1,130 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. 47:00 There is a difference between showing up and discerning your energy levels. If energy is low, you can still show up. You just need to do work that is lower in intensity.

  2. Mar 2024
  3. Feb 2024
    1. https://kumu.io/

      Make sense of your messy world. Kumu makes it easy to organize complex data into relationship maps that are beautiful to look at and a pleasure to use.

      tagline:

      The art of mapping is to create a context in which others can think.


      Tool mentioned on [[2022-06-02]] by Jerry Michalski during [[Friends of the Link]] meeting.

    1. Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired, April 1, 2000. https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/.

      Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0

      Annotations: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true

    2. the prevention of knowledge-enabled massdestruction
    3. Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowl-edge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves?
    4. I havefound the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the DalaiLama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, theDalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct ourlives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need todevelop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interde-pendency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individ-uals and societies that seems consonant with Attali’s Fraternity utopia.The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is thatmakes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neithermaterial progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key—that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.

      Dalai Lama throwing back to a large number of indigenous cultures and societies.... contemplate reading this book...

    5. We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on thevalue of open access to information, and recognize the problems thatarise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge.

      Many academics and modern people may think this way, but it is far from a "bedrock value".

      In many indigenous cultures knowledge was carefully sectioned and cordoned off.

      And as we know that knowledge itself is power (ipsa scientia potestas est - Francis Bacon) many people have frequently cordoned off access to information.

    6. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit de-velopment of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting ourpursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.
    7. In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings,Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, “It isnot possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge ofthe world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of in-trinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spreadof knowledge and are willing to take the consequences.”
    1. All men by nature desire to know.

      The famous, and oft-quoted first line of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

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  4. Jan 2024
    1. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destructionbut of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructive-ness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

      coinage of the phrase knowledge-enabled mass destruction here?

    1. this is whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness

      for - key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity

      • the worry for Goethe and whitehead is that
        • we forget sometimes with the typical scientific method that = we can only ever apply concepts derived from our empirical experience
      • and so if we're trying to understand experience as if it were really
        • an illusion produced by
          • collisions of particles or
          • brain chemistry or
          • something that we can never in principle experience
      • what we're doing is
        • applying concepts derived from our experience
        • to an imagined realm that
          • we think is beyond experience
      • but it's not
      • This is Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

      key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - This helps explain the rising rejection of science from the masses. I didn't realize there was already a name for the phenomena responsible for the emergence of collective denialist behavior

      adjacency - between - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - increasing collective rejection of science in the polycrisis - adjacency statement - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness exactly names and describes - the growing trend of a populus rejection of climate science (climate denialism), COVID vaccine denialism, exponential growth of conspiracy theory and misinformation - because of the inability for non-elites and elites alike to concretize abstractions the same way that elite scientists and policy-makers do - Research papers have shown that the knowledge deficit model which was relied upon for decades was not accurate representation of climate denialism - Yet, I would hold that Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concretism plays a role here - This mistrust in science is rooted in this fallacy as well as progress traps - Deep Humanity is quite steeped in Whitehead's process relational ontology and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness requires mass education for a sustainable transition - This abstract concreteness is everywhere: - Shift from Ptolemy's geocentric worldview to the Copernican heliocentric worldview - Now we are told that the sun is not fixed, but is itself rotating around the Milky Way with billions of other galaxies - scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating for dating objects in deep time - climate science - atomic physics - quantum physics - distrust of vaccines, which we cannot see - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects is related to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. - "Seeing is believing" but we cannot directly experience the ultra large or ultra small. So we have scientific language that draws parallels to that, but it is not a direct experience. - - Those not steeped in years or decades of science have the very real option of feeling that the concepts are fallacies and don't hold as much weight as that which they can experience directly, even though those concepts have obviously produced artefacts that they use, like cellphones, the internet and airplanes.

    1. 複習卡片時,可以選擇下方的 4 個動作:1. 重寫卡片,去除廢話2. 刪除卡片,不再需要3. 連結卡片,增加連結4. 寫成文章,分享知識​這樣做,就能讓大腦「擁有」筆記上的知識。

      review 複習 知識虛肥

  5. Dec 2023
    1. I think that we should be putting a high priority on developing the Next Generation nuclear 01:45:54 power uh but it's uh it's uh it's going to be a a tough job and as long as the as the special 01:46:05 interests are controlling our government uh we're not going to solve it
    1. Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

      How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

      How could one distribute the effects evenly?

      What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

    2. I dislike isolated events anddisconnected details. I really hate state-ments, views, prejudices, and beliefsthat jump at you suddenly out of mid-air.

      Wells would really hate social media, which he seems to have perfectly defined with this statement.

    3. without a World En-cyclopedia to hold men's minds togetherin something like a common interpreta-tion of reality there is no hope whateverof anything but an accidental and transi-tory alleviation to any of our world trou-bles. As mankind is so it will remainuntil it pulls its mind together. And if itdoes not pull its mind together then I donot see how it can help but decline.Never was a living species more peril-ously poised than ours at the presenttime. If it does not take thoughtto endits present mental indecisiveness catastro-phe lies ahead. Our species may yet endits strange eventful history as just the last,the cleverest, of the great apes. Thegreat ape that was clever-but not cleverenough. It could escape from mostthings but not from its own mental con-fusion.
    4. I believe thatin some such way as I have sketched, themental forces now largely and regrettablyscattered and immobilized in the univer-sities, the learned societies, research in-stitutions, and technical workers of theworld could be drawn together into areal directive world intelligence, and bythat mere linking and implementing ofwhat is known, human life as a wholecould be made much surer, stronger,bolder, and happier than it has ever beenup to the present time.
    5. We live in a worldof unused and misapplied knowledge andskill. That is my case. Knowledge andthought are ineffective.
    6. There had been no attempt toassemble that mechanism of knowledgeof which America stood in need.
    1. In the course of these experiments I have devoted a certain amount of anxious thought to the conspicuous ineffectiveness of modern knowledge.

      Does information overload prevent us from using knowledge more effectively? Are we distracted by the mundane?

    1. 4. Cite Card Icon : Hat (something above you)Tag : 5th block Quotation, cooking recipe from book, web, tv, anything about someone else’s idea is classified into this class. Important here is distinguishing “your idea (Discovery Card)” and “someone else’s idea (Cite Card)”. Source of the information must be included in the Cite Card. A book, for example, author, year, page(s) are recorded for later use.

      https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972899/in/album-72157594200490122/

      Despite being used primarily as a productivity tool the PoIC system also included some features of personal knowledge management with "discovery cards" and "citation cards". Discovery cards were things which contained one's own ideas while the citation cards were the ideas of others and included bibliographic information. Citation cards were tagged on the 5th block as an indicator within the system.

      Question: How was the information material managed? Was it separate from the date-based system? On first blush it would appear not, nor was there a subject index which would have made it more difficult for one to find data within the system.

