Center for the Study of the Great Ideas

https://web.archive.org/web/20190806154724/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/gbww/index.html

University of Adelaide digital collection of the Great Books of the Western World using public domain sources within their collection.

https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-world

A digital (app?) version of The Great Books of the Western World with cross references.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ebooks/comments/eao9c8/great_books_of_the_western_world_ebook_collection/

Someone's collected digital copies of most of the Great Books of the Western World collection here.

https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britannicas-great-books-of-the-western-world

Any book collector worth their salt will already have in mind the way they want their collection arranged. Only someone who wants to use it as wallpaper would have a service arrange it.

I wonder what the other two cases were?

the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

1952, 1970s, 1980s editions and their differences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVHhwyx-Cg

An overly complex method of commonplacing, though oddly with absolutely no mention of indexing of any sort.

reply: <br /> If academia doesn't work out, then perhaps you could shill for "Big Notebook"? Seriously though, this is a pretty heavy/complex method of commonplacing. Do you index any/all of it somehow so you can find the pieces you know you've worked through in the past? A card index perhaps? John Locke's commonplacing method? I do something similar, but use slips or index cards the way Wittgenstein or Walter Benjamin did.... Perhaps one day I'll go more visual like https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/ ?

This research site has a digitized copy of Jonathan Edwards' commonplace book (aka Miscellanies): http://edwards.yale.edu/research/misc-index

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/z-library-returns-aims-to-avoid-seizures-by-giving-each-user-a-secret-url/

Amazon removing titles from Kindle Unlimited due to ebook piracy issues<br /> by Sovan Mandal

Read at Tue 2023-02-28 6:50 AM

https://ditchthattextbook.com/

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A133141011%2Cn%3A154606011%2Cp_36%3A0-0%2Cp_30%3ARoutledge&s=date-desc-rank&qid=1676881333&ref=sr_pg_1

Reagan’s Note Card Treasures<br /> by John H. Fund <br /> at August 10, 2011, 12:00 AM<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 12:25:06)

archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20151017020314/http://spectator.org/articles/37399/reagans-note-card-treasures

Ronald Reagan's index card-based commonplace book consisted of quotes, economic statistics, jokes, and anecdotes.

Ronald Reagan's index cards of one-liners at 2014-07-20 <br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:41:42)

archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200305070906/https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/ronald-reagans-index-cards-of-one-liners/12/

ᔥ Manfred Kuehn in Ronald Reagan's Notecards at 2015-01-25<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:34:10)

Manfred Kuehn in Ronald Reagan's Notecards at 2015-01-25<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:34:10)

Kuehn felt that Ronald Regan's note taking "does not seem like a good system. In fact, it's hardly any system at all..."

https://petersmith.org/webmentions/replies/2023/reply-202320230217-134119/

https://booksbythefoot.com/

reply to u/Turbulent-Focus-1389 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/112wup1/beginner_question/

I'd recommend you do your best to stay away from rigid category-like classifications and see what develops. For specifics see: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/19/on-the-interdisciplinarity-of-zettelkasten-card-numbering-topical-headings-and-indices/

If it's easier to conceptualize, think of it all like a map which may have place names, but also has numerical coordinates. Sometimes a specific name like Richard Macksey's house is useful, but other times thinking about a specific coordinate and the general neighborhoods around them will be far more useful in your community development plan. A religion-only neighborhood without religious activities, religious food, religious organization or communication will be a a sad one indeed. If you segregate your communities, they're likely not to be very happy places for co-mingling of ideas and the potential resultant creativity you'll get out of them.

Bob Doto also suggests a similar philosophy in some of his work, particularly with respect to folgezettel: https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/

I'll note that this is an incredibly hard thing to do at the start, but it's one which you may very well wish you had done from the beginning.

Because one may need to spend an inordinate amount of time filtering through potentially bad suggestions of artificial intelligence, the time and energy spent keeping a commonplace book or zettelkasten may pay off magnificently in the long run.

Eugenia Triantafyllou is talking about crutches for creativity and inspiration, but seems to miss the value of collecting interesting tidbits along the road of life that one can use later. Instead, the emphasis here becomes one of relying on an artificial intelligence doing it for you at the "hit of a button". If this is the case, then why not just let the artificial intelligence do all the work for you?

