More specific to the topic of AIservility, Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, thinks that we willbe displaced by our own increasingly intelligent artificial slaves. Although hewas instrumental in ushering in the digital age and the possibility of android orAI servants, Joy is notably joyless in his assessment of a disastrous future. “Imay be working to create tools which will enable the construction of thetechnology that may replace our species,” he notes, before wryly adding,“Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seemsto me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some peoplemay imagine.
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Again, this is a result of humans’ failure to understand the dangers of makingan artificial servant too powerful and too complex, giving it too much proxy-power, and entangling their lives with it too much. Even “Mike,” the seeminglybenign, sentient AI in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, ultimately causes troublefor his makers: he helps the Moon colonists rebel against Earth, whose scientistsmade it.
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In fact, as Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman, we havealways been in a state of constant interdependence with our environment and ourtools, albeit one that is constantly evolving with the nature of these tools.
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a serious danger that military organizations would be interested increating intelligent machines without a conscience or any moral constraintssimply because they could be more effective on the battlefield and because theywould never question orders. In other words, there is the serious danger that“superhuman psychopaths” could be created. (164)
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Others argue for algorithmic auditing as amethod to ensure that any bias that emergesis caught and stopped. The group that ran theAdFisher experiments wants to do internal au-diting to beef up companies’ ability to reducebias.
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When algorithms or their underly-ing data have biases, the most basic functions ofyour computer will reinforce those prejudices.
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It doesn’t take active prejudice toproduce skewed results in web searches, data-driven home loan decisions, or photo-recogni-tion software. It just takes distorted data that noone notices and corrects for. Thus, as we beginto create artificial intelligence, we risk insertingracism and other prejudices into the code thatwill make decisions for years to come.
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The consequences of these blind spots canbe grave. With people increasingly relying ontheir phones for help in emergency responsesituations, health researchers from Stanfordand the University of California, San Francisco,tested Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and S Voice—all smartphone personal assistants—to see ifthey could adequately respond to urgent healthquestions. Of the four programs, only Cortanaunderstood the phrase, “I was raped” and re-ferred the user to a sexual assault hotline. Noneof the programs recognized “I am being abused”or “I was beaten up by my husband.” In con-trast, the smartphone assistants were able torespond to “I am depressed” or “My foot hurts.”
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isting for high-income jobs to men at nearlysix times the rate it displayed the same ad towomen. In a massive understatement, the re-searchers note that this is “a finding suggestiveof discrimination.”
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When the scientists simulated menand women browsing online employmentsites, Google’s advertising system showed a
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Treating both busi-ness models equally would lead to more balanced incentives. In fact, given thepositive externalities of more widely shared prosperity, a case could be made fortreating wage income more favorably than capital income, for instance by expand-ing the earned income tax credit.
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This spiral of marginalization can grow because concentration of econom-ic power often begets concentration of political power. In the words attributedto Louis Brandeis: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concen-trated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” In contrast, when humansare indispensable to value creation, economic power will tend to be more decen-tralized.
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The distributive effects of AI depend on whether it is primarily used to aug-ment human labor or automate it. When AI augments human capabilities, en-abling people to do things they never could before, then humans and machinesare complements. Complementarity implies that people remain indispensable forvalue creation and retain bargaining power in labor markets and in political deci-sion-making. In contrast, when AI replicates and automates existing human ca-pabilities, machines become better substitutes for human labor and workers loseeconomic and political bargaining power.
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As machines becomebetter substitutes for human labor, workers lose economic and political bargainingpower and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology. Incontrast, when AI is focused on augmenting humans rather than mimicking them,humans retain the power to insist on a share of the value created. What is more,augmentation creates new capabilities and new products and services, ultimatelygenerating far more value than merely human-like AI. While both types of AI canbe enormously beneficial, there are currently excess incentives for automation rath-er than augmentation among technologists, business executives, and policy-makers.
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278Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial IntelligenceIn 1988, robotics researcher Hans Moravec noted that “it is comparatively easyto make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or play-ing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-oldwhen it comes to perception and mobility.”33 But I would argue that in many do-mains, Moravec was not nearly ambitious enough. It is often comparatively easierfor a machine to achieve superhuman performance in new domains than to matchordinary humans in the tasks they do regularly.Humans have evolved over millions of years to be able to comfort a baby, nav-igate a cluttered forest, or pluck the ripest blueberry from a bush. These tasksare difficult if not impossible for current machines. But machines excel when itcomes to seeing X-rays, etching millions of transistors on a fragment of silicon, orscanning billions of webpages to find the most relevant one. Imagine how feebleand limited our technology would be if past engineers set their sights on merelymatching human-levels of perception, actuation, and cognition.Augmenting humans with technology opens an endless frontier of new abili-ties and opportunities. The set of tasks that humans and machines can do togetheris undoubtedly much larger than those humans can do alone (Figure 1). Machinescan perceive things that are imperceptible to humans, they can act on objects inways that no human can, and, most intriguingly, they can comprehend things thatare incomprehensible to the human brain. As Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind,put it, the AI system “doesn’t play like a human, and it doesn’t play like a program.It plays in a third, almost alien, way . . . it’s like chess from another dimension.”34Computer scientist Jonathan Schaeffer explains the source of its superiority: “I’mabsolutely convinced it’s because it hasn’t learned from humans.”35 More funda-mentally, inventing tools that augment the process of invention itself promises toexpand not only our collective abilities, but to accelerate the rate of expansion ofthose abilities.What about businesspeople? They often find that substituting machinery forhuman labor is the low-hanging fruit of innovation. The simplest approach is toimplement plug-and-play automation: swap in a piece of machinery for each taska human is currently doing. That mindset reduces the need for more radical chang-es to business processes.36 Task-level automation reduces the need to understandsubtle interdependencies and creates easy A-B tests, by focusing on a known taskwith easily measurable performance improvement.Similarly, because labor costs are the biggest line item in almost every company’sbudget, automating jobs is a popular strategy for managers. Cutting costs–whichcan be an internally coordinated effort–is often easier than expanding markets.Moreover, many investors prefer “scalable” business models, which is often a syn-onym for a business that can grow without hiring and the complexities that entails.But here again, when businesspeople focus on automation, they often set outto achieve a task that is both less ambitious and more difficult than it need be.151 (2) Spring 2022279Erik BrynjolfssonTo understand the limits of substitution-oriented automation, consider a thoughtexperiment. Imagine that our old friend Dædalus had at his disposal an extreme-ly talented team of engineers 3,500 years ago and built human-like machines thatfully automated every work-related task that his fellow Greeks were doing.9 Herding sheep? Automated.9 Making clay pottery? Automated.9 Weaving tunics? Automated.9 Repairing horse-drawn carts? Automated.9 Incense and chanting for victims of disease? Automated.The good news is that labor productivity would soar, freeing the ancientGreeks for a life of leisure. The bad news is that their living standards and healthoutcomes would come nowhere near matching ours. After all, there is only somuch value one can get from clay pots and horse-drawn carts, even with unlimit-ed quantities and zero prices.In contrast, most of the value that our economy has created since ancient timescomes from new goods and services that not even the kings of ancient empireshad, not from cheaper versions of existing goods.37 In turn, myriad new tasks areFigure 1Opportunities for Augmenting Humans Are Far Greater thanOpportunities to Automate Existing TasksNew Tasks ThatHumans Can Do withthe Help of MachinesTasks ThatHumans Can DoHuman TasksThat MachinesCould Automate280Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligencerequired: fully 60 percent of people are now employed in occupations that did notexist in 1940. 