by u/osservazione at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1anwrez/zauberkasten_work_in_progress/

Adam Savage's book Every Tool is a Hammer shows a checklist which has square bullets which can be partially filled in to show the level of completion. He learned the method when working at Industrial Light & Magic.

via u/AZORIAN_K129 at https://www.reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/comments/15zgbvr/does_this_technique_have_a_name/

Using Magic: The Gathering boxes for younger children and teenagers might be a more palatable way to introduce the zettelkasten method of note taking to them, particularly when it's a game in which they have a pre-existing interest.

https://www.amazon.com/mtg-deck-box/s?k=mtg+deck+box

First reference I've seen for someone suggesting using half size 3 x 5" index cards so that they could use commercially available Magic: The Gathering (MTG) boxes.

Oxford and possibly other manufacturers already make 1/2 size 3 x 5" index cards.

Another advising to use the analog method for learning even if one is going to switch to a digital zettelkasten.

He uses the word "good" here while others may have potentially used the word "magic", but writing in a space that values critical thinking, he would have been taken to task for having done so. In any case he's not able to put his finger on the inherent value of analog over digital.

Does he actually touch on the idea of "modern magic" explicitly? He talks about modern technology, but does he frame it as "magic"?

via Andy

Andy indicates that this review functionality isn't specific to zettelkasten, but it still sits in the framework of note taking. Given this, are there really "other" ways available?

@Will Thanks for always keeping up with your regular threads and considerations.

I've been keeping examples of people talking about the "magic of note taking" for a bit. I appreciate your perspectives on it. Personally I consider large portions of it to be bound up with the ideas of what Luhmann termed as "second memory", the use of ZK to supplement our memories, and the serendipity of combinatorial creativity. I've traced portions of it back to the practices of Raymond Llull in which he bound up old mnemonic techniques with combinatorial creativity which goes back to at least Seneca.

A web search for "combinatorial creativity" may be useful, but there's a good attempt at what it entails here: https://fs.blog/seneca-on-combinatorial-creativity/

Will Simpson feels that the magic of note taking stems from "the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly".

I think it sems more from the serendipitous connections and resultant combinatorial creativity.

cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/QLyD4P6mEe2uC4O7z2QOOQ

quote is from Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

I love the concept of "slender ideas" as small, fleeting notes which might accumulate into something if written down. In saying "Close the notebook and think about it for a few days" Patricia Highsmith seems to be suggesting that one engage in diffuse thinking, passive digesting, or mulling rather than active or proactive thinking.

She also invokes the magic word "presto!" (which she exclaims) as if to indicate that magically the difficult work of writing is somehow no longer difficult. Many writers seem to indicate that this is a phenomenon, but never seem to put their finger on the mechanism of why it happens. Some seems to stem from the passive digestion over days with diffuse thinking, with portions may also stem from not starting from a blank page and having some material to work against instead of a vacuum.

From Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 (Swiss Literary Archives)

Harry Lorayne, having run out of card tricks to entertain actor Victor Jory one evening, invented a trick in which he recalled the location of all the cards in a deck of playing cards. The feat so impressed Jory that Lorayne made it part of his magic act in the Catskills.

Harry Lorayne recognized the use of mnemonics as a form of entertainment and parlayed it into a career. Others before him, primarily magicians like David Roth had paved the way for some of this practice.

A solid question for which I have an historical answer, though working through some of the finer historical details may be a worthwhile exercise.

Somehow building up a critical mass will create "magic"?

No rhyme or reason here, just "magic"... 🤪

google translate:

And yet he never found what he was actually looking for, but something new and surprising.

While you'll only find in your zettelkasten exactly what you placed there, you may be surprised to find more than you expected.

Again note the reference to magic with respect to the artificial intelligence: "the ability to conjure ideas 'out of thin air'".

The engineers behind Wordcraft refer to it "as a 'magic text editor'". This is a cop-out for many versus a more concrete description of what is actually happening under the hood of the machine.

It's also similar, thought subtly different to the idea of the "magic of note taking" by which writers are taking about ideas of emergent creativity and combinatorial creativity which occur in that space.

https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8-3_V

I've read and referenced this several times, but never bothered to log it into my notes.

Sasha Fast's translation:

Ghost in the box? Spectators visit. They get to see everything, and nothing but that - like in a porn movie. And the disappointment is correspondingly high.

Klaus Kusanowsky uses the ideas of witchcraft or fascination to describe the sort of magic created by zettelkasten use. [0:09:15]

A side reference here to magic, but he defers what this is... why mention it if you're not going to back it up here?

I'm not a fan of the magic framing here and I'm not really sure that Luhmann consciously designed or built his system to do this. Prior systems had these "magical" features before Luhmann's.

I love that he points this out explicitly.

Some don't see the underlying processes of complexity within note taking methods and as a result ascribe magical properties to what are emergent properties or combinatorial creativity.