This is the area where the cultural loss of mnemonics used in orality or even the simple commonplace book will make us easier prey for (over-)reliance on technology.

Is serendipity really serendipity if it's programmed for you?

Google translate:

In addition to the methods of conventional research, card boxes are usually created in which index cards are used to record what needs to be constantly quoted. Students often try this out intensively for their diploma thesis for the first time. Notes are sorted alphabetically according to keywords and authors, and what has been sorted into the box can also be taken out again.

An indication from 2001 of the state of the art of zettelkasten written in German. Note that the description is focused more on the index card or slip-based version of a commonplace book sorted alphabetically by keywords and authors primarily for quoting. Most students trying the method for the first time are those working on graduate level theses.

The fact that Luhmann changed the structure of his zettelkasten with respect to the longer history of note taking and note accumulation allowed him several useful affordances.

In older commonplacing and slip box methods, one would often store their notes by topic category or perhaps by project. This mean that after collection one had to do additional work of laying them out into some sort of outline to create arguments and then write them out for publication. This also meant that one was faced with the problem of multiple storage or copying out notes multiple times to file under various different subject headings.

Luhmann overcame both of these problems by eliminating categories and placing ideas closest to their most relevant neighbor and numbering them in a branching fashion. Doing this front loads some of the thinking and outlining work which would often be done later, though it's likely easier to do when one has the fullest context of a note after they've made it when it is still freshest in their mind. It also means that each note is linked to at least one other note in the system. This helps notes from being lost and allows a simpler indexing structure whereby one only needs to use a few index entries to get close to the neighborhood of an idea as most other related ideas are likely to be nearby within a handful or more of index cards.

Going from index to branches on the tree is relatively easy and also serves the function of reminding one of interesting prior reading and ideas as one either searches for specific notes or searches for placing future notes.

When it comes to ultimately producing papers, one's notes already have a pre-arranged sort of outline which can then be more easily copied over for publication, though one can certainly still use other cross-links and further rearranging if one wishes.

Older methods focused on broad accretion of materials into subject ordered piles while Luhmann's practice not only aggregated them, but slowly and assuredly grew them into more orderly trains of thought as he collected.

Link to: The description in Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens (section 1.2 Die Kartei) at https://hypothes.is/a/-qiwyiNbEe2yPmPOIojH1g which heavily highlights all the downsides, though it doesn't frame them that way.

Blogs as digital commonplace books

For newer non-surveillance capitalist alternatives to Goodreads:

• Bookrastinating
• LibraryThing
• The StoryGraph

David Berman on a fave book.

Some of David Berman's book tips.

Categorizing ideas (and or indexing them for search) can be useful for quick bulk storage, but the additional work of linking ideas to each other with in a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten can be more useful in the long term in developing ideas.

Storage by category means that ideas aren't immediately developed explicitly, but it means that that work is pushed until some later time at which the connections must be made to turn them into longer works (articles, papers, essays, books, etc.)

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Maxims and Reflections. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books, 1998.

urn:x-pdf:577d8c2ae537c748bc9ae3d1e12ecb38

Goethe's Maxims and Reflections represents a commonplace book of sorts.

Who numbered the maxims though? Was it Goethe or someone after him?

(stray note on a slip of paper dated 2022-10-27)

http://bactra.org/

An interesting raw html-based website that also serves the functions of notebook and to some extent a digital commonplace.

Cosma Shalizi is a professor in the statistics department at CMU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPqjgN-pNDw

When did the switch in commonplace book framing did the idea of "second brain" hit? (This may be the first time I've seen it personally. Does it appear in other places?) Sift through r/commonplace books to see if there are mentions there.

By keeping one's commonplace in an analog form, it forces a greater level of intentionality because it's harder to excerpt material by hand. Doing this requires greater work than arbitrarily excerpting almost everything digitally. Manual provides a higher bar of value and edits out the lower value material.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifDi2SsQjQM

Comparing the various e-note/e-reader devices, Kit Betts-Masters ranks them overall as follows: - Boox Note Air 2 - Supernote A5X - Remarkable 2 - Bigme Inknote - Kobo Elipsa - Boyue P10

Manfred Kuehn's index card commonplace from 1974 - 1985

At 5 - 6,000 cards in 11 years from 1974 to 1985, Kuehn would have made somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.25 - 1.49 note per day.