  6. Nov 2023
    1. Sign in with Google for Web doesn't support silent sign in, in which case a credential is returned without any UI displayed. End users always see some UI, manual or automatic sign in, when a login credential is returned from Google to the relying party. This improves user privacy and control.
    1. However, the miniscule size of ‘facts’ did not neces-sarily reflect Deutsch’s adherence to any theory of information. Instead, it indicated hispersonal interest in distinctions of the smallest scale, vocalized by his motto ‘de minimiscurat historicus’, that history’s minutiae matter.

      Gotthard Deutsch didn't adhere to any particular theory of information when it came to the size of his notes. Instead Jason Lustig indicates that his perspective was influenced by his personal motto 'de minimis curat historicus' (history's minutiae matter), and as a result, he was interested in the smallest of distinctions of fact and evidence. ᔥ

    1. Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world.

      This is great!

    1. 美國國家美式足球聯盟(National Football League,NFL)的觀賞人次是遠高於籃球、棒球、冰球

      An example of a piece of knowledge to acquire.

    1. Humboldt represents the road not taken. He was a scientist who saw everything as interconnected. He called for good global stewardship and objected to the careless exploitation of resources. His warnings weren’t heeded.

      Given Alexander von Humboldt's time period (1769-1859), might he have been the recipient of indigenous knowledge during the Renaissance the same way that Graeber/Wengrow demonstrate others were around that same time frame?

    1. after almost 15 years of using git, I’ve become very used to git’s idiosyncracies and it’s easy for me to forget what’s confusing about it
  7. Oct 2023
    1. Victoria and Albert Museum and the Summer Palace Museum in Beijing.

      shapes what people learn about China- imperial, exotic

    2. evelopment of a field of art history on China. The objects had various meanings, representing the British army, the humiliation of the Chinese emperor, and the global discourse on non-European curiosities. The sell-off of imperial art in East Asia was influenced by war and revolution. Recently, mainland Chinese companies intervened to repatriate some of the plundered objects.
    1. Youmust apprehend the unity with definiteness. There is only oneway to know that you have succeeded. You must be able totell yourself or anybody else what the unity is, and in a fewwords. ( If it requires too many words, you have not seen theunity but a multiplicity. ) Do not be satisfied with "feeling theunity" that you cannot express. The reader who says, "I knowwhat it is, but I just can't say it," probably does not even foolhimself.

      Adler/Van Doren use the statement of unity of a work as an example of testing one's understanding of a work and its contents.

      (Again, did this exist in the 1940 edition?)

      Who do McDaniel and Donnelly 1996 cite in their work as predecessors of their idea as certainly it existed?


      Examples in the literature of this same idea/method after this: - https://hypothes.is/a/TclhyMfqEeyTkQdZl43ZyA (Feynman Technique in ZK; relationship to Ahrens) - explain it to me like I'm a 5th grader - https://hypothes.is/a/BKhfvuIyEeyZj_v7eMiYcg ("People talk" in Algebra Project) - https://hypothes.is/a/m0KQSDlZEeyYFLulG9z0vw (Intellectual Life version) - https://hypothes.is/a/OyAAflm5Ee6GStMjUMCKbw (earlier version of statement in this same work) - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw (Ahrens' version of elaboration citing McDaniel and Donnelly 1996, this uses both restatement and application to a situation as a means of testing understanding) - https://hypothes.is/a/B3sDhlm5Ee6wF0fRYO0OQg (Adler's version for testing understanding from his video) - https://hypothes.is/a/rh1M5vdEEeut4pOOF7OYNA (Manfred Kuenh and Luhmann's reformulating writing)

    1. on the traditional empiricist account we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world 00:11:03 that is we do not experience externality directly but only immediately not immediately but immediately because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes 00:11:18 sense organs and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there well to raise the question how faithful is the sensory report 00:11:30 of the external world is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question that's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap 00:11:42 between reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and reality as empirically sampled by the senses whose limitations and distortions are very well 00:11:56 known but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured
      • for: good explanation: empiricism, empiricism - knowledge gap, quote, quote - Dan Robinson, quote - philosophy, quote - empiricism - knowledge gap, Critique of Pure Reason - goal 1 - address empiricism and knowledge gap

      • good explanation : empiricism - knowledge gap

      • quote

        • on the traditional empiricist account
          • we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world
          • that is we do not experience externality directly but only MEDIATELY, not immediately but MEDIATELY
            • because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes, sense organs
          • and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there
          • To raise the question how faithful is the sensory report of the external world
            • is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question
          • That's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap between
            • reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and
            • reality as empirically sampled by the senses
              • whose limitations and distortions are very well known
                • but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured
      • Comment

        • Robinson contextualizes the empiricist project and gap thereof, as one of the 4 goals of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
        • Robinson informally calls this the "Locke" problem, after one of the founders of the Empiricist school, John Locke.
        • Robinson also alludes to a Thomas Reed approach to realism that contends that we don't experience reality MEDIATELY, but IMMEDIATELY, thereby eliminating the gap problem altogether.
        • It's interesting to see how modern biology views the empericist's knowledge gap, especially form the perspective of the Umwelt and Sensory Ecology
    1. Bill Atkinson had an idea about the freedom to associate knowledge not by what comes next on the list but by the links that are associated with it. This means that information can be organized in a non-linear fashion, allowing for connections to be made between seemingly unrelated ideas. By expanding on this idea, we can create new and innovative ways of storing and accessing information, potentially leading to breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence and data analysis.

  8. Sep 2023
    1. Professor Lehman, who is also the University of Tasmania’s Pro Vice-Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership and Palawa cultural historian, emphasised the importance of academic collaboration with Indigenous scholars and that scientific validation of oral traditions reinforces, rather than supersedes, the authority of Indigenous knowledge.

      The scientific validation of oral traditions aids in creating a third archive which fuses the value of Indigenous knowledges and Western ways of knowing.

    1. 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).

    2. Well one obvious drawback is that zettelkästen is not a knowledge management system.

      reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1fn8w4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 and

      Well, Zettelkasten is not a knowledge management system. [...] Update: I mean digital ZK. Shoe-box ZK is a combination of knowledge management system of that time and "thought system" of Niklas Luhmann. u/Aponogetone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1f23nj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      I'm curious to see some evidence for why both you and u/Aponogetone say that a slip box (analog, digital or otherwise) is not a knowledge management system? Perhaps you don't think of it that way or use it solely to that end, but I find it difficult to see in light of the way I use mine and others have in the past. I suspect that if I had access to either of yours I could use it as a knowledge management system and it would tell me a lot about your interests and what you know and with a bit of work I could continue using it as one.

      Even an argument against the more encompassing group nature versus personal or individual knowledge management systems is blunted by the use of a Zettelkasten by Adler, Hutchins, et al. to create the Syntopicon, the group uses by the Mundaneum effort (which went to great lengths to standardize information to be findable), the Oxford English Dictionary compilation, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, or even the academics who still use photocopies or microfilm versions of S.D. Goitein's zettelkasten.

      What are the rest of us missing in your argument?

    1. The colors represent categories, you are correct. So, for instance, with the War book, blue cards would be about politics, yellow strictly war, green the arts and entertainment, pink cards on strategy, etc. I could use this in several ways. I could glance at the cards for one chapter and see no blue or green cards and realize a problem. I could also take out all the cards of one color to see which story I liked best, etc. It also made the shoebox look pretty cool.

