded? It's the first time I've heard the phrase outside of Tiago Forte's use.

    1. ffost guides to research devote a few pages to methods of note takingW but they lag behind thenew technologiesi seeW for exampleW xacques parzun and venry tY uraffW The ́odern ResearcherS]gcei postonW ]gg‘TY

      Might be interesting to look at this reference to see what she's referring to specifically.

      It would be interesting to see how note taking is changing with even newer digital tools like Hypothes.is, Diigo, Twitter, Readwise, etc.

      Perhaps the growth of digital gardens in public may be a place for study as well? Though one would need to be wary of the idea of performative note taking as these are often done specifically in public as opposed to private as is more common in the past.

  14. Oct 2021
    1. "Vielmehr", so Schmidt et al., "notiert Luhmann in der Regel nur maximal drei Systemstellen, an denen der jeweilige Begriff zu finden ist, da er annimmt, dass man dann über das interne Verweisungsnetz schnell die anderen relevanten Stellen findet."

      machine translation:

      "Rather," says Schmidt et al., "Luhmann usually only notes a maximum of three system points at which the respective term can be found, since he assumes that the other relevant points can then be found quickly via the internal network of references."

      I wonder how many tags one might use in practice to maximize this? Can we determine such a thing mathematically?

  15. Sep 2021
    1. y. Already, in 1796, the trade was complaining at the competition of French and Swiss watches; the complaints continue to grow in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Clockmakers' Company alleged in 1813 that the smuggling of cheap gold watches has assumed major proportions, and that these were sold by jewellers, haberdashers, milliners, dressmakers, French toy-shops, perfumers, etc., "almost entirely for the use of the upper classes of society".

      I wonder at the history of counterfeit goods. At what point in a market does it typically begin to happen? Is there some level of profit margin which kicks in due to lack of competition? What are the effects of brand within the space of fashion?

    1. All four of these extraneural resources — technology, the body, physical space, social interaction — can be understood as mental extensions that allow the brain to accomplish far more than it could on its own.

      Technology, the body, physical space, and social interaction can be extensions of the mind.

      What others might exist? Examples?

    2. Those who are attuned to such cues can use them to make more-informed decisions. A study led by a team of economists and neuroscientists in Britain, for instance, reported that financial traders who were better at detecting their heartbeats — a standard test of what is known as interoception, or the ability to perceive internal signals — made more profitable investments and lasted longer in that notoriously volatile profession.

      Improved interoception may be a usefu skill for functioning in the world.

      How might one improve this ability? Can it be trained?

    1. While the material about just how darn embodied our brains are might have been something of a bummer for someone as uncomfortable being bodied as I am, the material about how much our brains like narratives was just what I wanted to read.

      How might we compare/contrast the ideas behind this with Alex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories?

    2. One of the best things I picked up in project-based learning training was to be deliberate in teaching groups how to work together. Though our brains may be pretty good at it, our societies are not, and it’s only getting worse. Students need modeling and practice to be able to figure out how to interact in positive ways in groups, how to structure collaborative work, how to overcome the atomizing forces of society.

      I wonder here at the stereotypical gendered views of working together. Who is better at it and why?

      What social function, if any, does a more conflict-based ability to not work together provide?

    1. In practice, almost every whistled tonal language chooses to use pitch to encode the tones.

      Why is pitch encoding of tones more prevalent in tonal languages? What is the efficiency and outcome of the speech and the information that can be encoded?

  16. Aug 2021
    1. The earliest attested manicules appeared in the Domesday Book, the exhaustive survey of England carried out for William I in 1086.

      I wonder if we can find a direct link to the manicule and the use of the hand as a mnemonic device?

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

      Sammelband (/ˈzæməlbænt/ ZAM-əl-bant, plural Sammelbände /ˌzæməlˈbɛndə/ ZAM-əl-BEN-də or Sammelbands), or sometimes nonce-volume, is a book comprising a number of separately printed or manuscript works that are subsequently bound together.

      Compare and contrast this publishing scheme with the idea of florilegium and commonplace books.

      Did commonplace keepers ever sammelband their own personal volumes? And perhaps include more comprehensive indices?