reply to u/jackbaty at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10mjwq9/ive_decided_i_dont_care_too_much_where_new_notes/

u/jackbaty, If it doesn't make sense for you (yet, or for your specific needs), you can always follow in the footsteps of the hundreds of thousands who used a topical subject heading method of the commonplace book before Luhmann's example shifted the space over the last decade. If it worked for Francis Bacon, you'll probably be alright too... (See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/)

I find that sometimes, it is useful to bank up a few dozen cards before filing/linking them together. Other times I'll file them by category in a commonplace book like system to ruminate a bit only later to move them to a separate Luhmann-esque zettelkasten area where they're more tightly linked with the ideas around them. After you've been doing it a while, it will be easier to more tightly integrate the three-way conversation or argument you're having between yourself, your card index, and the sources you're thinking about (or reading, watching, listening to). You mention that "my brain needs at least some level of structure", and I totally get it, as most of us (myself included) are programmed to work that way. I've written some thoughts on this recently which may help provide some motivation to get you around it: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/19/on-the-interdisciplinarity-of-zettelkasten-card-numbering-topical-headings-and-indices/

It helps to have a pointed reason for why you're doing all this in the first place and that reason will dramatically help to shape your practice and its ultimate structure.

Mark Bernstein suggested this with respect to note taking and commonplace book traditions in a Tools For Thought Rocks talk: https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984.

Many people collect notes that they're not sure what to do with or even where to put them. Neuroscience student and researcher Charlotte Fraza keeps her version of these notes in a category of "things that inspire me, but I don't yet know exactly how to use. She feels that compared to the other categories of actionable specific use and sources, this inspiration category is the most interesting to her.

Jan Wagenaar's four leather-bound commonplace books are housed in the Special Collections of the Leiden University Library inventoried as "Adversaria of mixed content."

They contain excerpts in French, English, and Hebrew and are arranged by topical heading.

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/77941/the-best-way-to-cite-ebooks-currently

To sub-specify an ebook as opposed to a physical book in Zotero, in the Extra section, add a note like Medium: Kindle .mobi.

https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/10fzdm6/do_you_guys_journal_in_your_commonplace_book_too/

https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

As humans we're good at separating things based on categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you're working toward? If this is the case, just put cards into the slip box closest to their nearest related intellectual neighbor—and by this I mean nearest related to you, not to Melvil Dewey or anyone else. Over time, through growth and branching, ideas will fill in the interstitial spaces and neighboring ideas will slowly percolate and intermix. Your interests will slowly emerge into various bunches of cards in your box. Things you may have thought were important can separate away and end up on sparse branches while other areas flourish.

If you make the (false) choice to separate math and history into different "sections" it will be much harder for them to grow and intertwine in an organic and truly disciplinary way. Universities have done this sort of separation for hundreds of years and as a result, their engineering faculty can be buildings or even entire campuses away from their medical faculty who now want to work together in new interdisciplinary ways. This creates a physical barrier to more efficient and productive innovation and creativity. It's your zettelkasten, so put those ideas right next to each other from the start so they can do the work of serendipity and surprise for you. Do not artificially separate your favorite ideas. Let them mix and mingle and see what comes out of them.

If you feel the need to categorize and separate them in such a surgical fashion, then let your index be the place where this happens. This is what indices are for! Put the locations into the index to create the semantic separation. Math related material gets indexed under "M" and history under "H". Now those ideas can be mixed up in your box, but they're still findable. DO NOT USE OR CONSIDER YOUR NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!! Don't make the fatal mistake of thinking this. The numbers are just that, numbers. They are there solely for you to be able to easily find the geographic location of individual cards quickly or perhaps recreate an order if you remove and mix a bunch for fun or (heaven forfend) accidentally tip your box out onto the floor. Each part has of the system has its job: the numbers allow you to find things where you expect them to be and the index does the work of tracking and separating topics if you need that.

The broader zettelkasten, tools for thought, and creativity community does a terrible job of explaining the "why" portion of what is going on here with respect to Luhmann's set up. Your zettelkasten is a crucible of ideas placed in juxtaposition with each other. Traversing through them and allowing them to collide in interesting and random ways is part of what will create a pre-programmed serendipity, surprise, and combinatorial creativity for your ideas. They help you to become more fruitful, inventive, and creative.