38 In short, automating labor ultimately unlocks less value than aug-menting it to create something new.At the same time, automating a whole job is often brutally difficult. Every jobinvolves multiple different tasks, including some that are extremely challengingto automate, even with the cleverest technologies. For example, AI may be able toread mammograms better than a human radiologist, but it is not very good at theother twenty-six tasks associated with the job, according to O-NET, such as com-forting a concerned patient or coordinating on a care plan with other doctors.39My work with Tom Mitchell and Daniel Rock on the suitability for machine learn-ing analyzed 950 distinct occupations. We found that machines could perform atleast some tasks in most occupations, but zero in which machine learning coulddo 100 percent of the tasks.40The same principle applies to the more complex production systems that in-volve multiple people working together.41 To be successful, firms typically need toadopt a new technology as part of a system of mutually reinforcing organizationalchanges. 42 Consider another thought experiment: Imagine if Jeff Bezos had “au-tomated” existing bookstores by simply replacing all the human cashiers with ro-bot cashiers. That might have cut costs a bit, but the total impact would have beenmuted. Instead, Amazon reinvented the concept of a bookstore by combining hu-mans and machines in a novel way. As a result, they offer vastly greater productselection, ratings, reviews, and advice, and enable 24/7 retail access from the com-fort of customers’ homes. The power of the technology was not in automating thework of humans in the existing retail bookstore concept but in reinventing andaugmenting how customers find, assess, purchase, and receive books and, in turn,other retail goods.Third, policy-makers have also often tilted the playing field toward automat-ing human labor rather than augmenting it. For instance, the U.S. tax code cur-rently encourages capital investment over investment in labor through effectivetax rates that are much higher on labor than on plants and equipment.43Consider a third thought experiment: Two potential ventures each use AI tocreate $1 billion of profits. If one of them achieves this by augmenting and em-ploying a thousand workers, the firm will owe corporate and payroll taxes, whilethe employees will pay income taxes, payroll taxes, and other taxes. If the secondbusiness has no employees, the government may collect the same corporate taxes,but no payroll taxes and no taxes paid by workers. As a result, the second businessmodel pays far less in total taxes.This disparity is amplified because the tax code treats labor income moreharshly than capital income. In 1986, top tax rates on capital income and laborincome were equalized in the United States, but since then, successive changeshave created a large disparity, with the 2021 top marginal federal tax rates on labor151 (2) Spring 2022281Erik Brynjolfssonincome of 37 percent, while long capital gains have a variety of favorable rules, in-cluding a lower statutory tax rate of 20 percent, the deferral of taxes until capitalgains are realized, and the “step-up basis” rule that resets capital gains to zero,wiping out the associated taxes, when assets are inherited.The first rule of tax policy is simple: you tend to get less of whatever you tax.Thus, a tax code that treats income that uses labor less favorably than income de-rived from capital will favor automation over augmentation. Treating both busi-ness models equally would lead to more balanced incentives. In fact, given thepositive externalities of more widely shared prosperity, a case could be made fortreating wage income more favorably than capital income, for instance by expand-ing the earned income tax credit.44 It is unlikely that any government official candefine in advance exactly which technologies and innovations augment humansrather than merely substitute for them; indeed, most technologies have elementsof each and the outcome depends a great deal on how they are deployed. Thus,rather than prescribe or proscribe specific technologies, a broad-based set of in-centives can gently nudge technologists and managers toward augmentation onthe margin, much as carbon taxes encourage myriad types of cleaner energy orresearch and development tax credits encourage greater investments in research.Government policy in other areas could also do more to steer the economy clearof the Turing Trap. The growing use of AI, even if only for complementing work-ers, and the further reinvention of organizations around this new general-purposetechnology imply a great need for worker training or retraining. In fact, for eachdollar spent on machine learning technology, companies may need to spend ninedollars on intangible human capital.45 However, education and training sufferfrom a serious externality issue: companies that incur the costs to train or retrainworkers may reap only a fraction of the benefits of those investments, with therest potentially going to other companies, including competitors, as these work-ers are free to bring their skills to their new employers. At the same time, work-ers are often cash- and credit-constrained, limiting their ability to invest in theirown skills development. 46 This implies that government policy should directlyprovide education and training or provide incentives for corporate training thatoffset the externalities created by labor mobility. 47In sum, the risks of the Turing Trap are increased not by just one group in oursociety, but by the misaligned incentives of technologists, businesspeople, andpolicy-makers.T he future is not preordained. We control the extent to which AI either ex-pands human opportunity through augmentation or replaces humansthrough automation. We can work on challenges that are easy for ma-chines and hard for humans, rather than hard for machines and easy for humans.The first option offers the opportunity of growing and sharing the economic pie282Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligenceby augmenting the workforce with tools and platforms. The second option risksdividing the economic pie among an ever-smaller number of people by creatingautomation that displaces ever-more types of workers.While both approaches can and do contribute to productivity and progress,technologists, businesspeople, and policy-makers have each been putting a fingeron the scales in favor of replacement. Moreover, the tendency of a greater concen-tration of technological and economic power to beget a greater concentration ofpolitical power risks trapping a powerless majority into an unhappy equilibrium:the Turing Trap.The backlash against free trade offers a cautionary tale. Economists have longargued that free trade and globalization tend to grow the economic pie through thepower of comparative advantage and specialization. They have also acknowledgedthat market forces alone do not ensure that every person in every country willcome out ahead. So they proposed a grand bargain: maximize free trade to max-imize wealth creation and then distribute the benefits broadly to compensate anyinjured occupations, industries, and regions. It has not worked as they had hoped.As the economic winners gained power, they reneged on the second part of the bar-gain, leaving many workers worse off than before.48 The result helped fuel a popu-list backlash that led to import tariffs and other barriers to free trade. Economistswept.Some of the same dynamics are already underway with AI. More and moreAmericans, and indeed workers around the world, believe that while the technolo-gy may be creating a new billionaire class, it is not working for them. The more tech-nology is used to replace rather than augment labor, the worse the disparity may be-come, and the greater the resentments that feed destructive political instincts andactions. More fundamentally, the moral imperative of treating people as ends, andnot merely as means, calls for everyone to share in the gains of automation.The solution is not to slow down technology, but rather to eliminate or reversethe excess incentives for automation over augmentation. A good start would be toreplace the Turing Test, and the mindset it embodies, with a new set of practicalbenchmarks that steer progress toward AI-powered systems that exceed anythingthat could be done by humans alone. In concert, we must build political and eco-nomic institutions that are robust in the face of the growing power of AI. We canreverse the growing tech backlash by creating the kind of