https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fGMOEWudc1PhmLIDfj6MtRdmOVITynsHNxG-XW89Mxw/edit
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/FastSascha</span> in Beta Reading: Communication with Zettelkastens : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>12/23/2022 12:02:16</time>)</cite></small>
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/ancient-apocalypse-graham-hancock/
I’m reminded of an old poem by Bertolt Brecht, which my Viennese grandmother, the daughter of a lifelong socialist and union man, taught me. It’s called “Questions From a Worker Who Reads”:
Bertolt Brecht has a poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" which points out how necessary societies are to their great accomplishments which can't ever be solely attributed to kings and leaders as if there is only a "Great Man theory of history".
At its most tame, Ancient Apocalypse simply reinforces a deeply conservative understanding of human history. Conservative, yes, because despite Hancock’s claim to challenge every orthodoxy going, his ideas—like those of Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, Erich von Däniken, and other so-called “pseudo-archaeologists”—rest on a baseline assumption that technology should always be advancing in linear fashion, from primitive simplicity to modern complexity.
There is a broad, conservative baseline assumption within much of archaeology that technology always proceeds in a linear fashion from primitive simplicity to modern complexity.
Archaeologists and historians need to watch carefully for this cognitive bias.
Petrie was also a eugenicist, who believed in the improvement of society through selective “breeding-out” of intellectually inferior races. While revealing evidence for the foundations of ancient Egypt, he attributed it on biometric grounds to a “New Race” of invaders from outside Africa, opening a space of the imagination that has since come to be filled by all manner of theories about the “alien” architects of ancient civilizations. It started with the “race science” that is part and parcel of archaeology’s own problematic history.
The study of Egypt “before the pharaohs” was pioneered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a British archaeologist called William Matthew Flinders Petrie, familiar to generations of students as “the father of archaeological science.”
https://mattgemmell.scot/atomic-thoughts/
Scott is the pope of paper.
https://pkm.social/@bobdoto/109558009858082429
quote by Bob Doto. :)
reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/zsljal/canvas_is_awesome_helped_me_solve_a_case
For the anacapa chart afficionados: https://www.vaultofculture.com/nst
https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/Stationery.html
Increasing your use of tools without increasing your exposure to distractions is a great way to increase your abilities and get a lot more done.
Good stationary is a cheap vice.
My day to day notebook is a soft 5 inch by 3.5 inch pocket notebook as shown below. I use a mechanical pencil when out and about (no breakage or sharpening) and take a small eraser (in this case an eraser shaped like Lego). This book is good for notes and ideas. Notice I cross them out when I have acted on them in some way (done the work, or given up on the idea). The goal of the daily notebook is to eventually throw it away (not save it). So all work needs to move out and I need to be able to know it has been moved.
If we consider organizations (universities, corporations, governments and so on) as organisms (a view I do not agree with) we can argue some increase in intelligence and institutional memory through record keeping and information technology. But, in my opinion, organizations don’t have significant emergent reasoning capabilities that aren’t really more properly attributed to their members.
What does Hidalgo have to say with respect to this quote? Can we push this argument?
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Mount</span> in Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought | MZLabs (<time class='dt-published'>11/30/2022 13:11:31</time>)</cite></small>
I think one of the the things that 00:00:27 really separates us from the high primates is that we're tool builders and I read a a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet the Condor used 00:00:41 the least energy to move a kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list it was not not too proud of a showing for the crown of 00:00:53 creation so that didn't look so good but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle 00:01:07 blew the Condor away completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me what a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the 00:01:19 equivalent of a bicycle for our minds
Cleaned up quote:
I think one of the [the] things that really separates us from the high primates is that [uh] we're tool builders. And I read a [uh] study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The Condor used the least energy to move a kilometer and [uh] humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not [not] too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. So [uh] that didn't look so good, but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle blew the Condor away—completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me. [uh] What a computer is to me is: it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.<br /> —Steve Jobs in Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. Documentary. Krainin Productions, 1990.
Snippet from full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bicycle-technology/
This is the article Steve Jobs is referencing in his bicycle for the mind quote.
Wilson, S. S. “Bicycle Technology.” Scientific American 228, no. 3 (1973): 81–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0373-81
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
Plato. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL036/1914/volume.xml.
For following my WordPress website from the Fediverse: https://fedifollow.glitch.me/follow?account=%40chrisaldrich%40boffosocko.com
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>codefoodpixelsLuke Bonaccorsi</span> in Luke Bonaccorsi: "Because sharing follow links i…" - Indieweb.Social (<time class='dt-published'>12/22/2022 11:41:16</time>)</cite></small>
https://help.micro.blog/t/whats-the-difference-between-micro-blog-and-mastodon/1395/2
https://shawngraham.github.io/hist1900/#the-big-idea
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</span> in Spending today tinkering with a combi… (<time class='dt-published'>12/18/2022 00:02:04</time>)</cite></small>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/17/how-to-join-mastodon/
Mastodon makes the front section of the Washington Post!? Twitter is in trouble...