Broadly the same thing is happening with respect to the structure of commonplace books. There one needs to do more work of randomly reading through and revisiting portions to cause the work or serendipity and admixture, but the end results are roughly the same. With the zettelkasten, it's a bit easier for your favorite ideas to accumulate into one place (or neighborhood) for easier growth because you can move them around and juxtapose them as you add them rather than traversing from page 57 in one notebook to page 532 in another.

If you use your numbers as topical or category headings you'll artificially create dreadful neighborhoods for your ideas to live in. You want a diversity of ideas mixing together to create new ideas. To get a sense of this visually, play the game Parable of the Polygons in which one categorizes and separates (or doesn't) triangles and squares. The game created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case based on the research of Thomas Schelling provides a solid example of the sort of statistical mechanics going on with ideas in your zettelkasten when they're categorized rigidly. If you rigidly categorize ideas and separate them, you'll drastically minimize the chance of creating the sort of useful serendipity of intermixed and innovative ideas.

It's much harder to know what happens when you mix anthropology with complexity theory if they're in separate parts of your mental library, but if those are the things that get you going, then definitely put them right next to each other in your slip box. See what happens. If they're interesting and useful, they've got explicit numerical locators and are cross referenced in your index, so they're unlikely to get lost. Be experimental occasionally. Don't put that card on Henry David Thoreau in the section on writers, nature, or Concord, Massachusetts if those aren't interesting to you. Besides everyone has already done that. Instead put him next to your work on innovation and pencils because it's much easier to become a writer, philosopher, and intellectual when your family's successful pencil manufacturing business can pay for you to attend Harvard and your house is always full of writing instruments from a young age. Now you've got something interesting and creative. (And if you must, you can always link the card numerically to the other transcendentalists across the way.)

In case they didn't hear it in the back, I'll shout it again: ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!!

"insert-eaves" !!

I've heard of interleaved books, but was unaware of the practice of book shops selling "insert-leaves" being specifically sold for the purpose of inserting notes into books.

Peter Smith calls his website his commonplace book.

https://petersmith.org/blog/2022/12/10/zettelkasten/

I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from earth

—Henry David Thoreau February 18, 1852

Rather than have two commonplaces, one for facts and one for poetry, if one can more carefully and successfully translate one's words and thoughts, they they might all be kept in the commonplace book of poetry.

Fascinating to think that Damion Searls edited this edition of Thoreau's journals almost as if they were his (Searls') own commonplace book of Thoreau's journals themselves.

Very meta!

Henry David Thoreau repeated himself frequently in his journals. Damion Searls who edited an edition of his journals suggested that some of this repetition was for the beauty and pleasure of the act, but that in many examples his repetition was an act of drafting, revising, and constructing.

Scott Scheper has recommended finding the place in one's zettelkasten where one wants to install a card before writing it out. I believe (check this) that he does this in part to prevent one from repeating themselves, but one could use the opportunity and the new context that brings them to an idea again to rewrite or rework and expand on their ideas while they're so inspired.

Thoreau's repetition may have also served the idea of spaced repetition: reminding him of his thoughts as he also revised them. We'll need examples of this through his writing to support such a claim. As the editor of this volume indicates that he removed some of the repetition, it may be better to go back to original sources than to look for these examples here.

(This last paragraph on repetition was inspired by attempting to type a tag for repetition and seeing "spaced repetition" pop up. This is an example in my own writing practice where the serendipity of a previously tagged word auto-populating/auto-completing in my interface helps to trigger new thoughts and ideas from a combinatorial creativity perspective.)

him.

!!!!

Henry David Thoreau from 1852

Arthur introduces the topic of Robert Pirsig and slips into the GTD conversation on 2004-05-19.

Was this a precursor link to the Pile of Index Cards in 2006?

Note that there doesn't seem to be any discussion of any of the methods with respect to direct knowledge management until the very end in which arthur returns almost four months later to describe a 4 x 6" card index with various topics he's using for filing away his knowledge on cards. He's essentially recreated the index card based commonplace book suggested by Robert Pirsig in Lila.

https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098

https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/05d285cb-21e6-5837-9ed5-05d03c52c0d6/notes

https://genizaprojects.princeton.edu/indexcards/index.php?a=themes

A digitized web-based version of S.D. Goitein's commonplace book using index cards.