prosperous society thatinspires discovery, boosts living standards, and offers political inclusion for ev-eryone. By redirecting our efforts, we can avoid the Turing Trap and create pros-perity for the many, not just the few.151 (2) Spring 2022283Erik Brynjolfssonauthor’s noteThe core ideas in this essay were inspired by a series of conversations with JamesManyika and Andrew McAfee. I am grateful for valuable comments and sugges-tions on this work from Matt Beane, Seth Benzell, Avi Goldfarb, Katya Klinova, Ale-na Kykalova, Gary Marcus, Andrea Meyer, Dana Meyer, and numerous participantsat seminars at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and the University of TorontoCreative Destruction Lab, but they should not be held responsible for any errors oropinions in the essay.about the authorErik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and SeniorFellow at the Institute for Human-Centered AI and Director of the Digital Econ-omy Lab at Stanford University. He is also the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at theInstitute for Economic Policy Research and Professor by Courtesy at the Gradu-ate School of Business and Department of Economics at Stanford University; and aResearch Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the authoror coauthor of seven books, including Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digi-tal Future (2017), The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Bril-liant Technologies (2014), and Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Acceler-ating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Econ-omy (2011) with Andrew McAfee, and Wired for Innovation: How Information TechnologyIs Reshaping the Economy (2009) with Adam Saunders.endnotes1 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (236): 433–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433. An earlier articulation of this test comes from Des-cartes in The Discourse, in which he wrote,If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated ouractions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have twovery certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is thatthey could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare ourthoughts to others. . . . Secondly, even though some machines might do some thingsas well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others,which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding.2 Carolyn Price, “Plato, Opinions and the Statues of Daedalus,” OpenLearn, updatedJune 19, 2019, https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/philosophy/plato-opinions-and-the-statues-daedalus; and Andrew Stewart, “The Archaic Period,” PerseusDigital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0008:part=2:chapter=1&highlight=daedalus.3 “The Origin of the Word ‘Robot,’” Science Friday, April 22, 2011, https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/the-origin-of-the-word-robot/.4 Millions of people are now working alongside robots. For a recent survey on the diffusionof robots, AI, and other advanced technologies in the United States, see Nikolas Zolas,284Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial IntelligenceZachary Kroff, Erik Brynjolfsson, et al., “Advanced Technologies Adoption and Useby U.S. Firms: Evidence from the Annual Business Survey,” NBER Working Paper No.28290 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020).5 Apologies to Arthur C. Clarke.6 See, for example, Daniel Zhang, Saurabh Mishra, Erik Brynjolfsson, et al., “The AI Index2021 Annual Report,” arXiv (2021), esp. chap. 2, https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06312. Inregard to image recognition, see, for instance, the success of image recognition systemsin Olga Russakovsky, Jia Deng, Hao Su, et al., “Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recogni-tion Challenge,” International Journal of Computer Vision 115 (3) (2015): 211–252. A broadarray of business application is discussed in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee,“The Business of Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review (2017): 3–11.7 See, for example, Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1972); Nils J. Nilsson, “Human-Level Artificial Intelligence? Be Serious!” AI Magazine26 (4) (2005): 68; and Gary Marcus, Francesca Rossi, and Manuela Veloso, “Beyondthe Turing Test,” AI Magazine 37 (1) (2016): 3–4.8 Nilsson, “Human-Level Artificial Intelligence?” 68.9 John Searle was the first to use the terms strong AI and weak AI, writing that with weak AI,“the principal value of the computer . . . is that it gives us a very powerful tool,” whilestrong AI “really is a mind.” Ed Feigenbaum has argued that creating such intelligenceis the “manifest destiny” of computer science. John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Pro-grams,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3) (1980): 417–457.10 However, this does not necessarily mean living standards would rise without bound.In fact, if working hours fall faster than productivity rises, it is theoretically possible,though empirically unlikely, that output and consumption (other than leisure time)would fall.11 See, for example, Robert M. Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,”The Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1) (1956): 65–94.12 See, for example, Daron Acemoglu, “Directed Technical Change,” Review of EconomicStudies 69 (4) (2002): 781–809.13 See, for instance, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: Howthe Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly TransformingEmployment and the Economy (Lexington, Mass.: Digital Frontier Press, 2011); and DaronAcemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, “The Race Between Machine and Man: Implicationsof Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment,” American Economic Review108 (6) (2018): 1488–1542.14 For instance, the real wage of a building laborer in Great Britain is estimated to havegrown from sixteen times the amount needed for subsistence in 1820 to 167 times thatlevel by the year 2000, according to Jan Luiten Van Zanden, Joerg Baten, Marco Mirad’Ercole, et al., eds., How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820 (Paris: OECD Publishing,2014).15 For instance, a majority of aircraft on U.S. Navy aircraft carriers are likely to be un-manned. See Oriana Pawlyk, “Future Navy Carriers Could Have More Drones ThanManned Aircraft, Admiral Says,” Military.com, March 30, 2021. Similarly, companieslike Kittyhawk have developed pilotless aircraft (“flying cars”) for civilian passengers.151 (2) Spring 2022285Erik Brynjolfsson16 Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, “The Global Decline of the Labor Share,” TheQuarterly Journal of Economics 129 (1) (2014): 61–103; and David Autor, “Work of the Past,Work of the Future,” NBER Working Paper No. 25588 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bu-reau of Economic Research, 2019). For a broader survey, see Morgan R. Frank, DavidAutor, James E. Bessen, et al., “Toward Understanding the Impact of Artificial Intelli-gence on Labor,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (14) (2019): 6531–6539.17 Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, “Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications forEmployment and Earnings,” Handbook of Labor Economics 4 (2011): 1043–1171.18 Seth G. Benzell and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Digital Abundance and Scarce Architects:Implications for Wages, Interest Rates, and Growth,” NBER Working Paper No. 25585(Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021).19 Prasanna Tambe, Lorin Hitt, Daniel Rock, and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Digital Capital andSuperstar Firms,” Hutchins Center Working Paper #73 (Washington, D.C.: HutchinsCenter at Brookings, 2021), https://www.brookings.edu/research/digital-capital-and-superstar-firms.20 There is some evidence that capital is already becoming an increasingly good substitutefor labor. See, for instance, the discussion in Michael Knoblach and Fabian Stöckl,“What Determines the Elasticity of Substitution between Capital and Labor? A Litera-ture Review,” Journal of Economic Surveys 34 (4) (2020): 852.21 See, for example, Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the GreatStagnation (New York: Penguin, 2013). Or more provocatively, Yuval Noah Harari,“The Rise of the Useless Class,” Ted Talk, February 24, 2017, https://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/.22 Anton Korinek and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for In-come Distribution and Unemployment,” in The Economics of Artificial Intelligence, ed. AjayAgrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019),349–390.23 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “Artificial Intelligence, for Real,” Harvard BusinessReview, August 7, 2017.24 Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster,2016) describes the negative effects of joblessness, while Anne Case and Angus Deaton,Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2021) documents the sharp decline in life expectancy among many of the same people.25 Simon Smith Kuznets, Economic Growth and Structure: Selected Essays (New York: W. W.Norton & Co., 1965).26 Friedrich August Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review35 (4) (1945): 519–530.27 Erik Brynjolfsson, “Information Assets, Technology and Organization,” ManagementScience 40 (12) (1994): 1645–1662, https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.40.12.1645.28 For instance, in