      Robert Greene used a color code for his index cards which also helped him to realize gaps in certain areas. He also liked them because "It also made the shoebox look pretty cool."

    1. according to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • for: quote, quote - Galileo, quote - hiding the origin of knowledge, physical theory - hiding origin of knowledge

      • quote

        • According to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • author: Michel Bitbol
    2. From the very beginning, his work has been guided by what Edmund Husserl called the mothers of knowledge. Namely, the dynamics of lived embodied experience,
      • for: Edmund Husserl, the Mother of Knowledge, nondual, nonduality, non-dual, non-duality, the ground of existence
      • definition: the mother of knowledge
        • the dynamics of lived embodied experience
      • author: Edmond Husserl
    1. (1:20.00-1:40.00) What he describes is the following: Most of his notes originate from the digital using hypothes.is, where he reads material online and can annotate, highlight, and tag to help future him find the material by tag or bulk digital search. He calls his hypothes.is a commonplace book that is somewhat pre-organized.

      Aldrich continues by explaining that in his commonplace hypothes.is his notes are not interlinked in a Luhmannian Zettelkasten sense, but he "sucks the data" right into Obsidian where he plays around with the content and does some of that interlinking and massage it.

      Then, the best of the best material, or that which he is most interested in working with, writing about, etc., converted into a more Luhmannesque type Zettelkasten where it is much more densely interlinked. He emphasizes that his Luhmann zettelkasten is mostly consisting of his own thoughts and is very well-developed, to the point where he can "take a string of 20 cards and ostensibly it's its own essay and then publish it as a blog post or article."

    1. Recent work has revealed several new and significant aspects of the dynamics of theory change. First, statistical information, information about the probabilistic contingencies between events, plays a particularly important role in theory-formation both in science and in childhood. In the last fifteen years we’ve discovered the power of early statistical learning.

      The data of the past is congruent with the current psychological trends that face the education system of today. Developmentalists have charted how children construct and revise intuitive theories. In turn, a variety of theories have developed because of the greater use of statistical information that supports probabilistic contingencies that help to better inform us of causal models and their distinctive cognitive functions. These studies investigate the physical, psychological, and social domains. In the case of intuitive psychology, or "theory of mind," developmentalism has traced a progression from an early understanding of emotion and action to an understanding of intentions and simple aspects of perception, to an understanding of knowledge vs. ignorance, and finally to a representational and then an interpretive theory of mind.

      The mechanisms by which life evolved—from chemical beginnings to cognizing human beings—are central to understanding the psychological basis of learning. We are the product of an evolutionary process and it is the mechanisms inherent in this process that offer the most probable explanations to how we think and learn.

      Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.

    1. Your success in reading it is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer intended to com­municate.

      The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

      In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

      Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

    1. Data categories in Salesforce Knowledge are used to logically separate articles and to filter the knowledge base.

      By categorizing articles, users can quickly locate relevant information, making the knowledge base a more effective and user-friendly resource.

  9. Aug 2023
    1. A category of golf clubs that includes the driver and the fairway woods. Compared to the other types of clubs woods are longer and feature bigger and rounder clubheads that are designed to shoot the ball over long distances.
    1. Perimeter-weighted Then someone had a bright idea. What if we place more weight around the perimeter of the head? That way, if you mistakenly hit the ball from the toe of the heel rather than right out of the middle of the face, the momentum of this extra weight will prevent the clubhead from twisting as much at impact. Would that make life easier?
    1. Imagine the younger generation studying great books andlearning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult population con-tinuing to turn to the same sources of strength, inspiration,and communication. We could talk to one another then. Weshould be even better specialists than we are today because wecould understand the history of our specialty and its relationto all the others. We would be better citizens and better men.We might turn out to be the nucleus of the world community.

      Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

      Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

    2. The mathematical specialist, for example, canget further faster into the great mathematicians than a readerwho is without his specialized training. With the help ofgreat books, specialized knowledge can radiate out into agenuine interfiltration of common learning and common life.

      Here Hutchins is again prefiguring C.P. Snow's "two cultures". He makes the argument that by having a shared base of knowledge and culture in our society's past history of knowledge (and especially early scientists and mathematicians), everyone, despite their individual interests and specializations, can be an active participant in a broader human conversation.

    3. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

      Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

    4. In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.

      Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

      One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

    1. I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so. Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge. Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard. And how to pay for it all? If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
      • for: quote, quote - Sam Adams, quote - social media
      • quote, indyweb - support, people-centered
        • I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so.
        • Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge.
        • Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard.
        • And how to pay for it all?
        • If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
      • author: Sam Adams
        • 24 year IBM veteran -senior research scientist in AI at RTI International working on national scale knowledge graphs for global good
      • comment
        • his comment about exploiting all that data is based on an assumption
          • a centralized, server data model
      • this doesn't hold true with a people-centered, person-owned data network such as Inyweb
    1. Ted Nelson launches Project Xanadu, and he said, "Well, what if it wasn't just limited to the things that I have? What if I could connect ideas across a larger body of work?"
      • for: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, knowledge federation
    1. BookmarkTypes and uses of PKM

      Almost every well known writer/composer/creative throughout history had some sort of note taking or knowledge system of one sort or another (florilegium, commonplace books, notebooks, diaries, journals, zettelkasten, waste books, mnemonic techniques, etc.), which would put them into your "active" category. I think you'd be hard put to come up with evidence of a "sudden" emergence of an "active" PKM system beyond the choice of individual users to actively do something with their collections or not.

      If you want to go more distant than Eminem, try looking closely at Ramon Llull's practice in the 11th century, or Homer in the c. 8th century BCE. Or to go much, much farther back, there's solid evidence that indigenous peoples in Australia had what you call both passive and active PKM systems as far back as 65,000 years ago. These are still in use today. Naturally these were not written, but used what anthropologists call orality. (See Walter Ong, Milman Parry, Lynne Kelly, Margo Neale, Duane Hamacher, et al.)

    1. The basic settings allow users to quickly configure a subset of KB features and colors accessible on the left sidebar on this page.

      设置

  10. Jul 2023
    1. I have been using the Outline of Knowledge (OoK) which Adler developed for the Propædia volume of the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (orig. publ. 1974) as my way of indexing knowledge (there is a blog series describing this). I am now working on Part 7 of the series, which is concerned with porting from a card-based analogue system to a digital computer-based form, using the insights gained from having done so via the analogue approach initially.It appears as though the final version of the OoK which ever appeared was in 2010, and is archived at The Internet Archive.I am interested in whether anyone has continued using the OoK or has expanded upon it in any formalised or systematic way. I have made my own mods to it, of course, as it is several decades old and could bear with some revision. But I am not aware of any organisation or group that may already be doing this, including the Britannica itself (which seems a shame, if it is the case).Does anyone know of any such efforts?

      reply to u/TheVoroscope at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/va2s09/comment/jtwqhd7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      u/TheVoroscope, the only things I've seen on it are the original and what you've written. I suspect anything current will be quite niche and would require searching in the areas of academic journal articles or at the level of graduate studies within the library sciences where you might find something. Simon Winchester had a section on the rise and downfall of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his most recent book Knowing What We Know (2023) which has a brief mention of the Propædia, but it was broadly described as a $32 million dollar bomb that ended the Encyclopedia. I would suspect that the last printings in 2010 and 2012 were probably the last more as a result of the rise of internet usage than they were the form and function of the Propædia itself though.

