Note taking is a means of rendering large volumes of non-portable sources of information into a nearly infinitely portable source. This is particularly true when done in digital form.

(p4, Why take notes?)

Goutor's description is offered as an outline of a mechanical method which he hopes will provide a greater level of efficiency, but which might be adapted to each researcher's work and needs. He also specifically offers it as a method to be used for "constructing some sort of final product". He considers it as serving the functions of gathering, organizing, storing and retrieving information.

(p3, Introduction)

Goutor indicates that "a certain amount of individual in methods is commendable, and indeed necessary." but that "it soon becomes apparent that there are some ways of doing things more efficient and ultimately more productive than others". But he goes on to bemoan that how to manuals offer little help.

(p3, Introduction)

https://archive.org/details/chamberlain-card-file.-kem-mur/mode/2up

https://medium.com/workings/how-i-take-notes-when-doing-research-90a649f10098

Stowe Boyd looks at Clive Thompson's note taking process which uses Scrivener.

Nothing new here for me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/xsq3ga/good_welsh_learners_dictionary_with_entomologies/

https://www.welsh-dictionary.ac.uk/android-ios-apps/app-support/

https://ymlaenwelsh.com/2018/11/11/on-word-field-farming/

Creating world fields (groups of words related to a particular area or field of knowledge) can be helpful for acquiring vocabulary in a new language. There's no research here to back up the claim, but it's an interesting word game and method for familiarize oneself with a small area and acquire new words related to an area or various related stem words.

https://ymlaenwelsh.com/2020/08/31/my-top-6-welsh-dictionaries/

https://geiriaduracademi.org/

I get the gist of what you're saying and I prefer putting things into my own collection in my own words as well. However, there is a history of folks putting other materials into their systems like this. Johannes Heyde, in particular, mentioned that German publishers used to mail promo details for forthcoming books on A6 size postcards that one might place directly into their bibliographic index without needing to recopy.

I know I've suggested to u/sscheper before that he ought to release his forthcoming book in index card format, if only as an interesting means of showing an example of what a zettelkasten looks like and how it might work.

Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

I saw this ad for Storyteller Tactics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiybhKcA3ZV/?hl=en. The pitchman indicates that he distilled down a pile of about 25 books into a deck of informative cards which writers can use in their craft. Rather than sell it as a stand alone book, it's a set of cards (in digital format too) that they're selling for a order of magnitude more than they could have gotten for a book format.

They're advertising for a product from https://pipdecks.com/. They're essentially selling custom zettelkasten collections of cards for niche topics! Who else is going to sell sets of cards like this? Anyone else seen examples of zettelkasten-like products like this?

In "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" (1952), C. Wright Mills talks about his methods for note taking, thinking, and analysis in what he calls "sociological imagination". This is a sociologists' framing of their own research and analysis practice and thus bears a sociological related name. While he talks more about the thinking, outlining, and writing process rather than the mechanical portion of how he takes notes or what he uses, he's extending significantly on the ideas and methods that Sönke Ahrens describes in How to Take Smart Notes (2017), though obviously he's doing it 65 years earlier. It would seem obvious that the specific methods (using either files, note cards, notebooks, etc.) were a bit more commonplace for his time and context, so he spent more of his time on the finer and tougher portions of the note making and thinking processes which are often the more difficult parts once one is past the "easy" mechanics.

While Mills doesn't delineate the steps or materials of his method of note taking the way Beatrice Webb, Langlois & Seignobos, Johannes Erich Heyde, Antonin Sertillanges, or many others have done before or Umberto Eco, Robert Greene/Ryan Holiday, Sönke Ahrens, or Dan Allosso since, he does focus more on the softer portions of his thinking methods and their desired outcomes and provides personal examples of how it works and what his expected outcomes are. Much like Niklas Luhmann describes in Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981), Mills is focusing on the thinking processes and outcomes, but in a more accessible way and with some additional depth.

Because the paper is rather short, but specific in its ideas and methods, those who finish the broad strokes of Ahrens' book and methods and find themselves somewhat confused will more than profit from the discussion here in Mills. Those looking for a stronger "crash course" might find that the first seven chapters of Allosso along with this discussion in Mills is a straighter and shorter path.