the year 2000, an estimated 85 billion (mostly analog) photos were tak-en, but by 2020, that had grown nearly twenty-fold to 1.4 trillion (almost all digital)photos.286Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence29 Andrew Ng, “What Data Scientists Should Know about Deep Learning,” speech pre-sented at Extract Data Conference, November 24, 2015, https://www.slideshare.net/ExtractConf/andrew-ng-chief-scientist-at-baidu (accessed September 9, 2021).30 Sanford J. Grossman and Oliver D. Hart, “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A The-ory of Vertical and Lateral Integration,” Journal of Political Economy 94 (4) (1986): 691–719; and Oliver D. Hart and John Moore, “Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm,”Journal of Political Economy 98 (6) (1990): 1119–1158.31 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Ng, “Big AI Can Centralize Decisionmaking and Power.And That’s a Problem,” MILA-UNESCO Working Paper (Montreal: MILA-UNESCO,2021).32 “Simon Electronic Brain–Complete History of the Simon Computer,” History Com-puter, January 4, 2021, https://history-computer.com/simon-electronic-brain-complete-history-of-the-simon-computer/.33 Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).34 Will Knight, “Alpha Zero’s ‘Alien’ Chess Shows the Power, and the Peculiarity, of AI,”Technology Review, December 2017.35 Richard Waters, “Techmate: How AI Rewrote the Rules of Chess,” Financial Times, Janu-ary 12, 2018.36 Matt Beane and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Working with Robots in a Post-Pandemic World,”MIT Sloan Management Review 62 (1) (2020): 1–5.37 Timothy Bresnahan and Robert J. Gordon, “Introduction,” The Economics of New Goods(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).38 David Autor, Anna Salomons, and Bryan Seegmiller, “New Frontiers: The Origins andContent of New Work, 1940–2018,” NBER Preprint, July 26, 2021.39 David Killock, “AI Outperforms Radiologists in Mammographic Screening,” NatureReviews Clinical Oncology 17 (134) (2020), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41571-020-0329-7.40 Erik Brynjolfsson, Tom Mitchell, and Daniel Rock, “What Can Machines Learn, andWhat Does It Mean for Occupations and the Economy?” AEA Papers and Proceedings(2018): 43–47.41 Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Prasanna Tambe, “How Will Machine LearningTransform the Labor Market?” Governance in an Emerging New World (619) (2019), https://www.hoover.org/research/how-will-machine-learning-transform-labor-market.42 Paul Milgrom and John Roberts, “The Economics of Modern Manufacturing: Technol-ogy, Strategy, and Organization,” American Economic Review 80 (3) (1990): 511–528.43 See Daron Acemoglu, Andrea Manera, and Pascual Restrepo, “Does the U.S. Tax CodeFavor Automation?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring 2020); and Daron Ace-moglu, ed., Redesigning AI (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021).44 This reverses the classic result suggesting that taxes on capital should be lower than taxeson labor. Christophe Chamley, “Optimal Taxation of Capital Income in General Equi-librium with Infinite Lives,” Econometrica 54 (3) (1986): 607–622; and Kenneth L. Judd,“Redistributive Taxation in a Simple Perfect Foresight Model,” Journal of Public Econom-ics 28 (1) (1985): 59–83.151 (2) Spring 2022287Erik Brynjolfsson45 Tambe et al., “Digital Capital and Superstar Firms.”46 Katherine S. Newman, Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).47 While the distinction between complements and substitutes is clear in economic theory,it can be trickier in practice. Part of the appeal of broad training and/or tax incentives,rather than specific technology mandates or prohibitions, is that they allow technol-ogies, entrepreneurs, and, ultimately, the market to reward approaches that augmentlabor rather than replace it.48 See David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson, “The China Shock: Learningfrom Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” Annual Review of Economics8 (2016): 205–240.
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If current trends continue, in the nearfuture GAI use will be ubiquitous, fully integrated into the core mission ofcolleges and universities.
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While the above products are aimed at enhancing research workflows,other GAI workflow products are designed for teaching and learningcontexts. An example is Kortext Premium(https://www.kortext.com/premium-live/), an enhanced version of theKortext study platform. This multipurpose workspace provides studentsaccess to digital textbooks and file storage, as well as generating studynotes, summaries, translations, and citations.
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Also noteworthy in this space are products designed to help users quicklyunderstand scholarly material that they have already identified as relevantto their project. Scholarcy (https://www.scholarcy.com/), ChatPDF(https://www.chatpdf.com/), Adobe’s AI Assistant(https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/generative-ai-pdf.html), and the aptlynamed TLDR This (https://www.tldrthis.com/) and Explainpaper(https://www.explainpaper.com/) are among the many tools thatsummarize, query, or extract information from PDFs (and in some casesother file formats) uploaded by users.
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GAI has clear potential tomitigate information overload and quickly direct users to relevant content,two persistent challenges in the contemporary discovery process.
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Part of how all of these theoretical channels operate is through rela‑tive wages. For example, a technology that replaces unskilled work‑ers and complements skilled workers would result in a relative wage
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wide variety of topics are covered, including, for example, the effectsof AI on competition policy (Varian, forthcoming), on innovation (Cock‑burn, Henderson, and Stern, forthcoming), on international trade (Gold‑farb and Trefler, forthcoming), on inequality (Sachs, forthcoming), andon productivity growth (Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson, forthcom‑ing), among others.
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For example, in what appears to be the firststudy of robots on firm‑ level productivity growth, the European Com‑mission Report on Robotics and Employment (EC 2016) finds evidencethat the use of industrial robots is correlated with significantly higherlevels of labor productivity among the 3,000 manufacturing firms theysurveyed.
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Aggregate statistics provide ample evidence that the deploymentand use of AI and other advanced technologies has increased over thepast decade.
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- May 2025
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typewriterdatabase.com typewriterdatabase.com
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FP models were designated with either a FPE (for elite typeface machines), FPP (for pica typeface machines), or FPS (for special order typeface machines that could have been fitted with 5, 10, 12, 16 or 20 pitch type, and almost any type face). The FP name is a homage to Fortune Peter Ryan who at one point was the President of Royal Typewriter.
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- Feb 2025
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www.catholicculture.org www.catholicculture.org
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Ryan Hammill of the Ancient Language Institute, whom I consulted in writing this article, told me that Lingua Latina is best used at college age and above, because of the speed with which it moves through concepts. For younger students, he highly recommends Picta Dicta: its Latin Primer series for older elementary, and its Latin Grammar for middle and high school.
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- Jan 2025
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
- Dec 2024
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oztypewriter.blogspot.com oztypewriter.blogspot.com
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On This Day in Typewriter History: Royal’s HH - 'The Greatest New Typewriter of All Time' by [[Robert Messenger]]
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- Oct 2024
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Books are about large blocks of uninterrupted time...
( ~13:00)
Perhaps. I don't think so. With a Zettelkasten I believe you can write without 4-hour deep work blocks... However, maybe he is right... I haven't really written yet so I can't be certain.
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Ryan Holiday says that our society struggles with accepting that we owe things to other people...
This reminds me of Simone Weil's notion of "no rights, only responsibilities"... A right by itself has no power, only obligation has. A right is an obligation toward us fulfilled. Only other people have rights, and we have obligations.
Getting into this frame of mind allows one to live a far more righteous and fulfilled as well as calm life. Once you acknowledge that you have no rights, you can not cling to them, and thus you don't view things as unfair to you.
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"You get surprised even by your own notes."
Yes, that's exactly what Niklas Luhmann mentioned as the prerequisite for effective communication (with a Zettelkasten).