Wowzers!

Cards from the topically arranged index cards in Goitein's sub-collection of 20,000 served as the skeleton of his magnum opus Mediterranean Society.

Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” 144.

Goitein's cards are segmented into two sets: one for subjects and one related to the India Book.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BZWJDHN/

Example of a modern day waste book for keeping track of one's accounting.

dimensions 3.5 x 5"

https://wiki.rel8.dev/co-write_a_neobook

A playlist of related index cards from a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten could be considered a playlist that comprises an article or a longer work like a book.

Just as one can create a list of all the paths through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, one could do something similar with linked notes. Ward Cunningham has done something similar to this programmatically with the idea of a Markov monkey.

https://onyxboox.com/boox_nova3

@adamprocter @chrisaldrich i really like my boox nova3 color – it’s ✌️ just ✌️ a color-paper android device with a custom integrated launcher/ereader software but it can have f-droid or play store sideloaded on to it. i mostly use it with koreader+wallabag but there surely is an RSS or NNW client that works decently on it in B/W mode via rrix Jan 03, 2023, 12:47 https://notes.whatthefuck.computer/objects/0f1ffdd4-4e27-4962-ae53-0c039494bef9

via u/The_Bee_Sneeze

Example of someone using Obsidian with a zettelkasten focus to write screenplays.

Thought the example appears in r/Zettelkasten, one must wonder at how Luhmann-esque such a practice really appears?

I gave some examples of uses in arts/media a while back that you might find interesting for your use case: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xdrb0k/comment/iofo5vv/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

In particular, a more commonplace book approach or something along the lines of Chapter 6 of Twyla Tharpe's book may be more useful or productive for your use case.

I'll have to look into this argument as it feels dramatically false to me.

The only way I can see this is if one only uses their commonplace for excerpts and no other notes, a pattern which may have been the case for some, but certainly not all.

Why though? The slight difference in form doesn't account for any differences claimed here.

sigh

This is untrue in practice. They can evolve, they just do so in different ways. Prior to Luhmann's example, they have done so for centuries.

What was the purpose of these summaries? Were they of areas which weren't readily apparent in hindsight? Often most people's long summaries are really just encapsulalizations of what is apparent from the book jacket. Why bother with this? If they're just summaries of the obvious, then they're usually useless for review specifically because they're obvious. This is must make-work.

You want to pull out the specific hard-core insights that weren't obvious to you from the jump.

Most self-help books can be motivating while reading them and the motivation can be helpful, but generally they will only contain one or two useful ideas

footnote: Moller, Violet (2019). The Map of Knowledge (1st ed.). Doubleday. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-385-54176-3.

I wrote this snippet yesterday.

Goitein accumulated more than 27,000 index cards in his research work over the span of 35 years. (Approximately 2.1 cards per day.)

His collection can broadly be broken up into two broad categories: 1. Approximately 20,000 cards are notes covering individual topics generally making of the form of a commonplace book using index cards rather than books or notebooks. 2. Over 7,000 cards which contain descriptions of a single fragment from the Cairo Geniza.

A large number of cards in the commonplace book section were used in the production of his magnum opus, a six volume series about aspects of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, which were published as A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993).

Moller, Violet. The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2019. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546484/the-map-of-knowledge-by-violet-moller/.

Konrad Gessner published three editions of Stobaeus' Anthology (Zurich, 1543; Basel, 1549; and Zurich, 1559).

He would thus have had this as an example of a compilation of excerpts at his disposal and as an example for his own excerpting work.

Hints of personal website as commonplace book.

https://standardebooks.org/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>awarm.space</span> in Making a modern ebook with Standard Ebooks (<time class='dt-published'>08/02/2021 12:08:19</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/492909.Microcosm

Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder

Sexual Suicide by George Gilder

What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley by Adrian Daub

AI superpowers (2018 edition) | Open Library

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines  by William Davidow

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority by Martin Gurri

Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State by Parag Khanna

https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/

What a solid looking list of non-fiction books.

This is a reference to a great book "Beginning Mathematical Logic: A Study Guide [18 Feb 2022]" by Peter Smith on "Teach Yourself Logic A Study Guide (and other Book Notes)". The document itself is called "LogicStudyGuide.pdf".

