Successful Secretary Presented by Royal Office Typewriters. A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production, 1966. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5b2FiDaLk.

Script: Lee Thuna<br /> Educational Consultant: Catharine Stevens<br /> Assistant Director: Willis F. Briley<br /> Design: Francisco Reynders<br /> Director & Producer: Carl A. Carbone<br /> A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production

"Mother the mail"

gendered subservience

"coding boobytraps"

"I think you'll like the half sheet better. It is faster." —Mr. Typewriter, timestamp

A little bit of the tone of "HAL" from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is particularly suggestive as H.A.L. was a one letter increment from I.B.M. and the 1966 Royal 660 was designed to compete with IBM's Selectric

This calm voice makes suggestions to a secretary while H.A.L. does it for a male astronaut (a heroic figure of the time period). Suddenly the populace feels the computer might be a bad actor.

"We're living in an electric world, more speed and less effort."—Mr. Typewriter<br /> (techno-utopianism)

"Well, I already gave him an estimate," he says with a chuckle. "I'm not gonna change that quote, I've been here too long to do that."

It seems like an unwritten rule for typewriter repair shops to go way over on time versus pay to repair a typewriter based on an initial quote.

I've seen at least one other quote like this, but don't think I collected it.

By abstracting and concatenating portions of material, one can more efficiently learn material that would otherwise take more time.

I wonder if you can share libraries of comments. or if that is counter productive b/c it's someone else's voice.

value of peer reviewing

Which study?

Was it mentioned by Robert Caro in his Johnson biography which has a chapter laying out some of this work before electrification?

While the idea of a common user interface on computers may have felt like a selling point when facing a new scary machine with a variety of functionalities, did it really save that much time, effort, and learning curve? Particularly with respect to the common office tools it was replacing?

The common user interface was really more a benefit to the company and all the companies which programmed for it at scale. The benefits are like Melvil Dewey's standardization of the Dewey Decimal Classification which allowed libraries everywhere to work on the same system rather than needing to reinvent their own individually.

This sort of innovation with scalability is helpful as humans are far better at imitation than innovation.

Setting up and learning a note taking or card index system has a reasonably large up-front cost, but learning it well and being able to rely on it over long periods of time will eventually reap larger and cheaper long-term outcomes and benefits.

Unless changing systems creates dramatically larger improvements, the cost of change will surely swamp the benefits making the switch useless. This advice given by Kaiser is still as true today as it was in 1908, we tend not to think about the efficiency as much now as he may have then however and fall trap to shiny object syndrome.

In modern, digital settings, the work of approapriately indexing content is lost in exchange for other forms of organization (tagging, for example), this means one is less reliant on an index for looking up material and more reliant on concordance search of particular words within an ever-growing corpus of collected knowledge.

Over time and with scale, simple tagging may become overwhelming as a search method for finding the requisite material, even when one knows it exists.

As a result a repository may do better in the long run with a small handful of carefully applied rules from the start.

This quote is broadly recognized in economic settings as true, but few in the knowledge management space place emphasis or focus on designing both simple systems which are easy to master and use on a regular, ongoing basis. This allows the knowledge worker the ability to more quickly (almost blindly) handle their indexing and filing operations so that things are precisely where they need them when required for use.

Poor design will not only decrease the ease of use, but also discourage the user from both efficiently using and benefiting from their systems.

Even simple and efficient filing systems require familiarity and expertise for them to effect useful gains to their users, and prove their effectiveness over time. If a user can't get to a basic level of functionality in short time, they're likely to give up on it and never see the ultimate benefits.

Julius Kaiser contemporaneously posits that mass manufacture and maximizing efficiency (greater output for minimum input) are the primary drivers of card index system use in the early 20th century. These also improve both precision and accuracy in handling information which allow for better company or factory operation, which would have been rising concerns for businesses and manufacturing operations at the rise of scientific management during the time period.

This quote is a feature of toxic capitalism, which should be efficient enough to allow a person to quickly obtain another job to thereby make the issue moot.

Part of it is tied into identity as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

The increased efficiency in the use of a resource doesn't imply a decrease in the usage of that resource, but rather may cause in incommensurate increase in use because of decrease in cost.

The increased efficiency of the use of a resource may act as a catalyst for increasing usage.

Uncover the main reasons why your patients cancel surgeries and what to do about it. Read more about schedule and manage surgeries

The author, Rediscovering Analog, reads a book at least twice, usually. He first reads it mainly for pleasure, just to enjoy it and to see what's in it. During the second time, if applicable, he goes through the book using intellectual (or learning) systems and methodologies to extract value from the book.