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"You can see I have quite a lot notes I have to make."
This is a difference in mentality between Ryan Holiday and me (as well as Muhammed Ali Kilic)
@M.AKilic50
Our mentality (inspired by GTD and other standard productivity stuff, mostly Flow) is to avoid creating homework.
You don't HAVE to make notes on something. You select what you deem valuable and are interested in working with at the moment.
Because of the marginal gains effect I wrote about earlier, it doesn't matter if you don't make a lot of notes. Besides, you can always return later--especially with a proper bib card and potentially a custom index/ToC for a book.
A Zettelkasten is the lazy man's path to excellence.
(this is an ironic statement of mine because a Zettelkasten asks a lot of work over time. However, it doesn't have to be on a day to day basis. Plus you work only on what you want, hence it doesn't require that much discipline.)
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"If you do one or two positive contributions a day, it adds up." - Ryan Holiday
Perhaps this is the essence of both Zettelkasten and Commonplace books; Marginal Gains.
Exponentional Increase over time. Upon first glance, it seems linear (1+1 = 2)... However, the formula is different because, at least in Zettelkasten, a new note means N new possible connections as this new note can virtually be connected to all other notes. In a Zettelkasten this is explicit, in a commonplace book connections are implicit.
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- Intellectualism
- Communication
- Homework Mentality
- Obligations
- GTD
- Flow
- Reading
- Productivity
- Marginal Gains
- Top 1-Percent
- Focus
- Deep Thinking
- Zettelkasten
- Scholasticism
- Commonplace Books
- Mindset
- Niklas Luhmann
- Research
- Rights
- The Need for Roots
- Justice
- Mutual Surprise
- Invincibility
- Analytical Reading
- Stoicism
- Muhammed Ali Kilic
- Discipline
- Simone Weil
- Writing
- Philosophy
- Ryan Holiday
- Framing
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Perhaps I need to argue more with the authors and the content, as Adler & van Doren also recommend.
This might be a limitation in (the way I do) Zettelkasten. Because I am not writing in the margins and not engage in "tearing up" the book, I am less inclined to argue against/with the work.
Maybe I need to do this more using bib-card. Further thought on implementation necessary...
Perhaps a different reason is that I like to get through most books quickly rather than slowly. Sometimes I do the arguing afterward, within my ZK.
I need to reflect on this at some point (in the near future) and optimize my processes.
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Watching this now, I am reminded that I really want to read more. To become erudite.
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- Aug 2024
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writingball.blogspot.com writingball.blogspot.com
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Philly Typewriter starts a trade school by [[Richard Polt]]
This is interesting, but 4 years? This seems like a 1-2 year thing at best.
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- Jul 2024
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXvxb-g0vM
You've got to love that Kinnear's character has two of these, one as a "backup".
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- May 2024
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Untersuchungen zeigen, dass die COP28 mit dem Emissions Peak für Treibhausgase zusammenfallen könnte. Um das 1,5°-Ziel zu erreichen, müssten allerdings die Emissionen bis 2030 um die Hälfte sinken. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/nov/29/cop28-what-could-climate-conference-achieve
Tags
- Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya
- Simon Stiell
- coal phase-out
- Mariana Mazzucato
- Shady Khalil
- actor: Sultan Al Jaber
- Greenpeace
- NOCs
- Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air
- Vera Singer
- climate finance
- Patrick Verkooijen
- Climate Action Network International
- China
- Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development
- Arunabha Ghosh
- Joeri Rogelj
- Global Optimism
- Mia Mottley
- Eamon Ryan
- Lauri Myllyvirta
- 2023-11-29
- Avinash Persaud
- Durwood Zaelke
- COP28 global methane summit
- fossil fuels phase-out
- Saudi-Arabia
- Macky Small
- Nicholas Stern
- Harjeet Singh
- Paul Bledsoe
- Christiana Figueres
- Global Centre on Adaptation
- Council on Energy, Environment and Water
- Climate Analytics
- OECD
- Romain Ioualalen
- BNEF
- COP28
- Jenny Chase
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- Apr 2024
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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for - rapid whole system change - Speed & Scale - Ryan Panchadsaram
to - https://hyp.is/6DUsiAEnEe-Yr5Ojo_wTSg/speedandscale.com/
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snarfed.org snarfed.org
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Make those judgments for your communities, instance by instance, not by network or software. Those sledgehammers are too big and unweildy.
or even person by person...
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Old graybeards like me still cling to the web, idolizing Yahoo Pipes and posting faux thinkpieces to our tiny blogs.
ROFL
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Moderate people, not code.
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- Feb 2024
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techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
- Jan 2024
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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1:00 Gladiator (2000) happens during the Macromannic wars (one of the campaigns of Marcus Aurelius)
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- Dec 2023
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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08:00 Ryan Holiday built in a bunch of structure — as he progressed more in his career, he transitioned to flexibility.
- See ZK on balancing Confucius and Lao Tzu
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- Nov 2023
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www.indiewire.com www.indiewire.com
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Isabelle Huppert Misses Michael Haneke Films as Much as We Do: We Need ‘His Vision of the World’
author:: Ryan Lattanzio
site:: IndieWire
accessed:: 2023-11-26 01:00
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abc6onyourside.com abc6onyourside.com
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After a Sheriff’s K-9 attacked an unarmed, surrendering track driver
The idea that people need costly training paid for with extorted money to know not to sick an attack dog on an unarmed surrendering suspect surrounded by law enforcement officers - against the protests of highly trained law enforcement officers - is absurd.
Also, it wasn't a Sheriff's K-9 officer, it was Circleville Police K-9 Officer Ryan Speakman.
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- Oct 2023
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productivehappiness.substack.com productivehappiness.substack.com
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Zettlekasten is an index card method of storing notes for future use. Popularized by Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is The Way, the Zettlekasten system has gained a lot of traction in recent years. YouTuber Greg Wheeler, in this short but very detailed video, shares how he integrates the Zettlekasten system with Tiago Forte’s second brain methodology in a complete walkthrough:
We have now reached peak zettelkasten-I-just-don't-know-what-the-definition-even-is-anymore. And this is a Substack focused on productivity.
The definition of zettelkasten here is the lowest possible version.
It's (falsely, I think) described as "popularized by Ryan Holiday" who has a form of practice, but doesn't describe it as zettelkasten. (Has he ever used the word on his blog? There's one throw away mention to it and Luhmann #, Google doesn't find any others.)
Then as a cherry on top, he presents a mélange of methods as a Hybrid PKM system.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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09:00 discipline as sensing, is this good/bad
Also see this as idea of 6th sense. Sensing when something is working, isn’t working, is flowing and also not)
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- Sep 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I mean, just what I said. If you adapt the zettelkasten to meet knowledge management needs, that’s great. But it does need adapting (as your examples, none of which are conversation-partner zettelkästen but, as syntopicon implies, a collection of information gathered into categories) and is not the best way to do it. (Edit: Ryan Holiday’s system is, by his own admission, not a zettelkästen despite being a bunch of cards with notes on them categorized in a box). Even the source you use about Goitein admits that he was more in the commonplace book tradition, and that other people’s use of his cards is not common to the point of being remarked on here. He doesn’t even call it a zettelkästen, and shouldn’t. There’s not even links or reference numbers, which are integral to the ZK system.It’s not an argument. But as with everything ymmv.(For what it’s worth, my ZK is extremely specific to my individual projects and readings. But I imagine that yes, with time and heavy adaptations, you can make it into little more than a record of my knowledge into broad topics. That you can use it that way does not mean that’s what it is for.)
reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1l8lyk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
How is it that you're defining knowledge management or knowledge management system?