While Mills doesn't delineate his specific method in terms of physical tools, he does broadly refer to "files" which can be thought of as a zettelkasten (slip box) or card index traditions. Scant evidence in the piece indicates that he's talking about physical file folders and sheets of paper rather than slips or index cards, but this is generally irrelevant to the broader process of thinking or writing. Once can easily replace the instances of the English word "file" with the German concept of zettelkasten and not be confused.

One will note that this paper was written as a manuscript in April 1952 and was later distributed for classroom use in 1955, meaning that some of these methods were being distributed from professor to students. The piece was later revised and included as an appendix to Mill's text The Sociological Imagination which was first published in 1959.

Because there aren't specifics about Mills' note structure indicated here, we can't determine if his system was like that of Niklas Luhmann, but given the historical record one could suppose that it was closer to the commonplace tradition using slips or sheets. One thing becomes more clear however that between the popularity of Webb's work and this (which was reprinted in 2000 with a 40th anniversary edition), these methods were widespread in the mid-twentieth century and specifically in the field of sociology.

Above and beyond most of these sorts of treatises on note taking method, Mills does spend more time on the thinking portions of the practice and delineates eleven different practices that one can focus on as they actively read/think and take notes as well as afterwards for creating content or writing.

My full notes on the article can be found at https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0138200b4bfcde2757a137d61cd65cb8

Finding order and relations (and their particular types), is a form of linking ideas found in some of the more complex zettelkasten and knowledge management spaces. It's not as explicit here and he doesn't seem to be focusing on stating or writing explicit links within his notes. He does, however, place some focus on the quality and types of links he's making (or at least thinking about), something which isn't frequently seen in the current PKM space. For example, no one is creating user interfaces that show links between ideas which are opposite (or in opposition or antonym relation) to each other.

Evidence that Mills is talking specifically about papers and individual folders (potentially tagged or categorized) rather than a card index system.

Seems similar to the advice within Ahrens. Did he have a section on not needing to "start" writing or at least not starting with a blank page?

Compare and contrast these, if so.

Link to: https://hyp.is/DJd2hDUQEe2BMGv-WFSnVQ/www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153

C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.

The Technique of Controversy: Principles of Dynamic Logic by Boris B. Bogoslovsky https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technique_of_Controversy/P-rgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en

What was Dewey's contribution here?

The Gospel of Technology by C. E. Ayers https://archive.org/details/americanphilosop00kall/page/24/mode/2up

"Relaxed browsing and allowing the mind to wander" as a method of thinking and work is stated differently, but is highly related to the idea of diffuse thinking or working as a flâneur.

"deadbeat methods"... wowza!

Notice that it's not just notes, but data on IBM cards that he's using for research here. This sort of data analysis is much easier now, but is also of the sort detailed by Beatrice Webb in her scientific note taking.

curious...

Ha!

In a democracy, is it not just rule by majority, but rule by the most organized that ends up dominating the society?

Perhaps C. Wright Mills' work on the elite has some answers?

The Republican party's use of organization to create gerrymandering is a clear example of using extreme organization to create minority rule. Cross reference: Slay the Dragon in which this issue is laid out with the mention of using a tiny amount of money to careful gerrymander maps to provide outsized influences and then top-down outlines to imprint broad ideas from a central location onto smaller individual constituencies (state and local).

Intellectual work requires "surfaces" to work against, almost as an exact analogy to substrates in chemistry which help to catalyze reactions. The surfaces may include: - articles, books, or other writing against which one can think and write - colleagues, friends, family, other thinkers, or even imaginary characters (as suggested by C. Wright Mills) - one's past self as instantiated by their (imperfect) memory or by their notes about excerpted ideas or their own thoughts

Are there any other surfaces we're missing?

"loosening my imagination" !!

What a lot to unpack here.

He's actively looking through all parts of his files to find potential links and connections between ideas. He brings up the idea of "unsuspected connections" which touches on Luhmann's idea of serendipity, Llull's combinatorial arts, or what one might call combinatorial creativity.

By asking this question this way, Mills is explicitly indicating that his "file" is not a journal, and by implication probably doesn't take the form of a notebook, though we should be on the lookout for more evidence of this given the long tradition of the commonplace book.

