This comment is close, but it's also about control.

related, but not drawn from as I've been thinking about the continuum of taxonomies and subject headings for a while...

On the Spectrum of Topic Headings in note making

Any reasonable note one may take will likely have a hierarchical chain of tags/subject headings/keywords going from the broad to the very specific. One might start out with something broad like "humanities" (as opposed to science), and proceed into "history", "anthropology", "biological anthropology", "evolution", and even more specific. At the bottom of the chain is the specific atomic idea on the card itself. Each of the subject headings helps to situate the idea and provide the context in which it sits, but how useful within a note taking system is having one or more of these tags on it? What about overlaps with other broader subjects (one will note that "evolution" might also sit under "science" / "biology" as well), but that note may have a different tone and perspective than the prior one.

This becomes an interesting problem or issue as one explores ideas in a pre-designed note taking system. As a student just beginning to explore anthropology, one may tag hundreds of notes with anthropology to the point that the meaning of the tag is so diluted that a search of the index becomes useless as there's too much to sort through underneath it. But as one continues their studies in the topic further branches and sub headings will appear to better differentiate the ideas. This process will continue as the space further differentiates. Of course one may continue their research into areas that don't have a specific subject heading until they accumulate enough ideas within that space. (Take for example Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work which is now known under the heading of Behavioral Economics, a subject which broadly didn't exist before their work.) The note taker might also leverage this idea as they tag their own work as specifically as they might so as not to pollute their system as it grows without bound (or at least to the end of their lifetime).

The design of one's note taking system should take these eventualities into account and more easily allow the user to start out broad, but slowly hone in on direct specificity.

Some of this principle of atomicity of ideas and the growth from broad to specific can be seen in Luhmann's zettelkasten (especially ZK II) which starts out fairly broad and branches into the more specific. The index reflects this as well and each index heading ideally points to the most specific sub-card which begins the discussion of that particular topic.

Perhaps it was this narrowing of specificity which encouraged Luhmann to start ZKII after years of building ZKII which had a broader variety of topics?

Not related to this text, but just thinking...

Writing against a blank page is dreadful and we all wish we would be visited by the muses. But writing against another piece of text can be incredibly fruitful for generating ideas, even if they don't necessarily relate to the text at hand. The text gives us something to latch onto for creating work.

Try the following exercise:<br /> Write down 20 things that are white.<br /> (Not easy is it?)

Now write down 20 things in your refrigerator that are white?<br /> (The ideas come a lot easier don't they, even if you couldn't come up with 20.)

The more specific area helped you anchor your thoughts and give them a positive direction. Annotating against texts in which you're interested does this same sort of anchoring for your brain when you're writing.

Is there research on this area of concentration with respect to creativity?

Marshall, in looking at your cards, I'm curious how easy/hard you feel it is to remember longer portions of full quotes like your H.L. Menken example using only spaced repetition? I usually find it far more taxing and not as long lasting as using other more classical mnemonic methods (method of loci/songlines).

Piotr Wozniak has some material on creating/designing more concrete cards for spaced repetition that I've found generally helpful. I know that Andy Matuschak and Soren Bjornstad have some ideas, experience, and research in the space but I've yet to see more deep research on the effectiveness of these more specific practices at scale or beyond the anecdotal.

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review

Michael Mina. (2021, September 24). Thread On tests and the media It is almost universal that any piece discussing Rapid Ag tests says “PCR is more accurate but…” But even this isn’t true. It simply depends what you want to detect. If wanting to identify ppl who are contagious, PCR is much less accurate. 1/ [Tweet]. @michaelmina_lab. https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1441420493228236801

Note the power here of Applebaum providing very specific and citable examples.

The specificity is more powerful than the generality of these sorts of ills which we know exist in these regimes.

‘Expert Reaction to Study Evaluating the Accuracy of the AbC-19TM Rapid Test for SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies | Science Media Centre’. Accessed 26 February 2021. https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-evaluating-the-accuracy-of-the-abc-19tm-rapid-test-for-sars-cov-2-antibodies/.

Levin, A. T., Hanage, W. P., Owusu-Boaitey, N., Cochran, K. B., Walsh, S. P., & Meyerowitz-Katz, G. (2020). Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: Systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications. European Journal of Epidemiology, 35(12), 1123–1138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1

Bosco-Lauth, A. M., Hartwig, A. E., Porter, S. M., Gordy, P. W., Nehring, M., Byas, A. D., VandeWoude, S., Ragan, I. K., Maison, R. M., & Bowen, R. A. (2020). Experimental infection of domestic dogs and cats with SARS-CoV-2: Pathogenesis, transmission, and response to reexposure in cats. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013102117

Rodda, L. B., Netland, J., Shehata, L., Pruner, K. B., Morawski, P. M., Thouvenel, C., Takehara, K. K., Eggenberger, J., Hemann, E. A., Waterman, H. R., Fahning, M. L., Chen, Y., Rathe, J., Stokes, C., Wrenn, S., Fiala, B., Carter, L. P., Hamerman, J. A., King, N. P., … Pepper, M. (2020). Functional SARS-CoV-2-specific immune memory persists after mild COVID-19. MedRxiv, 2020.08.11.20171843. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.11.20171843

Yang, G., Csikász-Nagy, A., Waites, W., Xiao, G., & Cavaliere, M. (2020). Information Cascades and the Collapse of Cooperation. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 8004. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64800-z

Spreckelsen, P. von, Wessel, I., Glashouwer, K., & Jong, P. J. de. (2020). Preprint Averting Repulsion? Body-Directed Self-Disgust and Autobiographical Memory Retrieval. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qhc35

Weissleder, R., Lee, H., Ko, J., & Pittet, M. J. (2020). COVID-19 diagnostics in context. Science Translational Medicine, 12(546). https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.abc1931

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