    1. The concept of the purity of science should be abandoned.
      • for: progress trap, abstraction
        • comment
          • we do not recognize the power of abstraction
          • through it, we begin to construct Indra's Net of Jewels, one jewel (idea) at a time
          • but each jewel (idea) that we construct is just a little knowledge, and as Dan observes, a little knowledge, compared to the endless knowledge reflected in any jewel is dangerous.
          • this then, is our dangerous predicament - we base technology on incomplete jewels of Indra's net
          • as we know from mathematics, when the finite meets the infinite, it can never win
    1. specific uses of the technology help develop what we call “relational confidence,” or the confidence that one has a close enough relationship to a colleague to ask and get needed knowledge. With greater relational confidence, knowledge sharing is more successful.
    1. Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world.

      This is great!

  11. Jun 2023
    1. (1:21:20-1:39:40) Chris Aldrich describes his hypothes.is to Zettelkasten workflow. Prevents Collector's Fallacy, still allows to collect a lot. Open Bucket vs. Closed Bucket. Aldrich mentions he uses a common place book using hypothes.is which is where all his interesting highlights and annotations go to, unfiltered, but adequately tagged. This allows him to easily find his material whenever necessary in the future. These are digital. Then the best of the best material that he's interested in and works with (in a project or writing sense?) will go into his Zettelkasten and become fully fledged. This allows to maintain a high gold to mud (signal to noise) ratio for the Zettelkasten. In addition, Aldrich mentions that his ZK is more of his own thoughts and reflections whilst the commonplace book is more of other people's thoughts.

    1. BookmarkNew book - Personal Knowledge Graphs, by Ivo Velitchkov

      https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2597/new-book-personal-knowledge-graphs-by-ivo-velitchkov#latest

      For some additional context the work can be found through https://personalknowledgegraphs.com/#/page/pkg. It also has portions of the building of the book which exist as a knowledge graph, though it doesn't appear that they put up the entirety of the book as a linked knowledge graph the way they had initially planned. I've read a few parts in draft form, including Flancian's chapter whose ideas are tremendous, but I have yet to read the remainder of the published work.

      [Disclosure: I had submitted and had been accepted to write an early, historical-flavored chapter for this volume, but ultimately fell out, as did many others, over disagreements regarding their editing and/or publishing process. I'm close with Flancian and appreciate his experimental programming work on https://anagora.org/index, which one might call a multi-layered wiki of personal wikis, commonplace books, zettelkasten, diaries, notes, and other similar forms of personal knowledge. If you've got a public, digitally available version of a zettelkasten you'd like to add to his project, do reach out to him to interconnect it with the Agora and others' work there.]

    1. knowledge mapping to analyze the changes in the number of published papers as time goes on, in terms of country and geographic area, research topics, research methods, funding sources, hot research spots, and research trends.
    1. And because libraries generally do not take possession of the ebook files they rent from publishers, their crucial role as long-term preservers of culture has been severed from their role as institutions that provide democratic access—a striking change.

      E-books have caused the missions of many libraries to shift away from institutions that provide democratic access to a preserved culture.

    1. I’ve also found that Tailwind works extremely well as an extension of my memory. I’ve uploaded my “spark file” of personal notes that date back almost twenty years, and using that as a source, I can ask remarkably open-ended questions—“did I ever write anything about 19th-century urban planning” or “what was the deal with that story about Houdini and Conan Doyle?”—and Tailwind will give me a cogent summary weaving together information from multiple notes. And it’s all accompanied by citations if I want to refer to the original direct quotes for whatever reason.

      This sounds like the sort of personalized AI tool I've been wishing for since the early ChatGPT models if not from even earlier dreams that predate that....

    1. This analysis will result in the form of a new knowledge-based multilingual terminological resource which is designed in order to meet the FAIR principles for Open Science and will serve, in the future, as a prototype for the development of a new software for the simplified rewriting of international legal texts relating to human rights.

      software to rewrite international legal texts relating to human rights, a well written prompt and a few examples, including the FAIR principles will let openAI's chatGPT do it effectively.

  12. May 2023
    1. Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, & Roger King (2005), "Building the memex sixty years later: trends and directions in personal knowledge bases", Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. The Wikipedia article on personal knowledge bases (PKBs) is basically a summary of the technical report. The report defined personal knowledge base systems, described their benefits, reviewed relevant fields of research, and compared systems in terms of several aspects of their data models: structural framework, knowledge elements, schema, and the role of transclusion. This report is the most comprehensive publication I've read that compares PKB systems according to their key features.
    1. Writing permanent notes was time consuming as f***.

      The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.

      Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.

      Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.

      For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.

      Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.

      If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.

      If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?

  13. Apr 2023
    1. It is difficult to see interdependencies This is especially true in the context of learning something complex, say economics. We can’t read about economics in a silo without understanding psychology, sociology and politics, at the very least. But we treat each subject as though they are independent of each other.

      Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

      If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

      Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

      Link to Garden of Forking Paths

      Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.


      It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

    1. Want to read: How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess 📚

      https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2023/04/28/want-to-read.html

      👀 How did I not see this?!?? 😍 Looks like a good follow up to Ann Blair's Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010) and the aperitif of Simon Winchester's Knowing What We Know (Harper) which just came out on Tuesday. 📚 Thanks for the recommendation Kimberly!

    1. To buy or not to buy a course? And, if the latter, which one? .t3_12fowjy._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionSo, I've been considering buying an online course for Zettelkasten (in Obsidian). Thing is... There are a bunch of them. Two (maybe three) questions:Is it worth it? Has anyone gone down that path and care to share their experience?Any recommendations? I've seen a bunch of options and really don't have any hints on how to evaluate them.

      reply to u/Accomplished-Tip-597 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12fowjy/to_buy_or_not_to_buy_a_course_and_if_the_latter/

      Which "industry", though? Productivity? Personal Knowledge Management? Neither of these are focused on the idea of a Luhmann-esque specific zettelkastenare they?

      For the original poster, what is your goal in taking a course? What do you want to get out of it? What are you going to use such a system for? The advice you're looking for will hinge on these.

      Everyone's use is going to be reasonably idiosyncratic, so not knowing anything else, my general recommendation (to minimize time, effort, and expense) would be to read one of the following (for free), practice at some of it for a few weeks before you do anything else. Then if you need it, talk u/taurusnoises into a few consultations based on what you'd like to accomplish. He's one of the few who does this who's got experience in the widest variety of traditions in addition to expertise in the platform you want (though I'd still recommend him if you were using something else.)

    1. Oakeshott saw educationas part of the ‘conversation of mankind’, wherein teachers induct their studentsinto that conversation by teaching them how to participate in the dialogue—howto hear the ‘voices’ of previous generations while cultivating their own uniquevoices.