      What time periods did this pattern take place? How does this reflect on the idea of reorganizing early modern information management practices? Could these have bled over into the idea of the evolution of the Zettelkasten?

    1. The issue of terminology is still problematic since some scholars insist that thegenre must be defined expansively in order to reflect accurately early modernpractice. Adam Smyth’s sixteen characteristics of commonplace book culture(II, A) are particularly useful in this regard

      Adam Smyth compiled sixteen characteristics of commonplace book culture. This could be an interesting starting point for comparing and contrasting all the flavors of commonplace book relatives.

      Adam Smyth, “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits,” in Women and Writing, c.1340–c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (2010), pp.90–110

      See also possibly: Smyth, Adam. “Printed Miscellanies: An Opening Survey,” in his “Profit and Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England,1640–1682 (2004), pp.1–31.

  17. Jul 2021
    1. A top down view of some learning strategies to begin teasing out which may be better than others.

      Are they broadly applicable or domain specific?

      What learning methods and pedagogy piece are best and for which domains.

      How can we balance learning and doing an overview of theory versus practice?

      Which methods are better for beginners versus domain specific experts?

      Which are better for overview versus creating new knowledge?

      https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2021/07/13/against-the-real-thing/

  18. Jun 2021
    1. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

      Description of how a technology the clock changed the human landscape.

      Similar to the way humans might practice terraforming on their natural environment, what should we call the effect our natural environment has on us?

      What should we call the effect our technological environment has on us? technoforming?

      Evolution certainly indicates that there's likely both short and long-term effects.

      Who else has done research into this? Do we have evidence of massive changes with the advent of writing, reading, printing, telegraph, television, social media, or other technologies available?

      Any relation to the nature vs nurture debate?

    1. Butler then moves on toquote—not Cicero, as Wilson does—but Quintilian, who among classical authorities is the mostskeptical about the art of memory’s efficacy (see endnote 4). Echoing Quintilian’s complaint, Butlersays that it is probably more difficult to construct a memory palace than simply to remember thingsby rote (54–55).

      Construction is definitely work. The question about how much it may be should be addressed on a continuum of knowing or understanding particular concepts as well.

      Creating palaces for raw data de-novo, as in a memory championship, takes a lot of practice for speed and the lack of relationships. However in a learning setting, it may be better to read, grasp, and understand material and then create a palace to contain the simple raw facts which might then also bring back other bits of the knowledge and understanding.

      This might be a useful idea to explore further, gather some data, and experiment with.

    2. Though he doesnot discuss mnemonics, Thomas Sloane similarly argues that classical invention—a process thattakes not only logic but also“sense, imagination, and emotions”into consideration—is irreparablyneutered by Ramism (137).

      This makes me wonder what the relation of this mode of "limited" thinking (represented by Ramism) has with Max Weber's ideas of Protestant work ethic? If we're not being creative like we may have been in the past, does it help us to focus on the mundane drudgery of our work at hand?

    3. Ong puts it this way:“Ramus can adopt memory intodialectic because his entire topically conceived logic is itself a system of local memory”(Ramus280).However, it is a simplified systemunlike the classical one: The ancient precepts about images and theirfacilitation of invention have been dropped.

      What is gained and lost in the Ramist tradition versus the method of loci?

      There is some simplicity to be sure and structure/organization aid in the structured memory.

      We lose the addition work, creativity, and invention. We also loose some of the interest that students might have. I recently read something to the effect that we always seem to make education boring and dull. (cross reference this, which I haven't read: https://daily.jstor.org/why-school-is-boring/)

      How does this interact with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow? Does Ramism beat out the fun of flow?

      How also, is this similar to Kelly's idea of the third archive as a means of bringing these all back together?

  19. May 2021
    1. The researchers had asked everyone in their game a set of questions: Did people follow the game? Did they understand the rules? Did they think it was fair? These questions were designed to measure which salespeople had “entered the magic circle,” meaning that they agreed to be bound by the game’s rules rather than the normal rules that ordinarily guide their work. After all, if people haven’t entered a game mentally, there’s no real point to it.Sure enough, the salespeople who felt that the basketball game was a load of baloney actually felt worse about work after the game was introduced, and their sales performance declined slightly. The game benefited only the salespeople who had fully bought into it—they became significantly more upbeat at work.