The first pass, which the author terms Scouting, is thus namely for enjoyment, but keeping in mind what might be valuable or interesting that will be valuable in the future, basically an unguided open ear. He has a list of scouted books in each section of the Zettelkasten that might be relevant to the section. What he does is have a stack of physical cards there with just the name of the book and the author, without anything else. Then when author proceeds to extract value from the book, he takes the card out and puts it in the respective book. Afterwards throwing this particular card into the trash. It's a form of the Anti-Library.

( Personally, I would include an appropriate reading cost and a level on Adler's hierarchy of books. In addition, I would make sure that my process of orientation, in the Inquiry-Based Learning framework, has been completed before I put it as a book within the Anti-Library. )

This may not be the most efficient for the purpose of acquiring value, but efficiency is not all there is. Enjoyment is a big part of intellectual work as well, as Antonin Sertillanges argues in his book The Intellectual Life: Its spirit, methods, conditions, as well as Mihaly Csikszentmihaliy in his book Flow.

This points to AI providing the best time savings in draft generation, which fits with the idea of having the AI generate the drafts based on the professional's queries.

For UX designers, this points to AI in a design tool being most useful when it generates drafts (sketches) that the designer then revises. Where UX deliverables don't compare easily to written deliverables is the contextual factors that influence the design, like style guides or design systems. Design too AI assistants don't yet factor those in, though it seems likely it will, if provided style guides and design systems in a format it can read.

Given a draft of sufficient quality that it doesn't require longer to revise than a draft the designer would create on their own, getting additional time to refine sounds great.

I'm not sure what to make of the reduced time to brainstorm when using AI. Without additional information, it's hard not to assume that the AI tool may be influencing the direction of brainstorming as professionals think through the queries they'll use to get the AI to generate the most useful draft possible.

Efficiency and effectiveness measures for specific mnemonic systems may vary from person to person, so one should consider them with respect to their own practices. There may not be a single "right" or "correct" practice universally, but there could be one for everyone individually based on their own choices or preferences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

How much of the 1935 Stakhanovite movement was propaganda vs. reality and how much of it used the ideas of scientific management from the late 1800s/early 1900s?

session平替

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Mount</span> in Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought | MZLabs (<time class='dt-published'>11/30/2022 13:11:31</time>)</cite></small>

Read 2022-12-31

Cleaned up quote:

I think one of the [the] things that really separates us from the high primates is that [uh] we're tool builders. And I read a [uh] study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The Condor used the least energy to move a kilometer and [uh] humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not [not] too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. So [uh] that didn't look so good, but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle blew the Condor away—completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me. [uh] What a computer is to me is: it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.<br /> —Steve Jobs in Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. Documentary. Krainin Productions, 1990.

Snippet from full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

Earl Pomeroy suggests that Paxson's note taking method freed his mind to better reflect and appraise his work. This allows a greater efficiency of work, particularly when it comes to easier search and recall as well as the overall process which becomes easier through practice.

Dwyer, Edward J. “File Card Efficiency.” Journal of Reading 26, no. 2 (1982): 171–171.

Ease of use in writing and grading with short assignments by using 4 x 6" index cards in classrooms.

This sounds like some of the articles from 1912 and 1917 about efficiency of card indexes for teaching.

I'm reminded of some programmed learning texts that were card-based (or really strip-based since they were published in book form) in the 1960s and 1970s. Thse books had small strips with lessons or questions on the front with the answers on the reverse. One would read in strips through the book from front to back and then start the book all over again on page one on the second row of strips and so on.

As is common in the tradition of the zettelkasten, Goutor advises "that each note-card should contain only one item of information, whether a quotation, a summary, or anything else". (p28) He ascribes this requirement to his earlier need for clarity. (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/SfWFwENIEe2KfGMbR5n7Qg)

He indicates that while it may seem wasteful to have only one item on each card that the savings in time, efficiency in handling, classification, and retrieval will more than compensate for the small waste.

This sort of small local waste being compensated for by a larger global savings and efficiency can be seen in the design of the shipping container industry as discussed in Mark Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 2008). Was this the exact sort of efficiency mentioned by Ahrens'? (Compare at https://hypothes.is/a/t4i32IXoEeyF2n9jQxu6BA)

In his section on "Arrangement of File", C. Wright Mills describes some of the evolution of his "file". Knowing that the form and function of one's notes may change over time (Luhmann's certainly changed over time too, a fact which is underlined by his having created a separate ZK II) one should take some comfort and solace that theirs certainly will as well.