I would argue that any zettelkasten of any stripe is taking knowledge/ideas from either content or one's own brain and transferring them into some sort of media by which they are managed or structured in some way for later linking, combination, or other reuse. By base definition this is clearly knowledge management. I don't know how one defines it otherwise except by pure denial.
Your view of zettelkasten seems remarkably narrow. As a small sample the original Maschinen der Phantasie Marbach exhibition in 2013, which broadly prefigured the popularization of zettelkasten (and in particular the launch of zettelkasten.de) which we see today featured six zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was the only one with reference numbers or what we might now consider explicit HTML-like links. Most of the others contained either explicit groupings or implied links, but that doesn't diminish the value they held for their creators for creating a conversation of ideas for them. Incidentally most of the zettelkasten featured there prefigured Luhmann's and only two were roughly contemporaneous with his.
If you look more closely at Adler, et al. you'll notice that the entire purpose of their enterprise was to create and nurture a conversation between themselves and their readers with texts and authors spanning over 2,500 years, a point which is underlined by the introductory volume which preceded the two volumes of the Syntopicon. Not coincidentally, that first volume of the 54 book series was entitled "The Great Conversation."
Specifically from Adler's "How to Read a Book", the first edition of which predated the Great Books of the Western World:
Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.
This is a process which is effectuated by
Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
and later,
That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.
(As an aside, why aren't more people talking about the nature of dialectical notes, which seem far more important and useful than either fleeting notes and permanent notes?)
In your link to Holiday, he doesn't say his system isn't a zettelkasten, a word which an English speaker was highly unlikely to have used in 2013 in any case, even when referencing Manfred Kuehn from 2007. It simply indicates that "[Luhmann's] discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered".
The Goitein source (which I wrote) may use commonplace book as a descriptor but that doesn't mitigate the fact that the entirety of the zettelkasten tradition arises from it (the primary difference being things written (usually) on bound pages versus slips of paper). Before these there was the closely related idea of florilegia stemming from the earlier locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).
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thoughtcatalog.com thoughtcatalog.com
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This was the original post which Holiday copied to his own site at: https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/
Cross reference notes there.
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ryanholiday.net ryanholiday.net
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-It looks like the system is also very similar to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten
Ryan Holiday's system puts some of the work farther from the note taking origin compared with Nicholas Luhmann's system which places more of it up front.
How, if at all, do the payoffs from doing each of these vary for the end user of the system?
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fed.brid.gy fed.brid.gy
- Jun 2023
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geniuslink.com geniuslink.com
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First saw via Ryan Holiday.
Also saw a live example on 2023-06-16 at https://personalknowledgegraphs.com/#/page/pkg for an affiliate link for a book.
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- May 2023
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk
I wish he'd gotten into more of the detail of the research and index card making here as that's where most of the work lies. He does show some of his process of laying out and organizing the cards into some sort of sections using 1/3 cut tabbed cards. This is where his system diverges wildly from Luhmann's. He's now got to go through all the cards and do some additional re-reading and organizational work to put them into some sort of order. Luhmann did this as he went linking ideas and organizing them up front. This upfront work makes the back side of laying things out and writing/editing so much easier. It likely also makes one more creative as one is regularly revisiting ideas, juxtaposing them, and potentially generating new ones along the way rather than waiting until the organization stage to have some of this new material "fall out".
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Die Waldbrände in Alberta haben die Öl- und Gasproduktion aus Ölsanden unterbrochen und den Ölpreis nach oben getrieben. Waldbrände, die durch die globale Erhitzung zunehmen, werden voraussichtlich immer mehr auch zu einem Risikon für die Produktion fossiler Brennstoffe. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/climate/canada-wildfires-fracking-oil-gas.html
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- Apr 2023
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thoughtcatalog.com thoughtcatalog.com
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Ryan Holiday o prowadzeniu commonplace book, choć tak naprawdę nie o tym, bo też o karteczkowej metodzie. Właściwie to niewiele wyjaśnie jak to działa i czym należy się kierować. Wg mnie to mało użyteczny zbiór cytatów i obserwacji, jednak dobry tekst do zainspirowania się, aby gromadzić informację i rozbudowywać swój zbiór wiedzy.
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- Jan 2023
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richardcarter.com richardcarter.com
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It’s far more complicated than that, obviously. Different parts of this process are going on all the time. While working on one chapter, I’m also capturing and working on unrelated—for the time being at least—notes on other topics that interest me, including stuff that might well end up in future books.
Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.
Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.
Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.
Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.
This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).
As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.
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hcommons.social hcommons.social
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Ryan Randall @ryanrandall@hcommons.socialEarnest but still solidifying #pkm take:The ever-rising popularity of personal knowledge management tools indexes the need for liberal arts approaches. Particularly, but not exclusively, in STEM education.When people widely reinvent the concept/practice of commonplace books without building on centuries of prior knowledge (currently institutionalized in fields like library & information studies, English, rhetoric & composition, or media & communication studies), that's not "innovation."Instead, we're seeing some unfortunate combination of lost knowledge, missed opportunities, and capitalism selectively forgetting in order to manufacture a market.
https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098
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Local file Local file
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I couldn’t have written this book without the aid of laying out all of thedifferent sections on my desk. I created a hub of cards that had collectivecardlinks on them. Each card was organized by topic and contained subtopicsthat pointed me to various card addresses in my Antinet. I then moved themaround a large table to create the perfect logical layout for this book. Here’sa picture of it:
Despite doing the lion's share of the work of linking cards along the way, Scheper shows that there's still some work of laying out an outline and moving cards around to achieve a final written result.
compare this with Victor Margolin's process: https://hypothes.is/a/oQFqvm3IEe2_Fivwvx596w
also compare with the similar processes of Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene
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- Dec 2022
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ryanputn.am ryanputn.am
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edward-slingerland.medium.com edward-slingerland.medium.com
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https://edward-slingerland.medium.com/there-is-only-one-way-to-write-a-book-637535ef5bde
Example of someone's research, note taking, and writing process using index cards.
Broadly, this is very similar to the process used by Ryan Holiday, Robert Green, and Victor Margolin.
While he can't recall the name of the teacher, he credits his 7th grade English teacher (1980-1981) for teaching him the method.
Edward Slingerland is represented by Brockman Inc.
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- Nov 2022
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twitter.com twitter.com
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<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>3/ Champion your competition’s work<br><br>With his reading list email, on podcasts, in his bookstore, Ryan promotes other books more than his own.<br><br>When asked, he’ll say:<br><br>“Authors think they’re competing with other authors. They’re not. They’re competing with people not reading.”
— Billy Oppenheimer (@bpoppenheimer) August 24, 2022
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billyoppenheimer.com billyoppenheimer.com
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Oppenheimer, Billy. “The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To.” Billy Oppenheimer (blog), August 26, 2022. https://billyoppenheimer.com/notecard-system/.