It bears pointing out that Mills hasn't specifically described the form of his "file". Is he using note cards, slips, sheets of paper? Ostensibly one might suppose given his context and the word "file" which he uses that he may be referring to either hanging files, folders, and sheets of paper, or a more traditional index card file.

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

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

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

Again he uses the idea of a "file" which I read and understand as similar to the concepts of zettelkasten or commonplace book. Unlike others writing about these concepts though, he seems to be taking a more holistic and integrative (life) approach to having and maintaining such system.

Perhaps a more extreme statement of this might be written as "zettelkasten is life" or the even more extreme "life is zettelkasten"?

Is his grounding in sociology responsible for framing it as a "social organization" of one's memory?

It's not explicit, but this statement could be used as underpinning or informing the idea of using a card index as autobiography.

How does this compare to other examples of this as a function?

The function of memory served by having written notes is what allows the serious researcher or thinker to have greater confidence in their work, potentially more free from cognitive bias as one idea can be directly compared and contrasted with another by direct juxtaposition.

The antecedent for "they" here is "accomplished thinkers".

Here Mills seems to be defining (in 1952) an "intellectual workman" as an academic, but he doesn't go as broad as a more modern "knowledge worker" (2022) which includes those who broadly do thinking in industry as well as in academia. His older phrase also has a more gendered flavor to it that knowledge worker doesn't have now.

Surely by "files" he means his written notes and ideas which he has filed away?

Thus articles and books are agglomerations of ideas within notes (or perhaps one's retained memory, as best as that might be done) which are then broken off from them and released to a wider readership.

We write to understand, to learn, to make knowledge our own.

We could use more of this in the current tools for thought space. Given neurodiversity, having a smorgasbord of options from which to choose from and then to be able to pick and choose or experiment on what works for you in particular seems to be the best route forward.

A description of the problem.

Also missing are concrete examples and modeling of behavior for students to see and follow.

Who is ILH?

1. Robert Dalleck, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Time, 1908–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 584.

Blacks are heavily overrepresented in news stories about poverty and welfare at an almost 2:1 ratio. (They account for 27 percent of people experiencing poverty, but 59 percent of the poor in news stories in 2015-2016 were African American.)

Is there evidence for this? Other confounding factors that prevent people from opening accounts?

Is it not coincidental that these life events are also some of the most stressful one will face in life? They're stressful enough on their own, but the added financial stressors add to the problems.

Saw this ad for Storyteller Tactics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiybhKcA3ZV/?hl=en

They're advertising for a product from https://pipdecks.com/. They're essentially selling custom zettelkasten collections of cards for niche topics!

This sort of institutionalized economic insecurity seems bound up in institutionalized racism and may have a relationship with recent abortion bans. Can we tease out the ways these ideas are tied together or compounded?

How can alleviating the perceptions of these effects help create societal changes and greater flexibility and more resiliency?

These are potential national security issues were the country to come to war with other major powers.

Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

The US penalizes those who don't complete high school to a higher degree than other countries and this can tend to lower our economic resiliency.

American exceptionalism at play?

Another factor at play with respect to https://hypothes.is/a/2uAmuEENEe2KentYKORSww

Presumably this is part of the reason for the problem mentioned above: https://hypothes.is/a/2uAmuEENEe2KentYKORSww

headship rates are are shares of people who are household heads

How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

Why???

1. Federal Reserve Bank, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2019” (Washington DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2020).

I've read this statistic many times, but where is the original source?

It's here: Federal Reserve Bank, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2019” (Washington DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2020).

This fact is repeated several times throughout the book. At least 3 by my count.

Can poverty be modeled after a statistical thermodynamic framework? How might we move the set point for poverty up significantly to prevent the ill effects of regular, repeated poverty?

What does the complexity of poverty indicate? Within the web of potential indicators, what might be done to vastly mitigate the movement of people in and out of poverty? What sorts of additional resiliency can be built into the system?

Is it possible that the general American need to always be keeping up appearances confounds the facts that most poverty spells are short?

This is the second time I've noted a possible link to this effect. Is there a way to help unbundle it both perceptually and politically to better allow people to face their problems and fix the broader societal problem here?