It focuses on mathematical logic and can be a gateway into understanding Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

I found this some time ago when looking for a way to grasp the difference between first-order and second-order logics. I recall enjoying his style of writing and his commentary on the books he refers to. Both recollections still remain true after rereading some of it.

It both serves as an intro to and recommended reading list for the following: - classical logics - first- & second-order - modal logics - model theory<br /> - non-classical logics - intuitionistic - relevant - free - plural - arithmetic, computability, and incompleteness - set theory (naïve and less naïve) - proof theory - algebras for logic - Boolean - Heyting/pseudo-Boolean - higher-order logics - type theory - homotopy type theory

Reply to Andy https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16865#Comment_16865

Andy, I'll take you at your word. You're right that none of it requires extraordinary genius--though many who seem to exhibit extraordinary genius do have variations of these practices in their lives, and the largest proportion of them either read about them or were explicitly taught them.

With these patterns and practices being so deeply rooted in our educational systems for so long (not to mention the heavy influences of our orality and evolved thinking apparatus even prior to literacy), it's a bit difficult for many to truly guarantee that they've done these things independently without heavy cultural and societal influence. As a result, it's not a far stretch for people to evolve their own practices to what works for them and then think that they've invented something new. The common person may not be aware of the old ideas of scala naturae or scholasticism, but they certainly feel them in their daily lives. Commonplacing is not much different.

By analogy, Elon Musk might say he created the Tesla, but it's a far bigger stretch for him to say that he invented a new means of transportation, or a car, or the wheel when we know he's swimming in a culture rife with these items. Humans are historically far better at imitation than innovation. If people truly independently developed systems like these so many times, then in the evolutionary record of these practices we should expect to see more diversity than we do in practice. We might expect to see more innovation than just the plain vanilla adjacent possible. Given Margolin's age, time period, educational background, and areas of expertise, there is statistically very little chance that he hadn't seen or talked about versions of this practice with several dozens of his peers through his lifetime after which he took that tacit knowledge and created his own explicit version which worked for him.

Historian Keith Thomas talks about some of these traditions which he absorbed himself without having read some of the common advice (see London Review of Books https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary). He also indicates that he slowly evolved to some of the often advised practices like writing only on one side of a slip, though, like many, he completely omits to state the reason why this is good advice. We can all ignore these rich histories, but we'll probably do so at our own peril and at the expense of wasting some of our time to re-evolve the benefits.

Why are so many here (and in other fora on these topics) showing up regularly to read and talk about their experiences? They're trying to glean some wisdom from the crowds of experimenters to make improvements. In addition to the slow wait for realtime results, I've "cheated" a lot and looked at a much richer historical record of wins and losses to gain more context of our shared intellectual history. I'm reminded of one of Goethe's aphorisms from Maxims and Reflections "Inexperienced people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago."

todo: procure this

also:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. —Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

They also suggest that due to the relative low cost of books, it's easier to justify writing in them, though they carve out an exception for the barbarism of scribbling in library books.

https://www.iamabook.online/

http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/2022/11/14/132535.html?title=designingABook

https://analogoffice.net/2022/10/28/a-life-in.html

@Guy Reminds me instantaneously of this collection of farm themed pocket notebooks which inspired Field Notes: https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed 📓

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ueMHkGljK0

Robert Greene's method goes back to junior high school when he was practicing something similar. He doesn't say he invented it, and it may be likely that teachers modeled some of the system for him. He revised the system over time to make it work for himself.

• [x] Revisit this for some pull quotes and fine details of his method. (Done on 2022-11-08)

Robert Greene: (pruriently) "You want to see my index cards?"<br /> Brian Rose: (curiously) Yeah. Can we?? ... This is epic! timestamp

I suspect that this example of Eleanor Konik's is incredibly common among note takers. They may have vast repositories of collected material which they can reference or use, but typically don't.

In digital contexts it's probably much more common that one will have a larger commonplace book-style collection of notes (either in folders or with tags), and a smaller subsection of more highly processed notes (a la Luhmann's practice perhaps) which are more tightly worked and interlinked.

To a great extent this mirrors much of my own practice as well.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90806657/z-library-ebook-piracy-shut-down-alternatives

https://www.bartleby.com/nonfiction/

https://library.harvard.edu/collections/reading-harvard-views-readers-readership-and-reading-history

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History<br /> Exploring the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard's libraries.