      Ethan Mollick and Nancy Rothbard experiment https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2277103 about gamification in a sales setting shows that gamification only works for those who buy into it.

      Is this similar to ideas like the placebo effect or potentially for cases like Eastern Medicine where one might need to buy into it for the effects to matter to them?

    1. I had always assumed – without realising the assumption – that the ancient knowledge keepers would have progressed around the henge posts or stones much as I do around a memory palace. It hadn’t occurred to me that there may be experts on each topic, ‘owning’ each post or stone and the knowledge it represented. Is there any way the archaeology could ever tell us if this is the case?

      Personally, I had assumed from Kelly's work that individual knowledge keepers may have done this. Particularly in the cases of the most advanced and protected knowledge based on the private spaces she discussed.

      The question about archaeology being able to tell us is a very good one. Nothing immediately comes to mind, but it's worthwhile to look at this. Could some artifacts indicate different artists through their own craft be a way of differentiation?

    1. Consistent with the notion that exploitation of spatial memory is among the most effective memorization techniques, an early MRI study of competitors in the World Memory Championships showed that 90% of the memory athletes employed some variation of the method of loci for rapid learning and accurate recall of information [30].

      What were the others using? Only the major system perhaps? Or were they the marginal under-performers?

      If there were solid performers in the other 10%, what method(s) were they using?

    2. Further, while the notion of ‘steps’ is often used in education as a way to scaffold knowledge, in the case of the Australian Aboriginal memory technique, there is also literal use of the term ‘steps’ as the following quote highlights: “[w]alking around and looking at the trees was a good visual tool to relate to corresponding steps in the cycle”. Kelly [1, p. 20] concurs and refers to the way Indigenous cultures use geography and landscape to create “memory spaces” and even “narrative landscapes”.

      Steps, diagrams, and other structures have been almost all that is left of potential mnemotechniques following educational reform in the late 1500s.

      Is there any research on these sorts of knowledge scaffolds in modern education?

      A classic example in Western culture can be seen in Eusebius' breaking the Bible down into smaller pieces using verses, though I don't think it was made canonical until during the Renaissance.

    3. Following the 20-minute rest, a final recall test was performed, this time without the opportunity for students to review the list prior to recall testing.

      It would be highly useful to do another test at a larger interval, say a week or a month later as well, both with and without the suggestion of spaced repetition with all three groups.

    4. Systems for encoding, transmission, and protection of essential knowledge for group survival and cohesion were developed by multiple cultures long before the advent of alphabetic writing.

      Focusing in on the phrase:

      essential knowledge for group survival

      makes me wonder if we haven't evolutionarily primed ourselves to use knowledge and group knowledge in particular to create group cohesion and therefor survival?

      Cross reference: https://hyp.is/LWtjtLhjEeuTqHPwUUMUbA/threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381933685713289216.html and the paper https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories

    5. The Australian Aboriginal method resulted in approximately a 3-fold greater probability of improvement to accurate recall of the entire word list (odds ratio = 2.82; 95% c.i. = 1.15–6.90), vs. the memory palace technique (odds ratio = 2.03; 95% c.i. = 0.81–5.06) or no training (odds ratio = 1.5; 95% c.i. = 0.54–4.59) among students who did not correctly recall all list items at baseline.

      Keep in mind that these numbers are likely to show even greater disparity in the broader population as the test group, based on their selection as advanced medical students, are likely to be some of the smartest and best studied students to begin with.

    1. Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: "Find me that document about the chimpanzees!" That's searching. The other feels different, so different that we don't quite have a verb for it: it's riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, to be sure, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful.

      What is the best word/verb for this sort of pseudo-searching via word or idea association for generating new ideas?

      I've used the related phrase combinatorial thought before, but he's also using the idea of artificial intelligence to search/find and juxtapose these ideas.

    1. 130 years on, privacy is still largely conceived of as an individual thing, wherein we get to make solo decisions about when we want to be left alone and when we’re comfortable being trespassed upon.