Middle Americans, and particularly those in suburbia and rural parts of America that account for the majority of poverty in the country, tend to make their poverty invisible because of the toxic effects of extreme capitalism and keeping up appearances.

Has this effect risen with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and the idea of "living one's best life"? How about the social effects of television with shows like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" which encourage conspicuous consumption?

More interesting is the fact that most of these suburban and rural poverty stricken portions of the country are in predominantly Republican held strongholds.

Is there a feedback mechanism that is not only hollowing these areas out, but keeping them in poverty?

Is there a long term correlation between these rates and political parties? Is there a potential lag time between the two if there is?

It would seem that most of the large swaths of rural poverty in America are those with historical roots of slavery, colonization, and exploitation. These include: the Deep South and Mississippi Delta region where slavery, share cropping, and cotton plantations abounded; Appalachia (esp. West Virginia and Kentucky) where the coal mining industry disappeared; Texas-Mexico border where the Latinx populations have long been exploited; the Southwest and Northern Plains (including Alaska) with Native Americans who live on reservations after having been exploited, dealt with broken treaties and general decimation of their people and communities; central corridor of California with high numbers of exploited immigrant farm laborers.

Only 10 to 15 percent of people who live in poverty live in high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods.

The savings indicated here is almost a factor of 10! How can we not be doing this?

Compare with statistics and descriptions from Why Fewer American Children Are Living in Poverty (New York Times, The Daily, 2022-09-26)

Note takers reading this may appreciate that Mills had a note taking system:

https://hypothes.is/a/Wbm09giuEe2-tH8vp1LziA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/_7SQkPdFEeunDX9htFmQ8w

This particular note and my notice of it is an interesting case of faint recognition and combinatorial creativity at play. I vaguely recognized Mills' name but was able to quickly find it within my reading notes to discover I'd run across him and his intellectual practice before.

we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.16

1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 9.

I love this quote and it's interesting food for thought.

Framing problems from the perspectives of a single individual versus a majority of people can be a powerful tool.

The idea of the "welfare queen" was possibly too powerful because it singled out an imaginary individual rather than focusing on millions of people with a variety of backgrounds and diversity. Compare this with the fundraisers for impoverished children in Sally Stuther's Christian Children's Fund (aka ChildFund) which, while they show thousands of people in trouble, quite often focus on one individual child. This helps to personalize the plea and the charity actually assigned each donor a particular child they were helping out.

How might this set up be used in reverse to change the perspective and opinions of those who think the "welfare queen" is a real thing instead of a problematic trope?

Holy shit!

What does the full list of available means-tested programs look like?

Open question:<br /> Why is the word "below" used with numbers like "150 percent below the poverty line" when in fact this number indicates near, but above, poverty based on my reading?

Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl's research based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) using risk assessments using life tables show that nearly 60 percent of Americans between 20 and 75 will live for at least 1 year below the poverty line and 75% of Americans will encounter poverty or near-poverty (defined as 150 percent below the official poverty line).

Cross reference:<br /> Mark R. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl, “The Likelihood of Experiencing Relative Poverty Across the Life Course,” PLoS One 10 (2015): E01333513.

One of the underlying commonalities about the various myths of poverty is that we tend to "other" those that it effects. The "them" we stigmatize with the ills of poverty really look more like "us", and in fact, they are.

Rather than victim shame and blame those in poverty, we ought to spend more of our time fixing the underlying disease instead of spending the time, effort, energy, and money on attempting to remedy the symptoms (eg. excessive policing, et al.) Not only is it more beneficial, but cheaper in the long run.

Related:<br /> Gladwell, Malcolm. “Million-Dollar Murray.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2006. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray (.pdf copy available at https://housingmatterssc.org/million-dollar-murray/)

The authors here do themselves and their public a disservice by repeating the myth up front before trying to dispel it. This may psychologically tend to reinforce it rather than priming the reader to come to believe the opposite.

A better framing might instead be George Lakoff's truth sandwich: present the truth/actuality, then talk about the myth and then repeat the truth again.

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

It can apparently apply to either income inequality or wealth inequality, so it may have slightly different meanings based on this underlying context.