In advance of deleting my Twitter account, I made this web page that lets you search my tweets, link to an archived version, and read whole threads I wrote.https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/I will eventually release this as a website I host where you drop your Twitter zip archive in and it spits out the 100% static site you see here. Then you can just upload it somewhere and you have an archive that is also easy to style how you like it.
https://friend.camp/@darius/109521972924049369
Anatolia was a major focus of the Abbasids’ search for ancientGreek texts in the ninth century.
Ephesus was cut off from trade and communication (today it isseveral miles inland); by the thirteenth century, it was all butdeserted.
The river mouth at Ephesus gradually filled with silt and eventually "moved" the location several miles inland. As a result, over time it went from a thriving port city to a nearly deserted town by the thirteenth century as the result of being cut off from trade and communication.
InAD 117, a great library was built there in honour of the Romansenator Celsus, who was buried in a mausoleum beneath it. Thisimpressive building housed 12,000 scrolls, making it the third largestcollection, after those of Alexandria and Pergamon.
the local healer, or wise man or woman, whowould have particular knowledge of local plants and herbalremedies. This knowledge was oral, however, and its practitioners,for the most part, were illiterate.
Example of an implicit bias against orality out of ignorance
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.
Paper was imported to Europe before the fourteenth century, often fromDamascus, hence it was known as “charta damascena.” It was expensive,but, as production developed in Europe, the price fell and it graduallyreplaced parchment.
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.
Atbest, papyrus only lasts for a couple of hundred years before the textneeds to be recopied onto a new scroll.
In 523, Cassiodorus was appointed magister officiorum (chiefadvisor) to the Ostrogothic King of Italy, Theodoric, taking over fromthe only other major scholar in Italy at that time, Ancinius ManliusSeverinus Boethius (480–524).
new genres of religious literature were created, like hagiography (thestories of saints’ lives)
Moller places the invention of the genre of hagiography around the year 500 with the stories of the lives of the saints.
He filled the library at Vivarium with texts onthese subjects and transformed the production of manuscripts in hisscriptorium by developing proper standards and methods forcopying. As one of the few notable scholars of his period,Cassiodorus played a vital role in the survival of classical culture inItaly, saving books from the smoking ruins of Roman libraries,preserving and reproducing them
What exactly were the standards created for copying manuscripts by Cassiodorus at the scriptorium at Vivarium?
Montecassino became famous for its library and scriptorium
In 529, two crucial events tipped the balance even further infavour of Christianity.
The rise of Christianity over paganism took a stronger turn for Christianity in the year 529 as the result of Justinian's closing the Academy in Athens and Saint Benedict's founding of a monastery.
The Emperor Justinian closed the Academy inAthens, the centre of Neoplatonist philosophy and pagan resistance.
to the success of Christianity’s victory over paganism, which hadtraditionally championed the pursuit of happiness and denouncedpain as evil. The triumph of suffering over pleasure had its mostextreme expression in the early monasteries.
People clung to the promise of salvation. The idea that the more you suffered here on earth, the better your time would be in the afterlife was a potent shield against the desperate realities of everyday life in the fifth and sixth centuries. This doctrine was central
Relationship to Eric Hoffer's thesis in The True Believer and mass movements' "hope for the future" even if the hope is for one's afterlife? This sort of hope can be seen in both Islam and Christianity
Theonly surviving manuscripts that were actually made in the ancientworld (before around AD 500) are small fragments of papyri found ona rubbish tip in Egypt and some scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri atHerculaneum.*1
Rubbish tip, places the author as speaking British English.
Odd that she doesn't specifically reference the Cairo Geniza by name here.
She's also dismissing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Are there other repositories of older texts missing here?
important works like Galen’s On Demonstration, Theophrastus’ OnMines and Aristarchus’ treatise on heliocentric theory (which mighthave changed the course of astronomy dramatically if it hadsurvived) all slipped through the cracks of time.
In the latefifth century, a man called Stobaeus compiled a huge anthology of1,430 poetry and prose quotations. Just 315 of them are from worksthat still exist—the rest are lost.
By AD 500, the Christian Church had drawn most of the talented men of theage into its service, in either missionary, organizational, doctrinal, or purelycontemplative activity.—Edward Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages
quote
Google is like the Catholic Church both as organizers of information and society<br /> Just as the Catholic Church used funding from the masses to employ most of the smartest and talented to its own needs and mission from 500-1000 AD, Google has used advertising technology to collect people and employed them to their own needs. For one, the root was religion and the other technology, but both were organizing people and information for their own needs.