      How could one design a mathematical balancing system to help separate individuals embedded within a variety of societies or publics to enforce a balance of levels of privacy.

      • There's the interpersonal level between the individuals
      • There's the person's individual privacy and the public's reaction/response to the thing captured, for which the public may shun or not
      • There's the takers rights (possibly a journalist or news outlet) to inform the broader public which may shame or not
      • There's the publics' potential right to know, the outcome may effect them or dramatically change society as a whole
      • others facets?
      • how many facets?
      • how to balance all these to create an optimum outcome for all parties?
      • How might the right to forget look like and be enforced?
      • How do economic incentives play out (paparazzi, journalism, social media, etc.?)
    1. Yet apart from a few megastar “influencers”, most creators receive no reward beyond the thrill of notching up “likes”.

      But what are these people really making? Besides one or two of the highest paid, what is a fair-to-middling influencer really making?

  20. Apr 2021
    1. Arguing in favor of cosmic connectivity, à la Whitley: why would anybody create art in places that are very difficult to see and dangerous to enter, if the goal is purely aesthetic or decorative?

      If these were used for societal memory purposes, the privacy of the caves as well as the auditory and even halucinatory effects could have helped as well.

      What sorts of other things would we expect to see in such instances? Definitely worth looking at Lynne Kelly's ten criteria in these situations, though some of them are so old as to be unlikely to have as much supporting evidence.

    1. It seems more likely, however, that Waun Mawn contributed only a small pro-portion of Stonehenge’s 80 or so bluestones. This raises the question of whether multiplemonuments in Wales contributed monoliths to Stonehenge and Bluestonehenge

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. At Slow Art Day events, museums generally ask visitors to look at five objects for 10 minutes each — enough time, often, to keep them looking a little longer. But the practice varies. Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard University and a proponent of slow art, has her students look at an individual artwork for three hours. “Approach it as if you were a visitor from another planet with no prior knowledge of the configuration or content of earthly art,” she tells them.

      Why isn't there a slow reading movement that does this with books? What would that look like? What might it accomplish?

  21. Mar 2021
    1. What Fukuyama and a team of thinkers at Stanford have proposed instead is a means of introducing competition into the system through “middleware,” software that allows people to choose an algorithm that, say, prioritizes content from news sites with high editorial standards.

      This is the second reference I've seen recently (Jack Dorsey mentioning a version was the first) of there being a marketplace for algorithms.

      Does this help introduce enough noise into the system to confound the drive to the extremes for the average person? What should we suppose from the perspective of probability theory?

    1. In the Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber's article, it is mentioned that the setting closest in structure to the market experiments done would be underwriting, a task in which well-informed experts price goods that are sold to a less-informed public. Investment bankers value securities, experts taste cheese, store buyers observe jewelry being modeled, and theater owners see movies before they are released. They then sell those goods to a less-informed public. If they suffer from the curse of knowledge, high-quality goods will be overpriced and low-quality goods underpriced relative to optimal, profit-maximizing prices; prices will reflect characteristics (e.g., quality) that are unobservable to uninformed buyers ("you get what you pay for").[5] The curse of knowledge has a paradoxical effect in these settings. By making better-informed agents think that their knowledge is shared by others, the curse helps alleviate the inefficiencies that result from information asymmetries (a better informed party having an advantage in a bargaining situation), bringing outcomes closer to complete information. In such settings, the curse on individuals may actually improve social welfare.

      How might one exploit this effect to more proactively improve and promote social welfare?

    1. I've broken down each base medium with some of its benefits, tips, and opportunities to make your content more accessible.

      Accessibility is definitely a great goal, but how can one also make it more memorable/rememberable or more sticky?

      What methods are there outside of [[Made to Stick]]?

    2. No matter how engaging, funny, well-produced the video is, I will not be able to retain it unless I cannot read along.

      I'm wondering how people of various stripes like this and other versions may or may not relate to the variety of mnemotechniques out there.