Delve into this question of definition.

qualify

compare with income inequality: https://hypothes.is/a/_JLGuj3HEe2dJFdOJRcvaQ

Did they really mean "tenacious" here or perhaps, given the political climate and perception, "tenuous"?

There is a variety of confounding myths in America which tend to hold us down. These include economic mobility, meritocracy, poverty, and the land of opportunity.

With respect to the "land of opportunity", does positive press of a small number of cases from an earlier generation outweigh the actual experience of the majority?

There was a study on The Blitz in London and England in general in World War II which showed that despite high losses in general, enough people knew one or more who'd lost someone or something to the extreme but that the losses weren't debilitating from a loss perspective and generally served to boost overall morale. Higher losses may have been more demoralizing and harmful, but didn't happen. (Find this source: possibly Malcolm Gladwell??)

Is this sort of psychological effect at play socially and politically in America and thereby confounding our progress?

https://sociology.wustl.edu/people/mark-rank

Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare Washington University in Saint Louis,

https://www.ship.edu/academics/colleges/cas/programs/sociology/sociology_faculty/

Dr. Lawrence Eppard<br /> leeppard@ship.edu<br /> Grove Hall 437<br /> 717-477-1596<br /> Ph.D., University of Florida

Areas of specialization are social stratification and inequalities, poverty and social welfare, racial inequality, culture, sociology of families and social theory.

https://psychology.ucsc.edu/about/people/faculty.php?uid=hbullock

Heather E. Bullock is an American social psychologist. She is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise, and Participatory Governance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bullock is known for her research on people's beliefs about economic disparities and the consequences of stereotypical beliefs about the poor on public policy. This includes work examining attributions about poverty made by news media, and how such attributions influence public support of welfare policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_E._Bullock

https://www.seanlawson.net/2017/09/zettelkasten-researchers-academics/

Hadn't heard of Mills before, but it looks interesing: C. Wright Mills, On Intellectual Craftsmanship, from The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. 1960.

Appendix to The Sociological Imagination (1959, 2000).

A 1952 draft was published as a stand alone journal article in 1980. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02700062

see also: https://hypothes.is/a/_dii9ED4Ee2l-B9ghcZqvA

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. 40th anniversary edition. Oxford University Press, 2000.

https://dictionary.apa.org/phonological-loop

The practice of repeating items as a means of attempting to place them into short-term memory is called maintenance rehearsal. Examples of this practice include repeating a new acquaintance's name or perhaps their phone number multiple times as a means of helping to remember it either for the short term or potentially the long term.

Research on the levels-of processing model of memory indicates that maintenance rehearsal is not as effective at promoting long term memory as methods like elaborative rehearsal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRssjvU2d-s

Starts out with some of the personal histories of how both got into the note making space.

This got more interesting for me around the 1:30 hour mark, but I was waiting for the material that would have shown up at the 3 hour mark (which doesn't exist...).

Scott spoke about the myths of zettelkasten. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/urawkd/the_myths_of_zettelkasten/

He also mentions maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal. These are both part of spaced repetition. The creation of one's own cards helps play into both forms.

https://www.uclaextension.edu/sciences-math/math-statistics/course/theory-and-applications-continued-fractions-math-x-45150

Mike Miller relayed to me on 2022-09-27 on the first meeting of his class Theory and Applications of Continued Fractions that he met a professor colleague walking on campus who mistakenly thought that he was teaching an 8th grade class on basic fractions for the UCLA math department.

Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vladimirovich_Gnedenko

He wrote with/worked with Khinchin and Kolmogorov.

Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Khinchin

Khinchin, Aleksandr Yakovlevich. Continued Fractions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.145.3631.478.b

https://gizmodo.com/justin-long-knows-life-is-short-1849448109

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUbwSiXAWjY

ta ra - bye bye

We [the Welsh] are a magic people, constantly doing magic tricks which is why we need to say "ta da" all the time.

https://welearnwelsh.com/blog/weird-welsh-words/

https://welearnwelsh.com/

A fun little website from someone learning/sharing Welsh.

https://english.radio.cz/archaeologists-prague-uncover-ancient-neolithic-structure-8760696

This seems to be the source of other similar articles around the net on science, archaeology, and art sites.

Will need to hunt for primary literature on roundels for more detail.