Who/what organization will succeed them? What will its goals and ethics entail?
(originally written 2022-12-11)
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/.
FOSSDLE Commons (new OER Foundation project) https://social.fossdle.org/ 4 OERu https://mastodon.oeru.org/ 6 Open EdTech https://openedtech.social/ 8 Fossodon (open source) https://fosstodon.org/ 1 Wikis World (wiki enthusiasts) https://wikis.world 1
The “Net” in “Antinet”
There's so little substance here in the "net" portion, why include it other than as something that seemingly concludes the name?
Before we move on, there’s one last thing you should know. It pertains tothe net in Antinet.
wordiness
but you’re welcome to use whateverterminology you like best.
why isn't this the case in the other definitions provided? note types, slipbox vs card index, etc.?
Later we’ll be exploring the tree structure of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten inmore detail. We’ll be exploring how to think of it. More practically, we’ll beexploring how to leverage it to help you develop and evolve your knowledgeover time.
Later, later, later....
this paragraph adds little
rather, it’s about exploration, as one scholar putit. The tree structure of the Zettelkasten enables meaningful exploration, asAlberto Cevolini points out: “secondary memories themselves have an innerorder that allows for exploration.”52
Who is the first scholar? Or is this just an inadvertent duplication of the same fact?
We’ll go into detail on this later on in the book; but
delete
Let’s not get carried away, however. Let’s jump back to the question: howare we to think of Luhmann’s notebox system?It’s actually quite simple, and I’ll share with you precisely how you shouldthink of the Zettelkasten in just a moment.
Stop asking questions and then putting them off. These sentences do nothing to support the present flow of the argument... why not push them to later when you're ready to make the argument?
In brief, Luhmann’s notebox system was not dynamic and fluid. Yet it wasnot one of order, either.
I don't trust these claims any further than I can throw them.
It was with this in mind that Luhmann crafted hisnotebox system.
this argument is not based in evidence<br /> We don't know that he actually crafted his system. We can certainly say as is the case for most that once using it, he certainly evolved it.
Much about numeric-alpha addresses willbe covered later on in this book.
Seems like 10% of the book is sentences like this putting of details until later...
as long as you operate within theframework of the four principles I’m introducing now
Thus far, Scheper has only been making the argument to do as I say because I know best. He's not laying out the reasons or affordances that justify this approach.
In this second principle it's ostensibly just "the possibility of linking", but this was broadly done previously using subject headings or keywords along with indices and page numbers which are logically equivalent to these note card addresses.
even Socrates himself, we learnby way of his followers, derided the emerging popularity of taking physicalnotes.
I recall portions about Socrates deriding "writing" as a mode of expression, but I don't recall specific sections on note taking. What is Ann Blair's referent for this?
The "emerging popularity of taking physical notes" seems not to be in evidence with only one exemplar of a student who lost their notes within the Blair text.
There’s magic within the analog medium incapable of beingreproduced in digital tools.
A side reference here to magic, but he defers what this is... why mention it if you're not going to back it up here?
TRUE
why keep harping on this framing?
“The florilegium was a type of ‘double memory’ towhich scholars could resort anytime their personal memory failed, the filingcabinet behaves as a true communication partner with its own idiosyncrasiesand its own opinions.”31
I'll have to look into this argument as it feels dramatically false to me.
The only way I can see this is if one only uses their commonplace for excerpts and no other notes, a pattern which may have been the case for some, but certainly not all.
Dutchhumanist, Desiderius Erasmus
not an appositive phrase, no comma
Yet, there are shortcomings of commonplace books. They embody that of a“subsidiary memory,” whereas the Antinet is more than this. The Antinet isa second mind, an equal.
Why though? The slight difference in form doesn't account for any differences claimed here.
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.
it’s time to belaborthis matter further
must we?
The reason slip is translated from zettel stems from a translation defining itas a slip of paper. In popular English-German translation dictionaries, slip ofpaper remains listed but is no longer used as the preferred definition.21 Themost widely used and arguably the “best among all” translation sources isone that does not hold slip as the most correct term for zettel.22 It holds thatthe most correct translation for the term zettel is simply a note.
There's a lot of semantics here, but for what reason? What cause?
The term Zettelkasten in American English translates to notebox. The termnotebox is the shortened form of a “notecard box.” Zettel is the German wordfor note, and kasten is the German word for box
We've really waited until page 109 for a definition?
The principles I’m presenting are mapped onto Luhmann’s four principles;however, in my perfectly biased opinion, they are more simple and usefulin understanding the Zettelkasten.
Why not go with Luhmann's canonical four instead of reframing them? What are they? List them up front before comparing and contrasting them with the others in the general space. It's hard for the reader to follow these arguments without clearer delineations between them.