  22. Feb 2021
    1. Only fifteen of the thirty-seven commonplace books were written in his hand. He might have dictated the others to a secretary, but the nature of his authorship, if it existed, remains a matter of conjecture. A great deal of guesswork also must go into the interpretation of the entries in his own hand, because none of them are dated. Unlike the notes of Harvey, they consist of endless excerpts, which cannot be connected with anything that was happening in the world of politics.

      I find myself wondering what this study of his commonplace books would look like if it were digitized and cross-linked? Sadly the lack of dates on the posts would prevent some knowledge from being captured, but what would the broader corpus look like?

      Consider the broader digital humanities perspective of this. Something akin to corpus linguistics, but at the level of view of what a single person reads, thinks, and reacts to over the course of their own lifetime.

      How much of a person could be recreated from such a collection?

    1. Eternal September or the September that never ended[1] is Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993,[2][3] the month that Internet service provider America Online (AOL) began offering Usenet access to its many users, overwhelming the existing culture for online forums.

      This makes me wonder at what level a founder community can manage to maintain its founder effects for incoming new members?

      Is there existing research on this? Are there potential ways to guard against it in the future?

      What happens to the IndieWeb community if it were to see similar effects?

  23. Dec 2020
    1. The settlement of the res-titution claims made by the Italian government against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Malibu, and the Cleveland Museum of Art and the return to Italy of looted antiquities raise ques-tions about the integrity of some museum directors and trustees – well-informed people whom one would expect to be the guardians and defenders of the past, not par-ticipants in the commercial processes which lead to its destruction.

      The museum directors definitely should know and have some subject area expertise here, but likely the trustees wouldn't have. While the museum directors should educate them, the financial position the trustees have will almost always tend to drown out the better angels of the museum directors who rely on those trustees' support.

      Part of the question is how to redesign the structural support underpinning the system to help ensure more ethical outcomes.

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  24. Nov 2020
  25. Oct 2020
    1. from tuka al-salani 60:48 and well actually it is a question but it's something that will probably 60:52 is out beyond our scope here but how would 60:56 social annotation be used as a research tool so not research into it but how 61:00 would we use it as a research tool

      Opening up social annotation and connecting it to a network of researchers' public-facing zettelkasten could create a sea-change of thought

      This is a broader concept I'm developing, but thought I'd bookmark this question here as an indicator that others are also interested in the question though they may not have a means of getting there (yet).

    1. to what extent is there value in breaking down the wall between blogging and wiki, and to what extent are these two technologies best left to do what they do best?
    2. Should Wikity follow the wiki tradition of supplying editable source to collaborators? Or the web syndication model of supplying encoded content. (Here, actually, I come down rather firmly on the source side of the equation — encoded content is a model suited for readers, not co-authors).

      What does he mean by "encoded" content? and why is it a problem?

    1. being able to follow links to “follow a conversation” that is threaded on Twitter.

      This is one of my favorite parts about my website and others supporting Webmention: the conversation is aggregated onto or more closely adjacent to the source. This helps prevent context collapse.

      Has anyone made a browser tool for encouraging lateral reading? I'd love a bookmarklet that I could click to provide some highly relevant lateral reading resources for any particular page I'm on.

    1. Commonplace books, during the Renaissance, were used to enhance the memory. Yeo writes, This reflected the ancient Greek and Roman heritage. In his Topica, Aristotle formulated a doctrine of ‘places’ (topoi or loci) that incorporated his ten categories. A link was soon drawn between this doctrine of ‘places’ (which were, for Aristotle, ‘seats of arguments’, not quotations from authors) and the art of memory. Cicero built on this in De Oratore, explaining that ‘it is chiefly order that gives distinctness to memory’; and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria became an influential formulation. This stress on order and sequence was the crux of what came to be known as ‘topical memory’, cultivated by mnemonic techniques (‘memoria technica’) involving the association of ideas with visual images. These ideas, forms of argument, or literary tropes were ‘placed’ in the memory, conceived in spatial terms as a building, a beehive, or a set of pigeon holes. This imagined space was then searched for the images and ideas it contained…. In the ancient world, the practical application of this art was training in oratory; yet Cicero stressed that the good orator needed knowledge, not just rhetorical skill, so that memory had to be trained to store and retrieve illustrations and arguments of various kinds. Although Erasmus distrusted the mnemonic arts, like all the leading Renaissance humanists, he advocated the keeping of commonplace books as an aid to memory.