There's an irony here in that this "cult" may have actually been a cult of teachers and students. Should the broader thesis bear out, we're going to have lots of references to these cults of teachers lingering in the literature....

https://www.livescience.com/neolithic-roundel-structure-prague

Roundels, primarily located in the area around the Czech Republic, enjoyed about 300 years of popularity before disappearing around 4600 BCE.

Sounds like this shares many of the potential features of Stonehenge, stone and timber circles, and menhirs that fit into Lynne Kelly's thesis on mnemonic devices.

Reading and studying it all without any regard to the Indigenous culture. Steve Martin is using Western perspectives to attempt to understand non-Western art which has a different basis.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/steve-martin-indigenous-art-national-arts-club-2180438

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/28/publisher-blocks-access-ebooks-students-faculty-scramble

I still say that students should do their own work on researching and identifying textbooks and not their professors. They should all be optional and never required. This would fix the textbook issue rapidly.

Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Belknap Press, 2014. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674729018

I agree with many that the black and red are overwhelming on many and make the book a bit less approachable. Warm tones and rich wooden boxes would be more welcome. The 8.5x11" filing cabinets just won't fly. I did like some with the drawer frames/pulls, but put a more generic idea in the frame (perhaps "Ideas"?). From the batch so far, some of my favorites are #64 TopHills, #21 & #22 BigPoints, #13, 14 D'Estudio. Unless that pull quote is from Luhmann or maybe Eco or someone internationally famous, save it for the rear cover or maybe one of the inside flaps. There's an interesting and approachable stock photo I've been sitting on that might work for your cover: Brain and ZK via https://www.theispot.com/stock/webb. Should be reasonably licensable and doesn't have a heavy history of use on the web or elsewhere.

https://www.wrexhamafc.co.uk/news/2022/september/statement--domestic--international-streaming/

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-attorney-general-ken-paxton-subpoena-abortion-lawsuit/

https://www.wrexhamafc.co.uk/news/2022/september/the-impact-of-welcome-to-wrexham/

https://opportunityinsights.org/

https://www.aei.org/articles/what-malcolm-gladwell-gets-wrong-about-poverty/

What creates "strong families"? It's definitely more than a two-parent household. Economic and social support are highly helpful as well as a myriad of other factors.

Watch the potential for subtle right leaning bias here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute#Political_stance_and_impact

If two-parent families are so important, where is the support for all two-parent families? Where is economic support for these going to magically appear? Is he pushing that agenda?

The arrest and incarceration rates for African-American men is primarily a tax on Black families which tends to split them up and destabilize them appalling rates. Why not mention this as something that could be helped in his argument here?

He seems to be doing a lot of cherry picking.

As he rightly says they "might be", but where are his small scale experiments providing any support for these claims??

School-choice is lovely in major cities that might provide it, though often it's a socio-economic ghetto creator moving privileged white children from their dark skinned neighbors. Why not force better public education and funding by rolling back the strangle hold on economic spending going back to Regan? School-choice is nice, but it continually feels more like a dog whistle for institutional and structural racism.

And don't forget that for the smaller communities that only have one school option things are even much more dire.

This seems to fall back on the trope of "two-parent families are the natural state" when in reality, since the late 80's one's chances are better with a two-parent, two-income family which provides far greater stability. His argument here is conflating multiple complex items, an issue he takes with Gladwell himself.

Why not peel apart this two-parent claim the same way? I suspect he may be nodding to the single-earner two-parent mode, but how prevalent is this in American culture now? What other pieces also underpin this? And is it different by state, by race, by culture, etc.

Cross reference with: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/raj-chettys-american-dream/592804

I should read more of Chetty's primary material here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/raj-chettys-american-dream/592804/

read in July 2019, but didn't catch the reference.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Million-Dollar Murray.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2006. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray (.pdf copy available at https://housingmatterssc.org/million-dollar-murray/)

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/27/sum-total-human-knowledge-4/

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/20/sum-total-human-knowledge-3/

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/13/sum-total-human-knowledge-2/

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/06/sum-total-human-knowledge-1/

https://udcc.org/index.php/site/page?view=subject_coverage

Subject coverage of the UDC.

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

http://www.styluslabs.com/

Write300.app

imposed system or on one’s own non-generalizable system, at least when it comes to the subdivisions.