See also: The Ghost in the Machine zettel from Luhmann

Somehow there's an odd dichotomy between the boredom of such a simple method and people seeing magic within it at the same time. This is very similar to those who feel that life must be divinely created despite the evidence brought by evolutionary and complexity theory. In this arena, there is a lot more evolved complexity which makes the system harder to see compared to the simpler zettelkasten process.

opinion: too much metaprogramming magic

I'm not so sure it's "too much" though... Any framework or large software project is going to feel that way to a newcomer looking at the code, due to the number of layers of abstractions, etc. that eventually were added/needed by the maintainers to make it maintainable, decoupled, etc.

Except that, seemingly, many historians have written and published about just this very topic!

People often talk about the "magic of note taking", but it's not frequent that they frame the methods as magician's secrets.

The zettelkasten can be a useful educational substrate for thinking in as few as five cards.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/Iwy7MGlMEeyztTNgvCXUOA

Sounds like magic, n'cest pas? 😜

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

ta ra - bye bye

We [the Welsh] are a magic people, constantly doing magic tricks which is why we need to say "ta da" all the time.

https://lu.ma/x7zlzv95

NoMa Method (note making method)<br /> JOMO mindset (Joy of Missing Out)<br /> MIMO - Mindfully In, Magically Out

Nick Milo's got WAY too many buzzwords and acronyms. Are we creating a new cult with in groups and out groups using language?

"Notice when you do" --- the root word of notice and note are related...

https://twitter.com/inkasrain/status/1566410516721016833

Does anyone know what exactly this is? A friend gave it to me years ago when they visited Jerusalem. I don't read Hebrew. Is it something harmless or should it be shamshed(jew magic)? (attached photo of a mezuzah)

The idea of "magic" here within a modern religious context is interesting in that it shows the divergence of religion and magic as concepts with respect to cultural practices.

The phrasing also has a sense of othering the unknown culture with a sense of fear in the idea that the object should be smashed. There's also a lack of basic science knowledge and tinge of superstition implied by the fact that they think that smashing will somehow dissipate the unknown magic.

So many different cultural indicators of various things going on here...

Harford, T. (2021, May 6). What magic teaches us about misinformation. https://www.ft.com/content/5cea69f0-7d44-424e-a121-78a21564ca35

1. Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 227. ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.

Stephen Downes describes some of his note taking process for creation here. He doesn't actively reuse his notes (or in this case blog posts, bookmarks, etc.) which number a sizeable 35669, directly, at least in the sort of cut and paste method suggested by Sönke Ahrens. Rather he follows a sort of broad idea, outline creation, and search plan akin to that described by Cory Doctorow in 20 years a blogger

Link to: - https://hyp.is/_XgTCm9GEeyn4Dv6eR9ypw/pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/

Downes suggests that the "magic happens in the creation" of his notes. He uses them as "grist for pattern recognition". He doesn't mention words like surprise or serendipity coming from his notes by linking them, though he does use them "intuitively to form overarching themes or concepts not actually contained in the resources themselves." This is closely akin to the broader ideas ensconced in inventio, Llullan Wheels, triangle thinking, ideas have sex, combinatorial creativity, serendipity (Luhmann), insight, etc. which have been described by others.

Note that Downes indicates that his brain creates the links and he doesn't rely on his software to do this. The break is compounded by the fact that he doesn't find value in classifying or categorizing his notes.

I appreciate that Downes uses the word "grist" to describe part of his note taking practice which evokes the idea of grinding up complex ideas (the grain) to sort out the portions of the whole to find simpler ideas (the flour) which one might use later to combine to make new ideas (bread, cake, etc.) Similar analogies might be had in the grain harvesting space including winnowing or threshing.

One can compare this use of a grist mill analogy of thinking with the analogy of the crucible, which implies a chamber or space in which elements are brought together often with work or extreme conditions to create new products by their combination.

Of course these also follow the older classical analogy of imitating the bees (apes).

These always read as hyperbole to me, but it's difficult to explain the surprise and serendipity of re-finding things in one's notes on a regular basis. It's akin to the sort of cognitive dissonance that religious people have when encountering the levels of complexity formed by living systems through evolution. Not having better words for describing the experience, they may resort to descriptions of magic or religion to frame their experiences.

The area of serendipity becomes much more powerful when one has ideas both directly interlinked, ideas categorized with subject headings or tags, or when one can have affordances like auto-complete.

The method Forte suggests and outlines allows for some serendipity, but not as much as other methods with additional refinements. Serendipity in Forte's method isn't as strong as in others.

In this section he's talking about some of the true "magic of note taking" which is discussed by Luhmann and others.

link to:<br /> Luhmann's writings on serendipity and surprise when using his zettelkasten (Communication with the Slipbox...)<br /> Ahrens mentions of this effect

another example of the idea of "magical" experience that comes when taking notes. This one isn't about idea creation or even serendipity though, but relates specifically to being "bulk productive".

There's some magical thinking involved here. While the system has some arbitrary internal branching, the surprises come from the system's perfect memory that the human user doesn't have. This makes it appear that the system creates its own creativity, but it is really the combinatorics of the perfect memory system with use over time.