      How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

      How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

    2. We could saythat he was the first progressive educator not simply because he encouraged hiscontemporaries and successors to think about the child as a special kind oflearner, but also because of his views on education’s role in helping to developan open, liberal polity. A political system, he said, needs people who are fair,open-minded, and think for themselves; it doesn’t want people who aresubservient to authority.

      We could say first, though I highly suspect that his ideas came from somewhere else...

  14. Mar 2023
    1. In the fall of 2015, she assigned students to write chapter introductions and translate some texts into modern English.

      continuing from https://hypothes.is/a/ddn4qs8mEe2gkq_1T7i3_Q

      Potential assignments:

      Students could be tasked with finding new material or working off of a pre-existing list.

      They could individually be responsible for indexing each individual sub-text within a corpus by: - providing a full bibliography; - identifying free areas of access for various versions (websites, Archive.org, Gutenberg, other OER corpora, etc.); Which is best, why? If not already digitized, then find a copy and create a digital version for inclusion into an appropriate repository. - summarizing the source in general and providing links to how it fits into the broader potential corpus for the class. - tagging it with relevant taxonomies to make it more easily searchable/selectable within its area of study - editing a definitive version of the text or providing better (digital/sharable) versions for archiving into OER repositories, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, https://standardebooks.org/, etc. - identifying interesting/appropriate tangential texts which either support/refute their current text - annotating their specific text and providing links and cross references to other related texts either within their classes' choices or exterior to them for potential future uses by both students and teachers.

      Some of this is already with DeRosa's framework, but emphasis could be on building additional runway and framing for helping professors and students to do this sort of work in the future. How might we create repositories that allow one a smörgåsbord of indexed data to relatively easily/quickly allow a classroom to pick and choose texts to make up their textbook in a first meeting and be able to modify it as they go? Or perhaps a teacher could create an outline of topics to cover along with a handful of required ones and then allow students to pick and choose from options in between along the way. This might also help students have options within a course to make the class more interesting and relevant to their own interests, lives, and futures.

      Don't allow students to just "build their own major", but allow them to build their own textbooks and syllabi with some appropriate and reasonable scaffolding.

    1. The ability to intentionally and strategically allocateour attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world. Wehave to jealously guard it like a valuable treasure.

      It would seem that the word treasure here is being used to modify one's attention. Historically in books about "knowledge work" or commonplacing, the word was used with respect to one's storehouse of knowledge itself and not one's attention. Some of the effect is the result of the break in historical tradition being passed down from one generation to another. It's also an indication that the shift in value has moved not from what one knows or has, but that the attention itself is more valued now, even in a book about excerpting, thinking, and keeping knowledge!

      Oh how far we have fallen!

      It's also an indication of the extremes of information overload we're facing that the treasure is attention and not the small tidbits of knowledge and understanding we're able to glean from the massive volumes we face on a daily basis.

    1. By looking at practices of note-taking for their ownsake we can get a better idea of how people performed intellectual work in the past, what caughttheir attention and how they moved from reading to producing a finished work, often via note-taking.
    1. Other PKM forums, places to discuss?

      reply to u/deafpolygon at https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/121ihrj/other_pkm_forums_places_to_discuss/

      The space is fragmented broadly by both tools (some with specific workflows) and philosophies, so you may have to hunt/peck (or subscribe/filter) for the types of pieces you're searching for. Here's some resources you might appreciate. In the fora section things are ordered roughly by relation to the topic as well as frequency of posting/activity.

      Fora

      Sites

      Discord

      For some communities like Obsidian, Logseq, etc. you're also likely to find discord servers with some reasonable sub-channels and activity as well. A good non-product specific Discord with related material is The Productivists at https://discord.gg/m2bP2hh3. There's also one for Zettelkasten https://discord.gg/bYrVm9sr.

      And of course as you visit all these locales, be sure to mention r/PKMS and maybe more will learn that this location is a better catch-all for in-depth conversations and questions.

    1. "Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit"

      reply to jameslongley at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2532/personal-knowledge-management-is-bullshit

      I find that these sorts of articles against the variety of practices have one thing in common: the writer fails to state a solid and realistic reason for why they got into it in the first place. They either have no reason "why" or, perhaps, just as often have all-the-reasons "why", which may be worse. Much of this is bound up in the sort of signaling and consumption which @Sascha outlines in point C (above).

      Perhaps of interest, there are a large number of Hypothes.is annotations on that original article written by a variety of sense-makers with whom I am familiar. See: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/ Of note, many come from various note making traditions including: commonplace books, bloggers, writers, wiki creators, zettelkasten, digital gardening, writers, thinkers, etc., so they give a broader and relatively diverse perspective. If I were pressed to say what most of them have in common philosophically, I'd say it was ownership of their thought.

      Perhaps it's just a point of anecdotal evidence, but I've been noticing that who write about or use the phrase "personal knowledge management" are ones who come at the space without an actual practice or point of view on what they're doing and why—they are either (trying to be) influencers or influencees.

      Fortunately it is entirely possible to "fake it until you make it" here, but it helps to have an idea of what you're trying to make.

    1. “increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5)
      • Quote
        • increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is
        • (Hoffman 2015:5).
    2. If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled” (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

      //Quote - If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled - (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

    3. “increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5).

      // quote - increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” - (Hoffman 2015:5). - The wealth of information available on the internet and through social media does not make us better informed, but simply makes us more certain that we are right - (Hoffman 2015:45)

    4. The knowledge deficit hypothesis is closely tied to the idea of Homo economicus, an ontological model of the human as rationally self-interested. Historically in Western philosophy “ontology” refers to the study of being, the nature of human being, subjectivity, or what it means to be a self, epitomized in Descartes cogito. This individualized ontology has been extensively critiqued in philosophy and anthropology, but people keep arguing against it because these critiques have had little impact on the material world of economics and politics in which people are still routinely assumed to be rationally self-interested individuals. Edmund Husserl, and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) developed a highly influential phenomenological critique of the Cartesian subject and the modern self, which influenced Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), and subsequent models of the self in deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology (see Roszak et al. 1995 for an overview). Phenomenology also inspired work in intersubjectivity such as Martin Buber’s (1970) I-Thou relations, and Emmanuel Levinas’ (1969, 1998) understanding of ethical subjectivity, as well as Bruno Latour’s (2005) development of actor network theory. Latour’s writings have stimulated fruitful dialogues with anthropologies of Indigenous ontologies. Much of this literature is well known within the environmental humanities, but has had little impact more broadly in environment studies and environmental science, and less still in in politics and economics.

      // Interconnecting many thinkers and ideas throughout modern history related to knowledge deficit - knowledge deficit model is closely related to homo economicus, which is based on human beings a rational, self-interested agents - all these inter-relationships are new knowledge to me - this individualized ontology has its roots at least in Descartes and has been extensively critiqued - Edmond Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty critiqued it - Their critique influenced Gregory Bateson, as reflected in his book "Steps in an Ecological Mind" - It also influenced Emmanuel Levinas' understanding of ethical subjectivity and Bruno Latour's actor network theory - Latour's work influenced anthropologies of Indigenous people - This knowledge is well known with field of environmental humanities, but little known in the world of politics and economics

    5. Abstract

      // abstract - summary - Rationalist approaches to environmental problems such as climate change - apply an information deficit model, - assuming that if people understand what needs to be done they will act rationally. - However, applying a knowledge deficit hypothesis often fails to recognize unconscious motivations revealed by: - social psychology, - cognitive science, - behavioral economics.