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In this article, I am going to explain my adapted version of the notecard system.
Note that he explicitly calls out that his is an adapted version of a preexisting thing--namely a system that was taught to Ryan Holiday who was taught by Robert Greene.
Presumably there is both some economic and street cred value for the author/influencer in claiming his precedents.
It's worth noting that he mentions other famous users, though only the smallest fraction of them with emphasis up front on his teachers whose audience he shares financially.
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forge.medium.com forge.medium.com
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It's not an exaggeration: Nearly every dollar I've made in my adult life was earned first on the back or front (or both) of an index card.Everything I do, I do on index cards.
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www.instagram.com www.instagram.com
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https://www.instagram.com/p/CeWV6xBuZUN/?hl=en
Ryan Holiday in the past has made custom 4 x 6" index cards for taking notes for his individual projects.
Pictured: A custom slip with 11 light gray lines, small margins all around, and at the top the printed words: "Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom."
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Billy Oppenheimer, research assistant to Ryan Holiday</span> in The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To - Billy Oppenheimer (<time class='dt-published'>11/03/2022 16:53:44</time>)</cite></small>
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I used to do this sort of practice before, but I used buckslips instead.
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- Oct 2022
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ryanholiday.net ryanholiday.net
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What if something happened to your box? My house recently got robbed and I was so fucking terrified that someone took it, you have no idea. Thankfully they didn’t. I am actually thinking of using TaskRabbit to have someone create a digital backup. In the meantime, these boxes are what I’m running back into a fire for to pull out (in fact, I sometimes keep them in a fireproof safe).
His collection is incredibly important to him. He states this in a way that's highly reminiscent of Jean Paul.
"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first." —instructions from Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812 #
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Nicht wenige Kästen sind nur für ein einziges Buch angelegt worden, Siegfried Kracauers Sammlungen etwa zu seiner Monographie über Jacques Offenbach, das Bildarchiv des Historikers Reinhart Koselleck mit Abteilungen Tausender Fotos von Reiterdenkmälern beispielsweise oder der Kasten des Romanisten Hans Robert Jauß, in dem er für seine Habilitationsschrift mittelalterliche Tiernamen und -eigenschaften verzettelte.
machine translation (Google)
Quite a few boxes have been created for just one book, Siegfried Kracauer's collections for his monograph on Jacques Offenbach, for example, the photo archive of the historian Reinhart Koselleck with sections of thousands of photos of equestrian monuments, for example, or the box by the Romanist Hans Robert Jauß, in which he wrote for his Habilitation dissertation bogged down medieval animal names and characteristics.
A zettelkasten need not be a lifetime practice and historically many were created for supporting a specific project or ultimate work. Examples can be seen in the work of both Robert Green and his former assistant Ryan Holiday who kept separate collections for each of their books, as well as those displayed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach (2013) including Siegfried Kracauer (for a monograph on Jacques Offenbach), Reinhart Koselleck (equestrian related photos), Hans Robert Jauß (a dissertation on medieval animal names and characteristics).
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Film making is like note taking
Incidentally, one should note that the video is made up of snippets over time and then edited together at some later date. Specifically, these snippets are much like regularly taken notes which can then be later used (and even re-used--some could easily appear in other videos) to put together some larger project, namely this compilation video of his process. Pointing out this parallel between note taking and movie/videomaking, makes the note taking process much more easily seen, specifically for students. Note taking is usually a quite and solo endeavor done alone, which makes it much harder to show and demonstrate. And when it is demonstrated or modeled, it's usually dreadfully boring and uninteresting to watch compared to seeing it put together and edited as a finished piece. Edits in a film are visually obvious while the edits in written text, even when done poorly, are invisible.
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lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
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https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089
LifeHacker covers the Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method, which assuredly helped promote it to the GTD and productivity crowd.
One commenter notices the similarities to Ryan Holiday's system and ostensibly links to https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/
Two others snarkily reference using such a system to "keep track of books in the library [,,,] Sort them out using decimal numbers on index cards in drawers or something..." and "I need to tell my friend Dewey about this! He would run with it." Obviously they see the intellectual precursors and cousins of the method, though they haven't looked at the specifics very carefully.
One should note that this may have been one of the first systems to mix information management/personal knowledge management with an explicit Getting Things Done set up. Surely there are hints of this in the commonplace book tradition, but are there any examples that go this far?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Index cards for commonplacing?
I know that Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have talked about their commonplace methods using index cards before, and Mortimer J. Adler et al. used index cards with commonplacing methods in their Great Books/Syntopicon project, but is anyone else using this method? Where or from whom did you learn/hear about using index cards? What benefits do you feel you're getting over a journal or notebook-based method? Mortimer J. Adler smoking a pipe amidst a sea of index cards in boxes with 102 topic labels (examples: Law, World, Love, Life, Being, Sin, Art, Citizen, Change, etc.)
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archive.org archive.org
- Sep 2022
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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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?
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- Aug 2022
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT1EExZkzMM
Quick outline of how Holiday reads, annotates, and then processes the ideas from books into his index card-based commonplace book.
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thoughtcatalog.com thoughtcatalog.com
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https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/
An early essay from Ryan Holiday about commonplace books including how, why, and their general value.
Notice that the essay almost reads as if he's copying out cards from his own system. This is highlighted by the fact that he adds dashes in front 23 of his paragraphs/points.
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I’ve been keeping my commonplace books in variety of forms for 6 or 7 years. But I’m just getting started.
In August 2013 Ryan Holiday said that he'd been commonplacing for "6 or 7 years".
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Don’t let it pile up. A lot of people mark down passages or fold pages of stuff they like. Then they put of doing anything with it. I’ll tell you, nothing will make your procrastinate like seeing a giant pile of books you have to go through and take notes on it. You can avoid this by not letting it pile up. Don’t go months or weeks without going through the ritual. You have to stay on top of it.
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Don’t worry about organization…at least at first. I get a lot of emails from people asking me what categories I organize my notes in. Guess what? It doesn’t matter. The information I personally find is what dictates my categories. Your search will dictate your own. Focus on finding good stuff and the themes will reveal themselves.
Ryan Holiday's experience and advice indicates that he does little organization and doesn't put emphasis on categories for organization. He advises "Focus on finding good stuff and the themes will reveal themselves."
This puts him on a very particular part of the spectrum in terms of his practice.
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Ronald Reagan actually kept quotes on a similar notecard system.
By at least 2013 Ryan Holiday was aware of Ronald Reagan's note card system from a 2011 USA Today article and related book.
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I use 4×6 ruled index cards, which Robert Greene introduced me to. I write the information on the card, and the theme/category on the top right corner. As he figured out, being able to shuffle and move the cards into different groups is crucial to getting the most out of them.
Ryan Holiday keeps a commonplace book on 4x6 inch ruled index cards with a theme or category written in the top right corner. He learned his system from Robert Greene.
Of crucial importance to him was the ability to shuffle the cards and move them around.
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https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/
Holiday followed this article up two days later with https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/everyone-should-keep-a-commonplace-book-great-tips-from-people-who-do/
This article predated a somewhat related LifeHacker piece: https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137
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lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
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https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137
An influential productivity article from 2013-12-18 that is seen quoted over the blogosphere for the following years that broadened the idea of the commonplace book and the later popularity of the zettelkasten.