The system designer might also consider the variety of shapes and forms to potentially create a better long term design of their (or others') system(s) for their ultimate needs and use cases. How can one avoid constant change, constant rearrangement, which takes work? How can one minimize the amount of work that goes into creating their system?

The individual knowledge worker or researcher should have some idea about the various user interfaces and potential arrangements that are available to them before choosing a tool or system for maintaining their work. What are the affordances they might be looking for? What will minimize their overall work, particularly on a lifetime project?

https://web.archive.org/web/20120122115952/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/10/13/one-pocket-rule/

Noguchi Yukio had a "one pocket rule" which they first described in “「超」整理法 (cho seiri ho)”. The broad idea was to store everything in one place as a means of saving time by not needing to search in multiple repositories for the thing you were hunting for. Despite this advice the Noguchi Filing System didn't take complete advantage of this as one would likely have both a "home" and an "office" system, thus creating two pockets, a problem that exists in an analog world, but which can be mitigated in a digital one.

The one pocket rule can be seen in the IndieWeb principles of owning all your own data on your own website and syndicating out from there. Your single website has the entire store of all your material which makes search much easier. You don't need to recall which platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.) you posted something on, you can save time and find the thing much more quickly by searching one place.

This principle also applies to zettelkasten and commonplace books (well indexed), which allow you to find the data or information you put into them quickly and easily.

Hans Monderman (19 November 1945 – 7 January 2008) was a Dutch road traffic engineer and innovator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Monderman

Suggested by Jerry Michalski: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/bd9c210a-ac8a-0e34-b309-f62e61e72778/attachments/724c3cbf-7aba-4ac7-5b1a-392125168c09

increasing service level efficiency can play a major role in reducing upstream energy demands.

This chapter is too entailed with productivity advice, which can be useful to some, but isn't as note taking focused for those who probably need more of that.

What is the differentiator between knowledge workers, knowledge creators, students, researchers, academics. How do we even clearly delineate knowledge worker as a concept. It feels far too nebulous which makes it more difficult to differentiate systems for them to use for improving productivity and efficiency.

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

Will this conference debate rebound effects of efficiency? If not, it will not have the desirable net effect.

My linked In comments were:

Alessandro Blasi, will this conference address the rebound effect? In particular, Brockway et al. have done a 2021 meta-analysis of 33 research papers on rebound effects of energy efficiency efforts and conclude:

"...economy-wide rebound effects may erode more than half of the expected energy savings from improved energy efficiency. We also find that many of the mechanisms driving rebound effects are overlooked by integrated assessment and global energy models. We therefore conclude that global energy scenarios may underestimate the future rate of growth of global energy demand."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121000769?via%3Dihub

Unless psychological and sociological interventions are applied along with energy efficiency to mitigate rebound effects, you will likely and ironically lose huge efficiencies in the entire efficiency intervention itself.

Also, as brought up by other commentators, there is a difference between efficiency and degrowth. Intelligent degrowth may work, especially applied to carbon intensive areas of the economy and can be offset by high growth in low carbon areas of the economy.

Vaclav Smil is pessimistic about a green energy revolution replacing fossil fuels https://www.ft.com/content/71072c77-53b3-4efd-92ae-c92dc02f09ad, which opens up the door to serious consideration of degrowth, not just efficiency improvements. Perhaps the answer is in a combination of all of the above, including targeted degrowth.

Technology moves quickly and unexpectedly. At the time of Smil's book release, there was no low carbon cement. Now there is a promising breakthrough: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/carbon-free-cement-breakthrough-dcvc-put-55-million-into-brimstone.html

As researchers around the globe work feverishly to make low carbon breakthroughs, there is obviously no guarantee of when they will occur. In that case then, with only a few years to peak, it would seem the lowest risk pathway would be to prioritize the precautionary principle over a gambling pathway (such as relying on Negative Emissions Technology breakthroughs) and perhaps consider along with rebound effect conditioned efficiency improvements also include a strategy of at least trialing a temporary, intentional degrowth of high carbon industries / growth of low carbon industries.

Experts have more practiced levels of visual perception of surroundings that provide them with information more quickly than novices who don't yet know what or where to focus their attention. Teaching with eye tracking technology might help to bridge the gap between novice and expert more quickly.

Systems that are too efficient will become brittle. Brittle systems collapse catastrophically when conditions vary too far from expectations. The only way to accommodate unforeseeable circumstances is to give up some efficiency for greater flexibility. This produces robust systems that endure where brittle systems collapse.

Much as coaches help their athletes become better, teachers are there to help students use their time and work efforts in the most effective ways.