Luhmann’s system is built entirely of physical, not digital,parts. With those parts of Luhmann’s system stripped away, deleted, andmorphed from physical form to metaphysical form, the critical essence ofthe Zettelkasten system has been demoted.
Interesting parallelism here with the metaphysical actions of governments and specifically the actions of American soldiers' treatment of Luhmann in the prior section....
beliefs
belief is a charged word when attempting to build systems for uncovering truths...
I hope I wouldn’t call it a wiki!
There's some flawed logic here in that Ward Cunningham outlined his version of a wiki and others who created versions thereafter modified and potentially expanded on that original "definition". We now have a general consensus of a wiki, but it's not necessarily the same for everyone. Scheper doesn't leave any fungible room in the semantics of his argument here and thereby forces one into a practicing the "one true way", which doesn't exist as even Luhmann's own practice varied over time.
I’m not against progress; however, it becomes confusing when a new concept(i.e. digital notetaking apps with linking capabilities) ensconces itself in aterm used by an entirely different concept (i.e. Niklas Luhmann’sZettelkasten).
I'm hoping he'll discuss and compare/contrast the affordances of each of these systems, but I suspect that he won't.
Even thoughsuch apps are thought of as a Zettelkasten, the magic that Luhmann builtinto his system is lost.
I'm not a fan of the magic framing here and I'm not really sure that Luhmann consciously designed or built his system to do this. Prior systems had these "magical" features before Luhmann's.
fundamental truth
Harnessing the dictionary into fronting for his zettelkasten religion?
DanAllosso · 36 min. agoThanks, Scott! I'll have a Scrintal "board" with photographed analog notes to show soon, too. Solved the fire and flood problem.
ephemeral sources .t3_znbvw3._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/znbvw3/ephemeral_sources/
If it makes you feel better, this is a long standing problem of document and source loss. As just a small historical example from a fellow, but very early, note taker and practitioner of the ars excerpendi (art of excerpting):
Presumed to have been written in the fifth century Stobaeus compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as The Anthologies of excerpts containing 1,430 poetry and prose quotations of classical ancient works from Greece and Rome of which only 315 original sources are still extant in the 21st century.[1] Large portions of our knowledge of many famous classical texts and plays are the result of his notes. Perhaps your notes will one day serve as the only references to famous documents of our time?
Often for digital copies of things, I'll use a browser bookmarklet to quickly save archive copies of pages to the Internet Archive as I'm excerpting or annotating them. See https://help.archive.org/help/save-pages-in-the-wayback-machine/ for some ways of doing this.
[1] 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/.
However, this has been the case for centuries, such as Chris has demonstrated several times here.
Ostensibly a reference to me??
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?
However, most of the stuff I read about personal knowledge management is about systems, apps, setups or plugins, and never really about its purpose. Why bother doing all this?
The crucial question to the whole enterprise. They should have asked this question from the start of the essay or the start of their journey, not at the end.
Again shiny object syndrome seems to have gotten them...
Fact-based disciplines such as natural sciences have less potential for deeply linked, atomic zettel notes than arts and humanities. There is not much to discuss about or 'generate insight' on photosynthesis, algebra or network protocols if you are not a scientist.
Again note taking is the wrong tool for fact-based acquisition. Apparently this is not advice given in most sources. Spaced repetition and mnemonic methods are far better suited for memorizing and remembering basic facts.
Take notes on the surprising and unique. Take notes as writing you'll reuse later. Take notes to understand.
There are different kinds of information, some of which don't make sense being recorded at all. I was struggling with what to record and what not to record for a long time. For example, I took notes on programming syntax that are just useless (most of these things can be googled in seconds and they are usually decently documented already).
How was this not obvious from the jump? Was the author of the essay so distracted by shiny object syndrome they failed to see the obvious?
It's like taking notes in a language class... the goal is to read and write with fluency, so you practice these things regularly and gain fluency over time. Taking notes about the grammar and syntax of a language is highly unlikely to get you to fluency. Note taking is the wrong tool for a number of processes and the user should very quickly get a gut feeling for what's useful and what is not.
This author obviously missed the boat here.
For example I had a few notes on principles of modern cryptography that came in handy when I had to write a paper about a related topic for my studies. But these cases were rare at best, most of these notes were never looked at again.
The one shining moment in the whole essay and they don't seem to realize where the benefit or use actually was. They finally had a reason to have taken notes and the ideas shone here. But they've written off the tools because they didn't understand when to use them.
Hammers are cool, but unless you're a professional carpenter, you don't carry it around all the time and use it constantly to hammer things. The same is true of note taking as a tool. You might use it regularly if you're a writer or an academic perhaps, but for hourly use in your day-to-day? Almost definitely not.
