He's literally drawing out bi-directional links to other ideas in his collection of notes as he creates fleeting notes so that he doesn't forget them in the future.

The original PoIC didn't include bi-directional links, but the idea was brought up and considered.

Finding order and relations (and their particular types), is a form of linking ideas found in some of the more complex zettelkasten and knowledge management spaces. It's not as explicit here and he doesn't seem to be focusing on stating or writing explicit links within his notes. He does, however, place some focus on the quality and types of links he's making (or at least thinking about), something which isn't frequently seen in the current PKM space. For example, no one is creating user interfaces that show links between ideas which are opposite (or in opposition or antonym relation) to each other.

Some excellent questions that nudge one into an "orthodox" zettelkasten practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X8gaMGQNsA

Using direct links to things within Obsidian can be powerful. It's also very useful when using other tools in conjunction with Obsidian.

Seems like many of the tips and automations from outside of Obsidian here are Apple iOS specific.

Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.

Building blocks of the note taking system

• atomic ideas
• written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
• cross linked with each other
• cross linked with an index
• cross linked with references

are there others? should they be broken up differently?

Godfathers of Notetaking

• Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
• Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
• Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
• Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
• John Locke (indices)
• Carl Linnaeus (index cards)

Create a list of tools that feature [[wikilink]] functionality.

• WikiMedia
• TiddlyWiki
• other wikis...
• Roam Research
• Obsidian
• other note taking apps...
• Trello
• Notion
• Airtable
• GitHub

Everything is connected. And isn't this just as it should be with respect to knowledge?

Unlinked notes in paper-based knowledge systems can become lost in the shuffle. This is much harder to do in digital systems which have visual checks that highlight unlinked notes.

While it may be important that there are no privileged positions, hierarchies, or immediate structures within Luhmann's (or others') zettelkasten, this belies the value of making (even by force) at least one link from each new note to the other notes. This helps begin to create the valuable interconnections of the system which are crucial for later use. Without this "linking hierarchy" one is left with just a pile of notes which will need the aforementioned additional work and context.

https://scrapbox.io/product

A note taking tool for groups that also does bi-directional linking.

This is the first reference I've heard about [[Athens]], but there are many others that aren't mentioned here including Obsidian, Foam, TiddlyWiki, etc. which have been adding the backlinking capabilities.

This is an important point. This is why the internet doesn't have contextual backlinks.

Nodes in a knowledge management system can be defined extensionally, rather than intensionally, through their backlinks and their respective context.

Bi-Directional links, or backlinks, only help define the node being linked to if the context in which the links occur is also provided.

Nat's conclusion is correct, but his reason for arriving at that conclusion is wrong.

You're not faced with the question of where to put things with Roam because you can do the following:

(1) You can tag a new entry on the fly, in-line, CLI style. (2) If the tag exists, it will autocomplete, if it doesn't you can create it with no extra effort (3) Any tags you add are links to their respective pages, which allows you to (a) navigate their as soon as you've typed the tag/page name and (b) it creates a backlink on those pages so your new entry is automatically linked to from there.

I think Nat touches on an important use case here, but I wouldn't call it "moving laterally while retaining vertical references."

He's referring to a link to the book Emergency, not some content of the book itself. So each page can link to the book, that's not novel.

What is novel is that when entering in the book into your Roam database you can tag it with Prepping and Neil Strauss and it will show up under those pages automatically.