      • Applying ecosystems science, data collection, economic incentives, and public education are necessary for solving problems such as climate change, but they are not sufficient.
      • Climate change discourse makes us aware of our mortality
      • This prompts consumerism as a social psychological defensive strategy,
      • which is counterproductive to pro-environmental behavior.
      • Studies in terror management theory, applied to the study of ritual and ecological conscience formation,
      • suggest that ritual expressions of giving thanks can have significant social psychological effects in relation to overconsumption driving climate change.
      • Primary data gathering informing this work included participant observation and interviews with contemporary Heathens in Canada from 2018–2019.
    1. Learning has to be knowledge. 00:10:07 And learning has to be based on understanding. And what you understand you can absorb, internalize and it becomes knowledge. What you know, you don't forget. You can block something that you know, but not forget.
    1. Ithaka - C. P. Cavafy, "The City" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

      The first version of "Ithaka" was probably written in 1894. Cavafy revised the poem in 1910, and it was first published in 1911. The first English translation was published in 1924, and there have been a number of different translations since then. The poem can be found in Cavafy's Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis, Princeton University Press, 1980.

  15. Feb 2023
    1. Stop Procrastinating With Note-Taking Apps Like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc by Sam Matla

      sophisticated procrastination - tweaking one's system(s) or workflow with the anticipation it will help them in the long run when it is generally almost always make-work which helps them feel smart and/or productive. Having measurable results which can be used against specific goals will help weed this problem out.

    2. optimization-procrastination trap is related to shiny object syndrome - the idea of tweaking one's system constantly

      perfect tool trap - guess what? there isn't one

    3. "Personal knowledge management is an aid to your work, not the work itself." —Sam Matla #

      This is entirely dependent on what and how you're doing it. If you're actively reading and annotating, and placing it somewhere, then that is the work, just in small progressive steps.

      He needs to be more specific about what he means by "personal knowledge management" as a definition of something.

    1. Certainly, computerizationmight seem to resolve some of the limitations of systems like Deutsch’s, allowing forfull-text search or multiple tagging of individual data points, but an exchange of cardsfor bits only changes the method of recording, leaving behind the reality that one muststill determine what to catalogue, how to relate it to the whole, and the overarchingsystem.

      Despite the affordances of recording, searching, tagging made by computerized note taking systems, the problem still remains what to search for or collect and how to relate the smaller parts to the whole.


      customer relationship management vs. personal knowledge management (or perhaps more important knowledge relationship management, the relationship between individual facts to the overall whole) suggested by autocomplete on "knowl..."

    2. As a result, hisindex is simultaneously a relic of research and a reminder of the pitfalls of all such effortsto create systematic knowledge, regardless of the underlying technology – paper, digitalor otherwise.
    3. Beyond the realm of historians, advocates called card indexes ‘the only portable,elastic, simple, orderly and self-indexing way of keeping records’, and the practice wascommon enough that Gustave Flaubert parodied the unending and ultimately futilepursuit of all knowledge in his 1881 satire Bouvard et Pe ́cuchet (Dickinson, 1894).
    4. Deutsch’s close friendJoseph Stolz, writing of the Chicago rabbi Bernard Felsenthal (1822–1908) who hadpenned a history of that city’s Jews and was instrumental in the 1892 formation of theAmerican Jewish Historical Society, noted that Felsenthal ‘was not the systematic orga-nizer who worked with a stenographer and card-index’ (Stolz, 1922: 259).

      Great example of a historian implying the benefit of not only a card index, but of potentially how commonplace it was to not only have one, but to have stenographers or secretaries to help manage them.

      Link this to the reference in Heyde about historians and others who were pushed to employ stenographers or copyists to keep their card indexes in order.


      Given the cost of employing secretaries to manage our information, one of the affordances that computers might focus on as tools for thought is lowering the barrier for management and maintenance. If they can't make this easier/simpler, then what are they really doing beyond their shininess? Search is obviously important in this context.

      What was the reference to employing one person full time to manage every 11 or 12 filing cabinets' worth of documents? Perhaps Duguid in the paper piece?

    5. one finds in Deutsch’s catalogue one implementation of what LorraineDaston would later term ‘mechanical objectivity’, an ideal of removing the scholar’s selffrom the process of research and especially historical and scientific representation (Das-ton and Galison, 2007: 115-90).

      In contrast to the sort of mixing of personal life and professional life suggested by C. Wright Mills' On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952), a half century earlier Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten method showed what Lorraine Datson would term 'mechanical objectivity'. This is an interesting shift in philosophical perspective of note taking practice. It can also be compared and contrasted with a 21st century perspective of "personal" knowledge management.

    1. What we do know is that ChatGPT’s underlying tech is GPT-3 and OpenAI plans to drop an upgraded version, GPT-4 in 2023. Asking students to train the thing that might take away opportunities from them down the road seems particularly cannibalistic but I also don’t know how you fight something you don’t understand.

      Or, since many of our students in higher ed will be entering the knowledge work sector, it's a fair question to ask: what do you want that sector to be like? Do you want those jobs to be more like the minder of intelligent machines? Or do you want it to be a place where the human in the loop is still a craftsman with agency?

    1. Today’s students carry access to boundlessinformation that Eco’s students could not have begun tofathom, but Eco’s students owned every word they carried.

      This is a key difference in knowledge mastery...

    1. Aesopian language is a means of communication with the intent to convey a concealed meaning to informed members of a conspiracy or underground movement, whilst simultaneously maintaining the guise of an innocent meaning to outsiders.

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

      Parents often use variations of double entendre to communicate between each other with out children understanding while present.

      It's also likely that Indigenous elders may use this sort of communication with uninitiated members nearby.

    1. at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a “longread”—it’s understandable that devoting a small chunk of one’s frisky twenties to writing a thesis can seem a waste of time, outlandishly quaint, maybe even selfish. And, as higher education continues to bend to the logic of consumption and marketable skills, platitudes about pursuing knowledge for its own sake can seem certifiably bananas.
    1. cancer can be insidious
      • comment
      • this speaks to our fundamental limitations of cognition and sensory experiences
      • we only ever have a small window into reality, a small bit of knowledge or perception
      • every decision we make is based on constrained knowledge of reality
      • in the case of cancer or other diseases growing inside our body,
        • each of us is a multi-level superorganism
        • consciousness is at one higher level of the body
        • but it cannot access knowledge of the activities
        • at a lower microscopic level of the body
        • there is very little communication between these two levels
    1. Categories mean determination of internal structure less flexibility, especially “in the long run“ of knowledgemanagement and storage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    2. “multiple storage”

      Within the history of personal knowledge management, one was often faced with where to store their notes so that it would be easy to find and use them again. Often this was done using slip methods by means of "multiple storage" by making multiple copies and filing them under various headings. This copying process was onerous and breaks the modern database principle "don't repeat yourself" (DRY).