Writing permanent notes was time consuming as f***. On one side writing them helped me grasp the concepts they described on a deep level. One the other side I think this would have been possible without putting an emphasis on referencing, atomicity, deep linking, etc.
The time it takes to make notes is an important investment. If it's not worth the time, what were you actually doing? Evergreen/permanent notes are only useful if you're going to use them later in some sort of output. Beyond this they may be useful for later search.
But if you're not going to search them or review them, which the writer says they didn't, then what was the point?
Have a reason for taking a note is of supreme importance. Otherwise, you're just collecting scraps...
People who have this problem shouldn't be using digital tools they should be spending even more time writing by hand. This will force them into being more parsimonious.
Funnily enough the ROI on these notes was a lot higher than all the permanent/evergreen/zettel notes I had written.
The missing context here: Why were they writing permanent/evergreen notes in the first place?
But then life went on and nothing really happened.
This essay seems to be more about shiny object syndrome. The writer doesn't seem to realize any problems they've created. Way too much digging into tools and processes. Note the switching and trying out dozens of applications. (Dear god, why??!!) Also looks like a lot of collecting digitally for no clear goal. As a result of this sort of process it appears that many of the usual affordances were completely blocked, unrealized, and thus useless.
No clear goal in mind for anything other than a nebulous being "better".
One goal was to "retain what I read", but nothing was actively used toward this stated goal. Notes can help a little, but one would need mnemonic methods and possibly spaced repetition neither of which was mentioned.
A list of specific building blocks within the methods and expected outcomes would have helped this person (and likely others), but to my knowledge this doesn't exist as a thing yet though bits and pieces are obviously floating around.<br /> TK: building blocks of note taking
Evidence here for what we'll call the "perfect system fallacy", an illness which often goes hand in hand with "shiny object syndrome".
Too many systems bound together will create so much immediate complexity that there isn't any chance for future complexity or emergence as the proximal system is doomed to failure. One should instead strive for immediate and excessive simplicity which might then build with time, use, and practice into something more rich and complex. This idea seems to be either completely missed or lost in the online literature and especially the blogosphere and social media.
people had come up with solutions Sadly, despite thousands of variations on some patterns, people don't seem to be able to settle on either "one solution" or their "own solution" and in trying to do everything all at once they become lost, set adrift, and lose focus on any particular thing they've got as their own goal.
In this particular instance, "retaining what they read" was totally ignored. Worse, they didn't seem to ever review over their notes of what they read.
I was pondering about different note types, fleeting, permanent, different organisational systems, hierarchical, non-hierarchical, you know the deal.
Why worry about all the types of notes?! This is the problem with these multi-various definitions and types. They end up confusing people without giving them clear cut use cases and methods by which to use them. They get lost in definitional overload and aren't connecting the names with actual use cases and affordances.
I often felt lost about what to takes notes on and what not to take notes on.
Why? Most sources seem to have reasonable guidance on this. Make notes on things that interest you, things which surprise you.
They seem to have gotten lost in all the other moving pieces. Perhaps advice on this should come first, again in the middle, and a third time at the end of these processes.
I'm curious how deeply they read sources and which sources they read to come to these conclusions? Did they read a lot of one page blog posts with summarizations or did they read book length works by Ahrens, Forte, Allosso, Scheper, et al? Or did they read all of these and watch lots of crazy videos as well. Doing it "all" will likely lead into the shiny object syndrome as well.
This seems to outline a list of specifically what not to do and how not to approach these systems and "popular" blog posts that are an inch deep and a mile wide rather than some which have more depth.
Worst of all, I spent so much time taking notes and figuring out a personal knowledge management system that I neglected the things I actually wanted to learn about. And even though I kind of always knew this, I kept falling into the same trap.
Definitely a symptom of shiny object syndrome!
Although some of them took a lot of time to create (I literally wrote whole book summaries for a while), their value was negligible in hindsight.
What was the purpose of these summaries? Were they of areas which weren't readily apparent in hindsight? Often most people's long summaries are really just encapsulalizations of what is apparent from the book jacket. Why bother with this? If they're just summaries of the obvious, then they're usually useless for review specifically because they're obvious. This is must make-work.
You want to pull out the specific hard-core insights that weren't obvious to you from the jump.
Most self-help books can be motivating while reading them and the motivation can be helpful, but generally they will only contain one or two useful ideas
I barely, if ever, looked at or refered back to the bulk of notes I had created.
If you don't refer back to your notes for any reason, why bother taking them? Were they so boring? Was there nothing of surprise in them for having taken them in the first place?
Often note taking (writing) for understanding can be initially useful, but reviewing over these can be less useful in a larger corpus of notes. File the boring and un-useful things away. Center the important and the surprising.
