10 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. I have always been impressed by those academics who can sit impassively through a complex lecture by some visiting luminary without finding it necessary to make a single note, even a furtive one on the back of an envelope. They’d lose face, no doubt, if they were seen copying it all down, like a first-year undergraduate.

      In academia, the act of not taking notes can act as an external signal of superiority or even indifference.

    1. A personal file is thesocial organization of the individual's memory; it in-creases the continuity between life and work, and it per-mits a continuity in the work itself, and the planning of thework; it is a crossroads of life experience, professionalactivities, and way of work. In this file the intellectualcraftsman tries to integrate what he is doing intellectuallyand what he is experiencing as a person.

      Again he uses the idea of a "file" which I read and understand as similar to the concepts of zettelkasten or commonplace book. Unlike others writing about these concepts though, he seems to be taking a more holistic and integrative (life) approach to having and maintaining such system.

      Perhaps a more extreme statement of this might be written as "zettelkasten is life" or the even more extreme "life is zettelkasten"?

      Is his grounding in sociology responsible for framing it as a "social organization" of one's memory?


      It's not explicit, but this statement could be used as underpinning or informing the idea of using a card index as autobiography.

      How does this compare to other examples of this as a function?

  2. Aug 2022
    1. I was doing some random searches for older material on zettelkasten in German and came across this.

      Apparently I've come across this before in a similar context: https://hypothes.is/a/CsgyjAXQEeyMfoN7zLcs0w

      The description now makes me want to read it all the more!

      This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images.

      As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.

      Given the portions about knowledge and control, it might also be of interest to @remikalir wrt his coming book.

  3. Jul 2022
    1. anticipations is key to 01:08:38 everything and attention is key to everything so every organism does that plants and everything else and it doesn't require a central nervous system 01:08:51 and and you i might add to this that not only is every organism cognitive but essentially every organism organism is cooperative to those cooperation and cognition 01:09:03 go hand in hand because any intelligent organism any organism that can act to better its you know viability is going to cooperate in 01:09:17 meaningful ways with other organisms and you know other species and things like that nice point because um there's cost to communication whether it's exactly whether it's the cost of making the pheromone 01:09:30 or just the time which is super finite or attention fundamentally and so costly interactions through time the game theory are either to exploit and stabilize which is fragile 01:09:42 or to succeed together yeah exactly and and and succeeding together cooperation is is is like everywhere once you once you understand what you're looking 01:09:54 for it's in the biologic world it's like everywhere so this idea that we're you know one one one person against all or you know we're a dog eat dog universe i mean it's you 01:10:08 know in a certain sense it's true obviously tigers eat you know whatever they eat zebras or whatever i mean that happens yes of course but in the larger picture 01:10:19 over and over multiple time scales not just uh you know in five minutes but over evolutionary time scales and uh you know developmental time scales and everything the cooperation is really the rule 01:10:33 for the most part and if you need if any listener needs proof of that just think of who you think of your body i mean there's about a trillion some trillion some cells 01:10:45 that are enormously harmonious like your blood pumps every day or you know this is a this is like a miracle i don't want to use the word miracle because i want to get into 01:10:59 whatever that might imply but uh it is amazing aw inspiring the the depth of cooperation just in our own bodies is like that's that's like 01:11:12 evolution must prefer cooperation or else there would never be such a complex uh pattern of cooperation as we see just in one human body 01:11:26 just to give one example from the bees so from a species i study it's almost like a sparring type of cooperation because when it was discovered that there were some workers with developed ovaries 01:11:38 there was a whole story about cheating and policing and about altruism and this equation says this and that equation says that and then when you take a step back it's like the colony having a distribution of over-reactivation 01:11:51 may be more ecologically resilient so um i as an evolutionary biologist never think well my interpretation of what would be lovey-dovey in this system must be how it works because that's so 01:12:05 clearly not true it's just to say that there are interesting dynamics within and between levels and in the long run cooperation and stable cooperation and like learning to adapt 01:12:17 to your niche is a winning strategy in a way that locking down just isn't but unfortunately under high um stress and 01:12:29 uh high uncertainty conditions simple strategies can become rife so that's sort of a failure mode of the population

      The human, or ANY multicellular animal or plant body is a prime example of cooperation....billions of cells in cooperation with each other to regulate the body system.

      The body of any multi-cellular organism, whether flora or fauna is an example of exquisite cellular and microbial cooperation. A multi-cellular organism is itself a superorganism in this sense. And social organisms then constitute an additional layer of superorganismic behavior.

  4. Mar 2021
  5. Sep 2020
  6. Aug 2020
  7. Jul 2020
  8. Feb 2019
    1. supported the aristocracy, from whom she benefited

      This bothers our modern sensibilities, yet the hirearchy of needs dictates that we don't dismantle social structures that help us survive. Ironically, it's the people who can survive without regard for those structures (i.e., the wealthy and powerful) who often do the dismantling. Or, as my father would say, "don't sh*t where you eat." Unless, of course, you can eat somewhere else...