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/

"data reuse"

r/BehSciMeta—Establishing an augmented online eco-system to foster the decentralized consolidation of behavioral science knowledge on COVID-19. (n.d.). Reddit. Retrieved April 16, 2020, from https://www.reddit.com/r/BehSciMeta/comments/fooqao/establishing_an_augmented_online_ecosystem_to/

Wagenmakers, E., & Gronau, Q. F. (2020, April 27). Efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine in Patients with COVID-19 (Chen et al., 2020): Moderate Evidence for a Treatment Effect on Pneumonia. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/7nk8z

I do love the drag-and-drop ability of rows/columns in Sheets!

Cost reduction suggestion

there may be ways to reduce costs associated with the development of Census-equivalent statistics, including relying less on the general public to answer questions every five years

This suggests that Joe is doing something almost completely unrecognizable--with language at least. I guess my assumption is that I would know what Joe was doing he'd just be doing it so quickly I wouldn't be able to follow. And he'd complete the task--a task I recognize--far more quickly than I possibly could using comparable analog technologies. Perhaps this is me saying, I buy Englebart's augmentation idea on the level of efficiency but remain skeptical or at least have yet to realize it's transformative effect on intellect itself.

I'm always a little proud when I say that Hypothesis will not make things easier/more efficient for teachers. If anything, it helps widen and deepen this "prolonged interaction between the instructor and students," which takes even more time!

Wouldn't that ease of gathering only be viable for a certain amount of time, in certain areas? With larger populations and in scarcer areas, that time increases. I wonder what other statistics or sources provide similar or disparate numbers, and how those numbers change over time. When did gathering become less efficient?

How can care be made further efficient? E.g., integration, cost-sharing, payment-sharing, parent partners, nurse partners

65.61

Interesting connection here between the efficiency mandate and the "talent means no effort required" attitude we see in many school settings.

William Cunningham is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota where he taught for 36 years in the Departments of Botany and Genetics and Cell Biology as well as the Conservation Biology Program, the Institute for Social, Economic, and Ecological Sustainability, the Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, and the McArthur Program in Global Change. He received his Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Texas in 1963 and spent two years at Purdue University as a postdoctoral fellow. At various times, he has been a visiting scholar in Sweden, Norway, Indonesia, and China, as well as several universities and research institutions in the United States. Dr. Cunningham has devoted himself to education and teaching development at the undergraduate level in biology. He began his educational career in structural biology but for the last 10-15 years has concentrated on environmental science, teaching courses such as Social Uses of Biology; Garbage, Government, and the Globe; Environmental Ethics; and Conservation History. Within the past four years, he has received both of the two highest teaching honors that the University of Minnesota bestows: The Distinguished Teaching Award and a $15,000 Amoco Alumni Award. He has served as a Faculty Mentor for younger faculty at the university, sharing the knowledge and teaching skills that he has gained during his distinguished career.

Cunningham, William. "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." Environmental Encyclopedia 1 (2011). Accessed March 26, 2017.

a.k.a. guarantees a poly-time solution for any SAT problem instance.

I see this as evidence of technology determinism, which this article is shot through with. This kind of sentiment comes off as if technologies make things better, faster, more efficient for all involved parties, without consequence. It also assumes a consensus around what improved teaching and learning looks like and means. IMO, "efficiency" recalls turn of 20th century industrialist philosophy and rhetoric. In the work of education, I think that we need to ask if efficiency really is always better, and better for who. I am suggesting that in many cases efficiency is better for administrators from a business perspective, but not so for learners.

I only skimmed this, but I think I got the point. You move more people faster on escalators when none of them are reserved for walking -- simply because not enough people are willing or able to walk. If you have walking lanes, they are under-used, and the standing lanes are over-crowded.

SLAC target PUE of 1.4 by FY15

Google's PUE is 1.12

Warren Hall target efficiency: 1.2 as of 2011

Target of 1.3 (vs typical data centers around 1.9) PUE