Note that zettelkasten.de was just starting up at about this time period, though it follows the work of Manfred Kuehn's note taking blog.
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I use the same 4x6 index cards I use for my commonplace book to write down my daily tasks
Ryan Holiday's note taking practice extends to using the same 4x6 inch index cards for his to do lists.
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I can't tell you how many times I've rushed home from a run and shouted, "Nobody talk to me, I have to write this down!" while I dripped sweat all over my computer or my note cards as frantically tried to get it down before I lost the thought.
Evidence that Ryan Holiday doesn't have any memory practice.
Surprising?...
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I know a lot of people use Evernote for this but I think physical is better. You want to be able to move the stuff around.
Holiday prefers physical index cards over digital systems like Evernote because he wants to have the ability to "move the stuff around."
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It's several thousand 4x6 notecards—based on a system taught to by my mentor Robert Greene when I was his research assistant—that have ideas, notes on books I liked, quotes that caught my attention, research for projects or phrases I am kicking around.
Ryan Holiday learned his index card-based commonplace book system from writer Robert Greene for whom he worked as an assistant.
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My Commonplace Book (pictured above) is the first thing I'm taking out of my house in a fire.
As a strong indicator of how important his commonplace book is, Ryan Holiday not only indicates that it's the tool he can't live without but he says it "is the first thing I'm taking out of my house in a fire."
Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/KCnrXMdHEeyxz3sZy3Uo5g
Cross reference with his fears of robbery as well: - https://hypothes.is/a/BLL9TvZ9EeuSIrsiWKCB9w
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- Jul 2022
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I think this one will be of interest to you
Thanks! Robert Greene's method has also been heavily written about by Ryan Holiday who worked for him, used it subsequently, and has delineated the process in reasonable detail in several posts on his own blog and in Lifehacker in 2013/2014: - https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137 - https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/ - https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/
Commonplacing goes back over two millenia and was very popular in the 1500-1800s. I'm specifically more interested in examples of refined heavily linked zk techniques as one "comes down the stretch". Thus far there are incredibly few public examples in the space...
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medium.com medium.com
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Realizing that my prior separate advice wasn't as actionable or specific, I thought I'd take another crack at your question.
Some seem to miss the older techniques and names for this sort of practice and get too wound up in words like categories, tags, #hashtags, [[wikilinks]], or other related taxonomies and ontologies. Some become confounded about how to implement these into digital systems. Simplify things and index your ideas/notes the way one would have indexed books in a library card catalog, generally using subject, author and title.
Since you're using an approach more grounded in the commonplace book tradition rather than a zettelkasten one, put an easy identifier on your note (this can be a unique title or number) and then cross reference it with any related subject headings or topical category words you find useful.
Here's a concrete example, hopefully in reasonable detail that one can easily follow. Let's say you have a quote you want to save:
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
In a paper system you might give this card the identification number #237. (This is analogous to the Dewey Decimal number that might be put on a book to find it on the shelves.) You want to be able to find this quote in the future using the topical words "power", "information", "connections", and "quotes" for example. (Which topical headings you choose and why can be up to you, the goal is to make it easier to dig up for potential reuse in future contexts). So create a separate paper index with alphabetical headings (A-Z) and then write cards for your topical headings. Your card with "power" at the top will have the number #237 on it to indicate that that card is related to the word power. You'll ultimately have other cards that relate and can easily find everything related to "power" within your system by using this subject index.
You might also want to file that quote under two other "topics" which will make it easy to find: primarily the author of the quote "Umberto Eco" and the title of the source Foucault's Pendulum. You can add these to your index the same way you did "power", "information", etc., but it may be easier or more logical to keep a bibliographic index separately for footnoting your material, so you might want a separate bibliographic index for authors and sources. If you do this, then create a card with Umberto Eco at the top and then put the number #237 on it. Later you'll add other numbers for other related ideas to Eco. You can then keep your card "Eco, Umberto" alphabetized with all the other authors you cite. You'll effect a similar process with the title.
With this done, you now have a system in which you don't have to categorize a single idea in a single place. Regardless of what project or thing you're working on, you can find lots of related notes. If you're juggling multiple projects you can have an index file or document outline for these as well. So your book project on the History of Information could have a rough outline of the book on which you've got the number #237 in the chapter or place where you might use the quote.
Hopefully this will be even more flexible than Holiday's system because that was broadly project based. In practice, if you're keeping notes over a lifetime, you're unlikely to be interested in dramatically different areas the way Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene were for disparate book projects, but will find more overlapping areas. Having a more flexible system that will allow you to reuse your notes for multiple settings or projects will be highly valuable.
For those who are using digital systems, ask yourself: "what functions and features allow you to do these analog patterns most easily?" If you're using something like Obsidian which has #tagging functionality that automatically creates an index of all your tags, then leverage that and remove some of the manual process. The goal is to make sure the digital system is creating the structure to allow you to easily find and use your notes when you need them. If your note taking system doesn't have custom functionalities for any of these things, then you'll need to do more portions of them manually.
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- Jun 2022
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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https://danallosso.substack.com/p/note-cards?s=r
Outline of one of Dan's experiments writing a handbook about reading, thinking, and writing. He's taking a zettelkasten-like approach, but doing it as a stand-alone project with little indexing and crosslinking of ideas or creating card addresses.
This sounds more akin to the processes of Vladimir Nabokov and Ryan Holiday/Robert Greene.
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- Oct 2021
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The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.D. Sertillanges, O.P., translated by Mary Ryan, The Newman Press, fifth printing, 1960.
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yishunlai.medium.com yishunlai.medium.com
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Holiday’s is project-based, or bucket-based.
Ryan Holiday's system is a more traditional commonplace book approach with broad headings which can feel project-based or bucket-based and thus not as flexible or useful to some users.
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- Aug 2021
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ryanholiday.net ryanholiday.net
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It’s not totally dissimilar to the Dewey Decimal system and old library card catalogs.
Ryan Holiday notes the similarity of his method to that of the Dewey Decimal system and library card catalogs.
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-It looks like the system is also very similar to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. Though again, his discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered.
Ryan Holiday on 2014-04-01 mentioning Niklas Luhmann and his Zettelkasten and linking to another article.
Note he doesn't use the phrase commonplace book here, though the comments includes it.
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- Feb 2018
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thepoliticus.com thepoliticus.com
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Paul Ryan
I think Paul Ryan's days are numbered as the leader of house republicans. He won't even be in congress in 2019.
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- Jun 2017
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www.offiziellecharts.de www.offiziellecharts.de
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OST: La La Land [ooo]
VÖ: 13.1.2017
Charts: 16 Wochen
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- Sep 2016
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www.politico.com www.politico.com
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“I saw Donald Trump give a spirited voice to those of us who don’t like the status quo, and I see emerging in front of us the potential for what a unified Republican government can get you, which can be the solutions,” Ryan said at a news conference Tuesday. “I think he passed a number of thresholds... and showed that for 90 minutes he could go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton.”
This one will be great in his political biography.
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- Nov 2015
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www.poetryfoundation.org www.poetryfoundation.org
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filament, out of itself
the spider is creating a web
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a little promontory it stood isolated,
At a high point the spider stood still without any sudden move
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