Heyde makes the suggestion of using one's own classification system yet again and even advises against "having to rely on a stranger's imposed system". Does Luhmann see this advice and follow its general form, but adopting a numbering system ostensibly similar, but potentially more familiar to him from public administration?

In a break from the more traditional subject heading filing system of many commonplacing and zettelkasten methods, in addition to this sort of scheme Heyde also suggests potentially using the Dewey Decimal System for organizing one's knowledge.

While Luhmann doesn't use Dewey's system, he does follow the broader advice which allows creating a dense numbering system though he does use a different numbering scheme.

that the sheetification can also be done based on other principles.

Heyde specifically calls the reader to consider other methods in general and points out the Dewey Decimal Classification system as a possibility. This suggestion also may have prompted Luhmann to do some evolutionary work for his own needs.

What is this??

While Heyde spends a significant amount of time on encouraging one to index and file their ideas under one or more subject headings, he address the objection:

“Doesn’t this neglect the importance of sequentiality, context and development, i.e. doesn’t this completely make away with the well-thought out unity of thoughts that the original author created, when ideas are put on individual sheets, particularly when creating excerpts of longer scientific works?"

He suggests that one file such ideas under the same heading and then numbers them sequentially to keep the original author's intention. This might be useful advice for a classroom setting, but perhaps isn't as useful in other contexts.

But for Luhmann's use case for writing and academic research, this advice may actually be counter productive. While one might occasionally care about another author's train of thought, one is generally focusing on generating their own train of thought. So why not take this advice to advance their own work instead of simply repeating the ideas of another? Take the ideas of others along with your own and chain them together using sequential numbers for your own purposes (publishing)!!

So while taking Heyde's advice and expand upon it for his own uses and purposes, Luhmann is encouraged to chain ideas together and number them. Again he does this numbering in a way such that new ideas can be interspersed as necessary.

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?

Heydes Overbearing System

Heyde's method spends almost a full page talking about what to do if one extends a note or writes longer notes. He talks about using larger sheets of paper, carbon copies, folding, dating, clipping, and even stapling.

His method seems to skip the idea of extending a particular card of potentially 2 or more "twins"/"triplets"/"quadruplets" which might then also need to be extended too. Luhmann probably had a logical problem with this as tracking down all the originals and extending them would be incredibly problematic. As a result, he instead opted to put each card behind it's closest similar idea (and number it thus).

If anything, Heyde's described method is one of the most complete of it's day (compare with Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, Webb, Sertillanges, et al.) He discusses a variety of pros and cons, hints and tips, but he also goes deeper into some of the potential flaws and pitfalls for the practicing academic. As a result, many of the flaws he discusses and their potential work arounds (making multiple carbon copies, extending notes, etc.) add to the bulk of the description of the system and make it seem almost painful and overbearing for the affordances it allows. As a result, those reading it with a small amount of knowledge of similar traditions may have felt that there might be a better or easier system. I suspect that Niklas Luhmann was probably one of these.

It's also likely that due to these potentially increasing complexities in such note taking systems that they became to large and unwieldly for people to see the benefit in using. Combined with the emergence of the computer from this same time forward, it's likely that this time period was the beginning of the end for such analog systems and experimenting with them.

Heyde specifically highlights that planning for one's future search efforts by choosing the right keyword or even multiple keywords "seems to be the biggest complaint about the entire system of the slip box and its merit."

Niklas Luhmann apparently spent some time thinking about this, or perhaps even practicing it, before changing his system so that the issue was no longer a problem. As a result, Luhmann's system is much simpler to use and maintain.

Given his primary use of his slip box for academic research and writing, perhaps his solution was in part motivated by putting the notes and ideas exactly where he would both be able to easily find them, but also exactly where he would need them for creating final products in journal articles and books.

With respect to Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten, it seems he eschewed the Heyde's advice to use subject headings as the Anschrift (address). Instead, much like a physical street address or card card catalog system, he substituted a card address instead. This freed him up from needing to copy cards multiple times to insert them in different places as well as needing to create multiple cards to properly index the ideas and their locations.

Without this subtle change Luhmann's 90,000 card collection could have easily been 4-5 times its size.