      Alternate means of doing this include storing it in one place and then linking that location to multiple subject headings in an index, though this may cause issues of remembering which subject heading when there are many appropriate potential synonyms.

      Modern digital methods allow one to store a note in one location and refer to it in multiple ways electronically as well as with aliases.

    1. If you ask an elder about the work’s meaning, you may quickly find yourself enrolledin what Wardaman law man Yidumduma Bill Harney calls “Bush University”.
    2. Art is often focused on aesthetic, but more importantly, it is avisual embodiment of knowledge.
    3. Hamacher, Duane W. “The Art of Star Knowledge.” In 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, edited by Judith Ryan and Marcia Langton. Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne Press, 2023. https://www.academia.edu/96537139/The_Art_of_Star_Knowledge.

  16. Jan 2023
    1. This was recommended in the Obsidian Members Group Discord for teaching someone how to setup an Obsidian vault with a GitHub repo for version control. Kamil claimed it was more clear than an intro article by [[Bryan Jenks]] on how to setup GitHub with Obsidian. Jenks eventually made a video about the process.

    1. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 20.1 (1899) 108-113 (at 108): With all our advance in scientific astronomy, the average modern man is not so familiar with the sky as was his antique brother, and some of the blunders in modern works of fiction that are scored from time to time in scientific journals would hardly have been possible for a ploughman of antiquity, not to say a sailor. The world needs every now and then a reminder that the modern head holds different things from the ancient brain-pan, not necessarily more.

      How painfully true this may have been in 1899, it's now much worse in 2023!


      Specialization of knowledge tends to fit the lifeways of the people who hold and maintain it. Changing lifeways means one must lose one or more domains and begin using or curating different domains of knowledge.

      In a global world of specialization, humans who specialize are forced to rely more heavily on the experience and veracity of those around them who have also specialized. One may be able to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but their knowledge of the state of the art in anthropology or economic policy may be therefore utterly undeveloped. As a result they will need to rely on the knowledge and help of others in maintaining those domains.

      This knowledge specialization means that politicians will need to be more open about what they think and say, yet instead politicians seem to be some of the least knowledge about almost anything.

      This is just the start of a somewhat well-formed thesis I've developed elsewhere, but not previously written out... more to come...

    1. May 19, 2004 #1 Hello everyone here at the forum. I want to thank everyone here for all of the helpful and informative advice on GTD. I am a beginner in the field of GTD and wish to give back some of what I have received. What is posted below is not much of tips-and-tricks I found it very helpful in understanding GTD. The paragraphs posted below are from the book Lila, by Robert Pirsig. Some of you may have read the book and some may have not. It’s an outstanding read on philosophy. Robert Pirsig wrote his philosophy using what David Allen does, basically getting everything out of his head. I found Robert Pirsigs writing on it fascinating and it gave me a wider perspective in using GTD. I hope you all enjoy it, and by all means check out the book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Thanks everyone. arthur

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

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

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

    1. But you should also be aware that current PKM theory has a hard-on for writing all your notes in your own words which, to me, seems like a limitation of "knowledge management" as compared to "information management". I'm fine excerpting and citing because some texts have better phrasing I could ever have.

      "current PKM theory"? There is such a thing beyond zeitgeist?!

    1. 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

    1. If it interests you, GPC lists phrases like dysgu ar gof. This page then gives the example, "Yn yr hen ddyddiau byddai pobl yn dysgu cerddi ar gof" - like saying "to learn by heart" in English.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

      Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

      Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

      Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

      If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

    1. Bacon, Bennett, Azadeh Khatiri, James Palmer, Tony Freeth, Paul Pettitt, and Robert Kentridge. “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-Writing System and Phenological Calendar.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, January 5, 2023, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000415.

      https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19

      There may be questions as to whether or not this represents written language, but, if true, this certainly represents one of the oldest examples of annotation in human history!

      cc: @remikalir

    2. Finally, statistics should reinforce the fact that any patterning found cannot be explained as accidental.

      It is possible that the variations in patterning may tell us about the relative timing of the data. Perhaps the earliest data points may have been anecdotal evidence that was improved over time.

      Of course it could be the case that migrations, births, etc. may have shifted somewhat over time.

      What does the general climate data from these areas and this time period show? Is there variability in this time period?

    3. We appreciate this is a long span of time, and were concerned why any specific artificial memory system should last for so long.

      I suspect that artificial memory systems, particularly those that make some sort of logical sense, will indeed be long lasting ones.

      Given the long, unchanging history of the Acheulean hand axe, as an example, these sorts of ideas and practices were handed down from generation to generation.

      Given their ties to human survival, they're even more likely to persist.

      Indigenous memory systems in Aboriginal settings date to 65,000 years and also provide an example of long-lived systems.

    4. These may occur on rock walls, but were commonly engraved onto robust bones since at least the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic and African Late Stone Age, where it is obvious they served as artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively, exosomatic devices in which number sense is clearly evident (for definitions see d’Errico Reference d'Errico1989; Reference d'Errico1995a,Reference d'Erricob; d'Errico & Cacho Reference d'Errico and Cacho1994; d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017; Hayden Reference Hayden2021).

      Abstract marks have appeared on rock walls and engraved into robust bones as artificial memory systems (AMS) and external memory systems (EMS).

    1. I think the point is somewhat different. Luhmann was an academic writing for other academics and wrote technically due to fears of misunderstanding by those with a different educational background, as was a quite reasonable fear at the time.

      Was Luhmann's obtuse style, in part, a means of publicly sharing content, but doing so in a way as to restrict the knowledge to those who had an increased level of context for understanding it? How similar is this to the pattern of restricted knowledge in some Indigenous cultures where people passed along knowledge in restricted ways?

      Is there a word or phrase to synopsize this sort of hard to understand academic-speak?

    1. It consists of two key components: The ‘Declarative Processing Environment’, which allows processes to be assembled goal-driven from a pool of process building blocks and the ‘Autopoietic Framework’ that mimics natural organisms to adapt to environmental changes, new capabilities and new technology.
    1. Books and Presentations Are Playlists, so let's create a NeoBook this way.

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

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

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

    1. Hi Chris Aldrich, thank you for sharing your great collection of hypothes.is annotations with the world. This is truly a great source of wisdom and insights. I noticed that you use tags quite a lot there. Are you tagging the notes inside your PKM (Obsidian?) as much as in Hypothes.is or are you more restrictive? Do you have any suggestions or further reading advice on the question of tagging? Thanks a lot in advance! Warmly, Jan

      Sorry, I'm only just seeing this now Jan. I tag a lot in Hypothes.is to help make things a bit more searchable/findable in the future. Everything in Hypothes.is gets pulled into my Obsidian vault where it's turned into [[WikiLinks]] rather than tags. (I rarely use tags in Obsidian.) Really I find tagging is better for broad generic labels (perhaps the way many people might use folders) though I tend to tag things as specifically as I can as broad generic tags for things you work with frequently become unusable over time. I recommend trying it out for yourself and seeing what works best for you and the way you think. If you find that tagging doesn't give you anything in return for the work, then don't do it. Everyone can be different in these respects.