Streamlining one's entire workflow from start to finish can unleash tremendous amounts of additional system-wide productivity. Starting out by tinkering with small things here and there is more likely to doom these smaller individual changes to failure with out associated global changes.

Once the overall system has been redesigned and reconfigured, then one can make and perfect smaller scale local changes.

Link this to the idea of kelp and sailing/rowing from The West Wing.

Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.

Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?

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

What others might exist? Examples?

New technologies don't always have the user interface to make them better than old methods.

Sometime in the past six months I ran across a description of how migrant workers do this sort of activity in farming contexts. That article also pointed out the fact that the average person couldn't do this sort of work and that there was extreme value in it.

This is the problem however. We can't program humans out of the equation entirely, for what is the general enterprise meant for in the first place?

Reminder to go back and read this.

[[Frederick Winslow Taylor]]

Clark, C. (2021). The Blame Efficiency Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Framework to Resolve Rationalist and Intuitionist Theories of Moral Condemnation.

Salvador, C. E., Berg, M. K., Yu, Q., San Martin, A., & Kitayama, S. (2020). Relational Mobility Predicts Faster Spread of COVID-19: A 39-Country Study. Psychological Science, 31(10), 1236–1244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620958118

Park, J. J. H., Grais, R. F., Taljaard, M., Nakimuli-Mpungu, E., Jehan, F., Nachega, J. B., Ford, N., Xavier, D., Kengne, A. P., Ashorn, P., Socias, M. E., Bhutta, Z. A., & Mills, E. J. (2021). Urgently seeking efficiency and sustainability of clinical trials in global health. The Lancet Global Health, 9(5), e681–e690. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30539-8

“Still Using a Cloth Mask? Upgrade to an N95 or P100!” Accessed February 28, 2021. https://www.microcovid.org/blog/masks.

Nuijten, M. B. (2020). Efficient Scientific Self-Correction in Times of Crisis. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9hc8z

(lazy checking)

Why on earth not? There's nothing wrong with reusing the same answer if it can work for multiple questions. That's called being efficient. It would be stupid to write a new answer from scratch when you already have one that can work very well and fits the question very well.

COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved October 11, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13622/

COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved October 11, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13749/

Neeley, L. (2020, March 31). How to Talk About the Coronavirus. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/how-talk-about-coronavirus/609118/

Peterson, David, and Aaron Panofsky. ‘Metascience as a Scientific Social Movement’. Preprint. SocArXiv, 4 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4dsqa.

Augenblick, N., Kolstad, J. T., Obermeyer, Z., & Wang, A. (2020). Group Testing in a Pandemic: The Role of Frequent Testing, Correlated Risk, and Machine Learning (Working Paper No. 27457; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27457

Zhou, Dong, and Amir Bashan. ‘Dependency-Based Targeted Attacks in Interdependent Networks’. Physical Review E 102, no. 2 (3 August 2020): 022301. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.022301.

The COVID-19 Crisis and Telework: A Research Survey on Experiences, Expectations and Hopes. COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13229/

BBC Radio 4—The Political School, Episode 1. (n.d.). BBC. Retrieved August 2, 2020, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kv6v

Martin, G., Hanna, E., & Dingwall, R. (2020). Face masks for the public during Covid-19: An appeal for caution in policy [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/uyzxe

A COVID-19 vaccine has passed its first human trial. But is it the frontrunner? (2020, May 29). Science. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/coronavirus-vaccine-passes-first-human-trial-but-is-it-frontrunner-cvd/

Dou, Z., Stefanovski, D., Galligan, D., Lindem, M., Rozin, P., Chen, T., & Chao, A. M. (2020). The COVID-19 Pandemic Impacting Household Food Dynamics: A Cross-National Comparison of China and the U.S. [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/64jwy

King’s Open Research Conference | Anne Scheel | The Importance of Registered Reports. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_gT2GLH1jM&feature=youtu.be

Zhang, L., Jackson, C. B., Mou, H., Ojha, A., Rangarajan, E. S., Izard, T., Farzan, M., & Choe, H. (2020). The D614G mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein reduces S1 shedding and increases infectivity. BioRxiv, 2020.06.12.148726. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.12.148726

Scholarly publishers are working together to maximize efficiency during COVID-19 pandemic. (2020, April 27). OASPA. https://oaspa.org/scholarly-publishers-working-together-during-covid-19-pandemic/

How Culture Explains Our Weak Response to the Coronavirus. (2020, June 14). Ethical Systems. https://www.ethicalsystems.org/how-culture-explains-our-weak-response-to-the-coronavirus/