As many people used slip boxes in 1930s Germany, publishers sold texts, not as typical books, but as file card collections!

Link to: Suggestion that Scott Scheper publish his book on zettelkasten as a zettelkasten.

often repeated advice, especially in the modern period.

Just like Heyde indicated about the slip box note taking system with respect to traditional notebook based systems in 1931, one of the reasons we still aren't broadly using Heyde's system is that we "do not know any better". This is compounded with the fact that the computer revolution makes information retrieval much easier than it had been before. However there is such an information glut and limitations to search, particularly if it's stored in multiple places, that it may be advisable to go back to some of these older, well-tried methods.

Link to ideas of "single source" of notes as opposed to multiple storage locations as is seen in social media spaces in the 2010-2020s.

Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

(link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

(Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

An explicit reference in 1931 in a section on note taking to cross links between entries in accounting ledgers. This linking process is a a precursor to larger database processes seen in digital computing.

Were there other earlier references that are this explicit within either note making or accounting contexts? Surely... (See also: Beatrice Webb's scientific note taking)

Just the word "digital" computing defines that there must have been an "analog' computing which preceded it. However we think of digital computing in much broader terms than we may have of the analog process.

Human thinking is heavily influenced by associative links, so it's only natural that we should want to link our notes together on paper as we've done for tens of thousands of years (at least.)

According to Scott Scheper's conversation with Clemens Luhmann, Niklas' son, Niklas Luhmann read Heyde (1931) in 1951. He would have been 24 years old and just out of law school at the University of Freiburg (1946-1949) and starting into a career in public administration in Lüneburg. (It would have been before he went to Harvard in 1961 and before he left the civil service in 1962. (Wikipedia entry for dates here)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

Could this be linked to my FUD thesis about decisions based on possibilities rather than realities?

This seems slightly different than the mere-exposure effect that Ahrens (2017) delineated. Are they same/different/related, but contextually different?

Popularity ≠ quality in social media.

early study relating to both culture and memory decay

What does memory decay scale as? Is it different for different levels of "stickiness"?

The upshot of this paper seems to be "information overload alone can explain why fake news can become viral."

Recall that this isn't new:

Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know

The new portions are the acceleration of the issue by social media and the inflammation by artificial intelligence.

In the attention economy, social media is the equivalent of fast food. Just like going out for fine dining or even healthier gourmet cooking at home, we need to make the time and effort to consume higher quality information sources. Books, journal articles, and longer forms of content with more editorial and review which take time and effort to produce are better choices.

In a society consumed with information overload, it is easier for our brains to allow our well evolved cognitive biases to decide not only what to pay attention to, but what to believe.

This sounds like interleaving?

Of course this idea of "learned right" sounds a lot like the problems built into "just". He defines it as meaning "understanding" but there's more he's packing into the word. While his vein example is lovely, the bigger issue is contextualizing everything all the time, which is something that commonly isn't done or even done well over time by educators. This work takes time and effort to help students do this as they're not doing it for themselves until much later in life.

retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of their memory representations.” (Stein et al. 1984, 522)

Want to read this paper.

Isn't this a major portion of what many mnemotechniques attempt to do? "increase distinctiveness of memory representations"? And didn't he just wholly dismiss the entirety of mnemotechniques as "tricks" a few paragraphs back? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/dwktfDiuEe2sxaePuVIECg)

How can one build or design this into a pedagogical system? How is this potentially related to Andy Matuschak's mnemonic medium research?

Elaboration has been shown to be the most successful learning approach. (See McDaniel and Donnelly 1996) It is a two step process of being able to write about it and to use it in alternate contexts.

How is the Feynman Technique similar to/different from elaboration? It would seem to be missing the second portion.

This is one of the first times I've come across another word for part of the Feynman technique I've been looking for.

He's wholly wrong on this score because he lacks a deeper appreciation for how this works or its value to oral societies. He uses the word "trick" in a disparaging sense with respect to mnemotechniques.

Because Hermann Ebbinghaus' early studies on memory, retrieval, and spaced repetition focused on meaningless random letter combinations that ha no natural associations, he started a field of learning theories that separated the ideas of understanding and learning. Learning is creating connections between ideas we already know (contextualization).