  17. Dec 2022
    1. But Thamus replied, " Most ingenious Theuth, oneman has the ability to beget arts, but the ability tojudge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their usersbelongs to another ; and now you, who are the fatherof letters, have been led by your affection to ascribeto them a power the opposite of that which theyreally possess. For this invention will produce for-getfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it,because they will not practise their memory. Theirtrust in writing, produced by external characterswhich are no part of themselves, will discourage theuse of their own memory within them. You haveinvented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding ;and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom,not true wisdom, for they will read many thingswithout instruction and will therefore seem to knowmany things, when they are for the most part ignorant

      and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." pp 563-564

    1. With medicine, the story was slightly different because of theconstant and urgent need for it. Medical knowledge was alwaysuseful, always relevant, so books on medicine were constantly indemand, and would have been available in the majority of libraries inlate antiquity.

      Transmission of medical knowledge has a more immediate and direct application for people; as a result it may tend to be transmitted more faithfully either in written or oral forms. The written record of medical scrolls from antiquity were in constant demand.

    2. If we narrow the process oftransmission down to a single, hypothetical strand, it is feasible thatPtolemy originally wrote The Almagest on a papyrus scroll insecond-century Alexandria. That scroll would have had to berecopied at least twice for it to survive until the sixth century, at whichpoint it might well have been copied onto parchment and bound intoa book. This, too, would need to be recopied every few hundredyears to ensure that it survived (again assuming that it escaped theusual pests, damage and disasters) and was available to scholars in1500. It is therefore likely that The Almagest had to be recopied atthe very least five times during the period 150–1500.
    3. Moller, Violet. The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2019. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546484/the-map-of-knowledge-by-violet-moller/.

    1. The limitations of commonplacebooks centers around the following: they only enable short-term knowledgedevelopment. They do not cater to allowing thoughts to evolve over time,infinitely. They do not allow for the infinite internal branching and expansionof ideas.

      sigh

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

    1. Life is too short to spend it on personal knowledge management.Tl;dr: I think personal knowledge management, in many cases, is a fruitless effort and there are generally only very few cases (see above) in which note taking actually makes sense.

      How was this tl;dr not obvious from before the start of their journey?

    1. To Zotero or not to Zotero?

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt/comments/zgvbg4/to_zotero_or_not_to_zotero/

      I don't often add in web pages, but for books and journal articles I love Zotero for quickly bookmarking, tagging, and saving material I want to read. It's worth it's weight in gold just for this functionality even if you're not using it for writing citations in publications.

      Beyond this, because of it's openness and ubiquity it's got additional useful plugins for various functions you may want to play around with and a relatively large number of tools are able to dovetail with it to provide additional functionality. As an example, the ability to dump groups of material from Zotero into ResearchRabbit to discover other literature I ought to consider is a fantastically useful feature one is unlikely to find elsewhere (yet).

    1. The concept of a knowledge vacuum refers to an organizational condition in which the pushing force of innovation and the pulling force of organizational inertia both at the structural and behavioral levels such as political pressure, pro-innovation bias, and employee frustration, interact to create a negative spiral that hampers organizational and policy learning.

      coupling and decoupling or learning dynamic of innovation

    2. a knowledge vacuum, which is an organizational condition in which excessive exploration and organizational inertia interact to create a vicious cycle of low performance.
    1. Dr James Ravenscroft @jamesravey@fosstodon.orgFollowing on from my first week with hypothes.is I decided to integrate my annotations into #Joplin so that I have tighter integration of my literature + permanent notes. I've built a VERY alpha Joplin plugin that auto-imports hypothes.is annotations + tags to joplin by following your user atom feed https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/12/04/joplin-hypothesis/ #PKM #ToolsForThought #hypothesis
    1. I continued to use this analog method right up through my Ph.D. dissertation and first monograph. After a scare in the early stages of researching my second monograph, when I thought all of my index cards had been lost in a flood, I switched to an electronic version: a Word doc containing a table with four cells that I can type or paste information into (and easily back up).
  18. Nov 2022
    1. Those inherent physical attributes were not what defines star athletes. The great ones, be it Jordan or Ohtani or Messi or Williams, possess superior knowledge, said the neuro. Tom Brady isn’t a great quarterback because he’s big or has a strong arm. Thousands of men are big with strong arms. Brady is great because he knows more about football, and what he has to do to play it better, than anyone else. His brain has an extraordinary store of football knowledge and the ability to process it at lightning speed.
    1. One of the first things that was discovered about building complicated technical hypertext is that you don’t know what the structure will be in advance. And as you’re adding information, you know you want to keep the information, but you frequently don’t know what the information you’re adding is. You can’t describe its type or its nature or its importance in advance. You just suspect that it’s going to be pertinent somehow. Or you see a terrific quotation that you know will be great to use, but you don’t know when that quotation will fit or even if it’ll fit in this book, or if you’ll have to save it for something else. Finding ways to say, “I think these two things are related somehow, but I don’t want to commit myself yet as to exactly how,” turns out to be quite an interesting design problem. Hypertext people started out, in fact, by inventing the outliner very early — 1968. And outliners are terrific if you already know the structure of your information space. But hierarchies are not good if you’re just guessing about how things fit together because you tend to build great elaborate structures that turn out to be wrong, and you have to unbuild them, and then you’ve got a terrible pile on your desk.

      Connecting ideas across space and time when you don't know how they'll fully relate in advance is a tough design problem.

      Outliner programs, first developed for computers in 1968, are great if you know the structure of a space in advance, but creating hierarchies by guessing about relationships in advance often turn out wrong or create other problems as one progresses.

    1. Paper by Gyuri Lajos and Andras Benedek. Gyuri's context was recommended by @wfinck. Looks like it pertains to knowledge graphs. Gyuri's own annotation calls it a "meta-knowledge graph"

    1. What would a secure Federated PMK / archive network backed by a minimal blockchain look like?

      Possibly like Holochain (which is distinct from the blockchain architecture). Blockchain only seems helpful if you need all of the following: - a database - immutability - distributed data - decentralized & totally trustless - append only - cryptographically secure assurance

      Confer Brandon Enright's provocative talk "Blockchain is Bullshit" for an elaboration of these features. The first 10 or so minutes is mostly uninsightful trolling, so the link takes one to his argument about the key features of blockchain.

      AFAICT, Holochain eases the feature of "decentralized", although Laurie Voss suggests that it's better to think of Bitcoin & Ethereum as "distributed" (in both the structure & control).

      In Voss' taxonomy, I suspect that Holochain's structure would be "distributed" (ie, "No total point of failure, all nodes work on shared goal") and control would be "federated" (ie, "Limited set of shared rules, multiple overlapping/conflicting rules below")

    1. My highlights are littered with notes to self and action items - it's not all pure knowledge.

      this is a good example of the personal side of note taking that isn't always outwardly seen

      each person's notes will be personal to them

    1. CEO, Mike Tung was on Data science podcast. Seems to be solving problem that Google search doesn't; how seriously should you take the results that come up? What confidence do you have in their truth or falsity?