IMO ZK has always been a tool for writers - who are writing complex things for other people to read - to gather and organize information for that expressed purpose. They could be book writers, essay writers, academic paper/thesis writers, speech writers, bloggers, etc, but they've gotta be output-focused.
via an anecdotal reply from /deltadeep
Many have frequently provided this advice, but they're missing a number of other affordances, one of the key one's being combinatorial creativity, and this often, because they're not consciously aware of it as a concept or a useful affordance or it's potential outcomes.
Presumed to have been written in the fifth century Stobaeus compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as The Anthologies of excerpts containing 1,430 poetry and prose quotations of works of which only 315 are still extant in the 21st century.[10]
footnote: Moller, Violet (2019). The Map of Knowledge (1st ed.). Doubleday. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-385-54176-3.
I wrote this snippet yesterday.
M. A. Friedman’s publication of Goitein’s India(link is external) book
https://www.google.com/books/edition/India_Traders_of_the_Middle_Ages/WMj5aFA3bjQC?hl=en
I've seen a few references to Goitein's "India book". This seems to be the referent, which somehow never seems to be called by title, even in contexts of academics who love citations. Is it shorthand? Was the book published posthumously? (2008, so yes)
Wikipedia calls it out as such as well...
India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents From the Cairo Geniza (ISBN 9789004154728), 2008 (also known as "India Book")
This has hints of the stereotypical Borscht Belt humor seen in "you never call, you never write" and Jewish mother disappointment.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Princeton Geniza Lab on Twitter (@GenizaLab)</span> in "New join for this letter from a disconsolate mother to her son in al-Ushmūnayn (Upper Egypt), 1146–54 CE. Found by @OdedZinger! https://t.co/w86PRW7eew https://t.co/ldRvosxY2a" (<time class='dt-published'>12/16/2022 10:10:53</time>)</cite></small>
The Princeton Geniza Project(link is external) is a database of more than 30,000 records and 4,600 transcriptions of documentary geniza texts. Since 1986, the PGP has been dedicated to discovering and describing unpublished documents; maintaining a full-text retrieval database of geniza documents; and creating new transcriptions and translations.
https://genizalab.princeton.edu/about/history-princeton-geniza-lab
Keeping track of research materials used to require an excellent memory, exceptional bookkeeping skills or blind luck; now we have databases.
Love the phrasing of this. :)
But a 1901 article(link is external) by Solomon Schechter hinted at the cache’s potential for social history.
Goitein accumulated more than 27,000 index cards in his research work over the span of 35 years. (Approximately 2.1 cards per day.)
His collection can broadly be broken up into two broad categories: 1. Approximately 20,000 cards are notes covering individual topics generally making of the form of a commonplace book using index cards rather than books or notebooks. 2. Over 7,000 cards which contain descriptions of a single fragment from the Cairo Geniza.
A large number of cards in the commonplace book section were used in the production of his magnum opus, a six volume series about aspects of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, which were published as A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993).
https://genizalab.princeton.edu/resources/goiteins-index-cards
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/Didactico</span> in Goitein's Index Cards : antinet (<time class='dt-published'>12/15/2022 23:12:33</time>)</cite></small>
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).
Three editions were published by Conrad Gessner (Zurich, 1543; Basle, 1549; Zurich; 1559),
Konrad Gessner published three editions of Stobaeus' Anthology (Zurich, 1543; Basel, 1549; and Zurich, 1559).
He would thus have had this as an example of a compilation of excerpts at his disposal and as an example for his own excerpting work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stobaeus
Stobaeus of Stobi in Macedonia Salutaris, fl. 5th C AD
aka Joannes Stobaeus, Ἰωάννης ὁ Στοβαῖος, Ioannis Stobaei, Iōannou Stobaiou, Ioannis Stobæi
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603551884748460034.html
Elon Musk / Twitter banning major journalists is not a good look.
https://infosec.exchange/@atax1a/109400028861061670
Voldemortations of Elon's name: - Elmo - Elno - Melon - Melon Husk - Felon Muck
You know, I haven’t been to the movies in over three years, and at this point I’m not sure what would bring me back.
reply to https://werd.io/2022/you-know-i-havent-been-to-the
@benwerd Having kids makes the value proposition even worse... (and I'm saying this as a movie addict whose run a theater before).
The day after Jack posted this, Revue announced it would be shutting down and data would disappear in January 2023.
The archived version of the article can be found on the InternetArchive at https://web.archive.org/web/20221215214051/https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jackjack/issues/a-native-internet-protocol-for-social-media-1503112
Because I am as interested in the attitudes and assumptions which are implicit in the evidence as in those which were explicitly articulated at the time, I have got into the habit of reading against the grain. Whether it is a play or a sermon or a legal treatise, I read it not so much for what the author meant to say as for what the text incidentally or unintentionally reveals.
Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and surely other researchers must often "read against the grain" which historian Keith Thomas defines as reading a text, not so much for what the author was explicitly trying to directly communicate to the reader, but for the small tidbits that the author through the text "incidentally or unintentionally reveals."
The cult objects included five standing stones, two basalt altars, two pottery libation vessels and two portable shrines.
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Research_fellowship
Seeing this a bit late...
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jason Tucker</span> in Mastodon, indieweb and the fediverse (<time class='dt-published'>11/27/2022 18:45:24</time>)</cite></small>
I'm finding that IndieBlocks may be the way to go since most of the indieweb plugins that are out there are lacking block editor compatibility and most of them state you need classic editor enabled which isn't helpful if you are trying to move forward with the way in which WordPress is going with the block editor. Maybe some of these devs haven't "learn javascript deeply" like Matt Mullenweg suggested and are still stuck in PHP land like many of the people like me are, sadly.
Anecdotal evidence of long time WordPress fans who are being left behind in the move to Gutenberg and more JavaScript.
https://jasontucker.blog/14183/mastodon-indieweb-and-the-fediverse
On my own website(s) I'm looking to write more content and share more of my experiences. I'm at a time in my life that documenting what is going on so I can recall things easier would be helpful, a place to publicly share my notes in hopes that it will help someone else.
Hints of personal website as commonplace book.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/ambient-genius
It's not stated in the piece, but there's a hint of Brian Eno as a lone genius within music, but the piece explicitly explores his own creative practices and collaborations which go toward creating his creativity and genius by way of his path through music.
“I have a trick that I used in my studio, because I have these twenty-eight-hundred-odd pieces of unreleased music, and I have them all stored in iTunes,” Eno said during his talk at Red Bull. “When I’m cleaning up the studio, which I do quite often—and it’s quite a big studio—I just have it playing on random shuffle. And so, suddenly, I hear something and often I can’t even remember doing it. Or I have a very vague memory of it, because a lot of these pieces, they’re just something I started at half past eight one evening and then finished at quarter past ten, gave some kind of funny name to that doesn’t describe anything, and then completely forgot about, and then, years later, on the random shuffle, this thing comes up, and I think, Wow, I didn’t hear it when I was doing it. And I think that often happens—we don’t actually hear what we’re doing. . . . I often find pieces and I think, This is genius. Which me did that? Who was the me that did that?”
Example of Brian Eno using ITunes as a digital music zettelkasten. He's got 2,800 pieces of unreleased music which he plays on random shuffle for serendipity, memory, and potential creativity. The experience seems to be a musical one which parallels Luhmann's ideas of serendipity and discovery with the ghost in the machine or the conversation partner he describes in his zettelkasten practice.
In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
In 1978, he started to use the term “ambient music”: the concept stretched back to describe “Discreet Music” and the work of earlier composers, like Satie, who coined the term “furniture music,” for compositions that would be more functional than expressive.
But taste is not an act—it’s an opinion.
Eno heard about No Wave, then the dominant style for downtown bands who were taking punk to its logical extremes—abandoning song form, playing entirely outside of formal tunings, and foregrounding noise over signal.
Eno’s strategies don’t always appeal to the musicians he works with. In Geeta Dayal’s book about the album, also titled “Another Green World,” the bassist Percy Jones recalls, “There was this one time when he gave everybody a piece of paper, and he said write down 1 to 100 or something like that, and then he gave us notes to play against specific numbers.” Phil Collins, who played drums on the album, reacted to these instructions by throwing beer cans across the room. “I think we got up to about 24 and then we gave up and did something else,” Jones said.
Example of Brian Eno using combinatorial creativity using cards to generate music.
This sounds similar to a process used by Austin Kleon which I've noted before.
Eno was moving toward a music that changed your perception of the space around you. Geography could be as memorable as melody.
ways to link this to oral traditions in music and memory?!?
Both albums are perverse, slightly agitated, and playful, with many of the lyrics generated randomly and cut together from various sources (mostly Eno’s own notebooks).
Brian Eno had a notebook-based practice of some sort.
The band began rehearsing in Eno’s house, with Eno acting as “sound manipulator,” a cross between a live-sound engineer and a band member.
Sound manipulator, what a great title for a business card.
“I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behavior, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters,” he said later.
We should do better at teaching and training creative behavior in schools. We say that we encourage exploration but somehow do it in all the wrong ways such we discourage it wholly.
At Ipswich, he studied under the unorthodox artist and theorist Roy Ascott, who taught him the power of what Ascott called “process not product.”
"process not product"
Zettelkasten-based note taking methods, and particularly that followed by Luhmann, seem to focus on process and not product.
Behind Eno stand John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Erik Satie, but those guys didn’t make pop records.
As he told Keyboard, in 1981, “Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.”
