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).

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?

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?

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?

Why???

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?

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

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?

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

early study relating to both culture and memory decay

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

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?

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

What size index cards did Vladimir Nabokov use?

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

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?

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?

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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...

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?

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

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?

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?

What is the origin of this metaphor?

One might suspect the 1500s or during the Scientific Revolution?

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?

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?

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?

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"?

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?

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/

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?

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

Is this really what our brain does best?

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

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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)

There's so much missing Indigenous context in this article. How can we better juxtapose and sort the cultural differences while trying to build a "Third Archive" to save Indigenous knowledge and languages?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396

Syndicated copy: http://stream.boffosocko.com/2022/theres-so-much-missing-indigenous-context-in-this-article-how

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396

Should outsiders attempting to preserve Indigenous knowledge, histories, or language be allowed to make money off of their work?

Are there examples of people using The Brain in public as more extensive commonplace books or zettelkasten?

This looks like an interesting question...

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1531349578229895170.html

How do we solve for toxic masculinity at scale?

Is there "recruitment" and how can we stop that piece?

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.?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Link to [[searching for questions while reading]]

https://twitter.com/grabe/status/1493723795281956867

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

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?

Is there evidence that this is true?

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

How can the idea of agency expansion within games be used as a broader tool?

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?

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?

This is a great question!

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?

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

What others might exist? Examples?

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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.

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/

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?

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.?)

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

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.

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

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?