Link to: serendipity of systems based on auto-complete

Missing from this description is the work that is involved in revisting, re-reading, and interacting with your notes. This is not an easy process, but this paragraph belies the work involved and makes it seem "magical" with the use of the words 'illuminating', 'gravitating', 'cross-pollinating' which are all external processes or forces that don't require work from the individual.

He does build a sense of excitement and magic around the idea of taking notes here, though sadly he's covering up the amount of work that maintaining such a system entails.

Sönke Ahrens apparently missed this bit of advice.

link to the Arthur C. Clarke quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." which appeared in his 1962 book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkjf0hCKOCE

The sky is a textbook. The sky is a lawbook. The sky is a science book. —Duane Hamacher, (1:24)

Hamacher uses the Western description "method of loci" rather than an Indigenous word or translated word.

The words "myth", "legend", "magic", "ritual", and "religion" in both colloquial English and even anthropology are highly loaded terms.

Words like "narrative" and "story" are better used instead for describing portions of the Indigenous cultures which we have long ignored and written off for their seeming simplicity.

https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/

An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.

Nice overview of work in the space for fixing monopoly in social media space the at the moment. I hadn't heard about Fukuyama or Daphne Keller's versions before.

I'm not sure I think Dorsey's is actually a thing. I suspect it is actually vaporware from the word go.

IndieWeb has been working slowly at the problem as well.

This line particularly hit me, as a 'black girl' I have been googling this most of my life. At least anecdotally, I have seen a relative evolution of this search and have felt some of its impact. My family and I were often the only black people in the towns we grew up in, and I used the internet a lot to try and find out what people thought of me. I saw a lot of really negative opinions and did everything I could to reject the 'black stereotype' people always expected of me because I didn't want to be hated or thought of as 'that kind of black'. Now I know the internet, and google in particular, brings up a lot more positivity when it comes to black women, but it feels like whiplash. The kind of content that comes up, though more positive makes me fear the change is due to a marketing trend and not a true social change

Compare and contrast the materials of comedians versus magicians.

Collection was an important piece. Protection/secrecy was relatively similar, though with a joke, the item was as ephemeral as a magic act which would have been confounding on it's nature.

Link to Ricky Jay's collection of magic acts and pieces. Other comedy collections include George Carlin, Joan Rivers, etc.

It's rarely ever the case (my cognitive bias statement), that anything springs fully formed from the mind.

Generally there's an infrastructure, a system, a method by which ideas or physical things are aggregated, accumulated, and edited into existence.

When seeing them well done, they appear magical because we don't see the work or the process. We will often call them genius, when in reality, they're the result of long hard work.

Take the Pyramids of Giza. They look large and magesterial---and likely moreso in their non-degraded form. But is it so mystical how they may have been built if we were to see the structure and scaffolding that likely went into constructing them?

Time in the US, Pastimes, Reading, Favorite genres, Favorite books

There seems to be an artificial pressure and a false assumption that the version that gets printed and included in the box be the "magic number" 1.00.

But I think there is absolutely nothing bad or to be ashamed of to have the version number printed in the rule book be 1.47 or even 2.0. (Or, of course, you could just not print it at all.) It's just being transparent/honest about how many versions/revisions you've made. 

A radio podcast exploring the novel and its cultural influences

"Manes," in this context, are ghosts or spirits of the deceased.

Theseus was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. Plutarch's Life of Theseus makes use of varying accounts of the death of the Minotaur, Theseus' escape, and the love of Ariadne for Theseus.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) was author of *De Occulta Philosophia**, known to practice magic, and considered nonsensical by modern natural philosophy.

The philosophers stone was also called the elixir of life, or thought to create it, and to be useful for rejuvenation and for achieving immortality; for many centuries, the stone and the elixir were the most sought goal in alchemy.

In his book De Occulta Philosophia Agrippa suggested that God placed magic in the world to make man capable of transcending the natural sphere and able to influence the superior realms.

The philosopher's stone, or "stone of the philosophers" (Latin: lapis philosophorum) was a legendary alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold (chrysopoeia, from the Greek χρυσός khrusos, "gold," and ποιεῖν poiēin, "to make") or silver.

One incantation in Agrippa's book, De occulta philosophia, was said to conjure demonic beings.

What I would give to have this!

I'll actually settle for a keyboard that won't break down all the time.

And I use a MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2018 version.

Burke is important for a lot of reasons, but really, to me, he's the guy who explains why Harry Potter fits into the Rhetorical Tradition, and I can't think of anything more important than that.

Mmmm Magic.

Yes, we can have images and GIFs here, but you have to find a URL for them (hint, you can upload them you your web site, and find the URL for the upload).

So... our inventions (technology) and how we implement them throughout society can make us god like? Makes me think of how we acquire different skill sets so that we can adapt to different tasks or work responsibilities (wearing different hats - if anyone has heard that metaphor)

But how is magic not a structure?