      I particularly love the way this highlights the phrase "'placed' in the memory" because the idea of loci as a place has been around so long that we tacitly use it as a verb so naturally in conjunction with memory!

      Note here how the author Richard Yeo manages not to use the phrase memory palace or method of loci.Was this on purpose?

    1. Ideas on how to analyze and predict network behavior have been informed by concepts arising from the computational and social sciences, which are themselves increasingly concerned with understanding networks. The interesting thing about these ideas is that they work at scales ranging from the molecular to the population level.

      scale free networks perhaps?

    1. Is it possible to avoid the public goods problem altogether?

      As Lynne Kelly indicates, knowledge is a broad public good, so it is kept by higher priests and only transferred in private ceremonies to the initiated in indigenous cultures. In many senses, we've brought the value of specific information down dramatically, but there's also so much of it now, even with writing and better dissemination, it's become more valuable again.

      I should revisit the economics of these ideas and create a model/graph of this idea over history with knowledge, value, and time on various axes.

    1. I’ve alluded to the deeply philosophical nature of this problem; in a sense, it’s politicized within the software communities. Some folks believe that platform developers should shoulder the costs of compatibility, and others believe that platform users (developers themselves) should bear the costs. It’s really that simple. And isn’t politics always about who has to shoulder costs for shared problems?So it’s political. And there will be angry responses to this rant.

      This idea/philosophy cuts across so many different disciplines. Is there a way to fix it? Mitigate it? An equation for maximizing it?

    1. By the time Protestantism came along, people had already internalized an individualist worldview. Henrich calls Protestantism “the WEIRDest religion,” and says it gave a “booster shot” to the process set in motion by the Catholic Church. Integral to the Reformation was the idea that faith entailed personal struggle rather than adherence to dogma. Vernacular translations of the Bible allowed people to interpret scripture more idiosyncratically. The mandate to read the Bible democratized literacy and education. After that came the inquiry into God-given natural (individual) rights and constitutional democracies. The effort to uncover the laws of political organization spurred interest in the laws of nature—in other words, science. The scientific method codified epistemic norms that broke the world down into categories and valorized abstract principles. All of these psychosocial changes fueled unprecedented innovation, the Industrial Revolution, and economic growth.

      Reading this makes me think about the political break in the United States along political and religious boundaries. Some of Trumps' core base practices a more personal religion and are generally in areas that don't display the level of individualism, but focus more on larger paternalistic families. This could be an interesting space for further exploration as it seems to be moving the "progress"(?) described by WEIRD countries backward.

  26. Jun 2020
    1. This argument is reinforced by the fact that, at the individual level, we meet many brilliant people who are fascinated by (and often working on) tools for thought, but who nonetheless seem to be making slow progress.

      Ideas have sex: the trouble in a dramatically increasing landscape of information that we've experienced over the last century alone is that the combinatoric interactions of all the ideas is also much slower, so the progress on this front may seem to slow while the body of knowledge and interactions is continually growing. This might make for an interesting graph.

  27. May 2020
    1. Whether in music (Bach, Lennon), art (Picasso, Bernini), film (Tarantino, Anderson), games (Blow, Lantz), fiction (Kundera, Tolstoy), the most eminent work is usually the result of a single person’s creative efforts. Occasionally it’s a very small group (Eames, Wrights).

      Great creative work is usually the product of a single person.

  28. Apr 2020
    1. Our hope is that once a formal specification for these extensions is settled, this patchset can be used as a base to upstream the changes in the original project.

      What does "can be used as a base to upstream the changes in the original project" mean here?

    1. Networks  of civic engagement increase the potential cost to defectors who risk  benefits from future transactiaction. The same networks foster norms of  reciprocity that are reinforced by the networks of relationships in  which reputation is both balued and discussed. The same social networks  facilitate the flow of reputational information.

      How can we build some of this into social media networks to increase the level of trust and facts?