Eno is widely known for coining the term “ambient music,”
https://mapofstories.scot/
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>awarm.space</span> in Making a modern ebook with Standard Ebooks (<time class='dt-published'>08/02/2021 12:08:19</time>)</cite></small>
Censorship and Information Control During Information RevolutionsExploring how new information technologies from the printing press to the digital age have stimulated new forms of censorship and information control.
https://voices.uchicago.edu/censorship/
Related YouTube channel/videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeNP7NIWmB70wFBv9QolYkg
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2022/12/the-vikings-in-africa/145505
Published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper also shows that the mice share similarities in mitochondrial DNA with Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with mice found in Portugal.
Use of DNA on rodents to indicate ancient trade and travel.
The “Book of Roads and Kingdoms”, an eleventh-century geography text by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri, describes the Vikings as “Majus”, a term for heathens and fire-worshipers.
Majus cognate with magi, magic?
https://www.granarybooks.com/pages/books/GB_176/aram-saroyan/the-letter-book?soldItem=true
Aram Saroyan decomposed a 1968 letter to his father into 195 recto pages containing fragments of the original.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>taurusnoises</span> in (2) Oblique Strategies, a custom zettelkasten for creativity : antinet (<time class='dt-published'>12/14/2022 13:07:14</time>)</cite></small>
Good teachers need to have the context of the student to know what level of explanation they need to give to satisfy the curiosity of the learner. (Also a potential reason that online programmatic learning is difficult as having the appropriate context to skip portions is incredibly hard to do with computers.)
General rule of thumb: The levels of the depth of explanations provided are generally proportional to the levels of understanding achieved.
Further understanding requires additional questions, research, and work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Xaw72ESdA
According to researcher Danny Hatcher, the "Feynman Technique" was coined by Scott H. Young in the August 22, 2011 YouTube video Learn Faster with The Feynman Technique and the subsequent 2022-09-01 article Learn Faster with Feynman Technique, ostensibly in a summarization of Gleick, James (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-679-40836-3. OCLC 243743850.
The frequently quoted Einstein that accompanies many instances of the Feynman Technique is also wrong and not said by Einstein.
The root Einstein quote, is apparently as follows:
that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.' —Ronald W. Clark, p418 of Einstein: His Life and Times (1972)
https://polygloss.app/
ourobo-ros · 2 days agoOk great! Do you have an example you could illustrate of new ideas you've managed to extrapolate?
Often the context to properly illustrate these new insights can be more than they're worth. However this self-contained one linked here, may be useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/comment/j02niq3/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Reply to:
Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/
Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.
Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.
His note taking technique has a high distraction potential and is time consuming.
highlight from https://www.reddit.com/user/ManuelRodriguez331/ <br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zigwo3
Anecdotal evidence of how some might view zettelkasten note-taking practices, particularly when they have no end goal or needs in mind.
Form follows function
/comment/izs0u3b/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Should I use a Zettelkasten if I’m just intending to use it to learn about a few topics (no intention of publication/paper-writing, ever)?
If you're considering less work upfront, you might consider a closely related form by maintaining a commonplace book, or a pared down version of what folks here are calling a zettelkasten.
https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/
Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/ The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses: Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see; Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers; Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms; Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties; Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair: https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd
This list is particularly good.
Proper regulation of end to end services would encourage the creation of filtering and other tools which would tend to benefit users rather than benefit the rent seeking of the corporations which own the pipes.
The enshittification of Amazon – where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones – is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
That same enshittification is on every platform, and "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" is just a way of saying, "Now that you're stuck here, we're going to enshittify your experience."
But there's another side to this playlistification of feeds: playlists and other recommendation algorithms are chokepoints: they are a way to durably interpose a company between a creator and their audience. Where you have chokepoints, you get chokepoint capitalism: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
Massive social media networks using algorithmic feeds and other programmatic and centralizing methods to interpose themselves between people trying to reach each other, often in ways which allow them to extract additional value from the participants. They become necessary platforms which create chokepoints for flows of information which Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin call "chokepoint capitalism".
The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between "Bellheads" (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and "Netheads" (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
They didn't block new features for shits and giggles, though – the method to this madness was rent-extraction. The iron-clad rule of the Bell System was that anything that improved on the basic service had to have a price-tag attached. Every phone "feature" was a recurring source of monthly revenue for the phone company – even the phone itself, which you couldn't buy, and had to rent, month after month, year after year, until you'd paid for it hundreds of times over. This is an early and important example of "predatory inclusion": the monopoly carriers delivered universal service to all of us, but that was a prelude to an ugly, parasitic, rent-seeking way of doing business:
Predatory inclusion is a form of rent-seeking in which one preys on customers using monopoly power to extract excessive value for small add-on services.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1601640985858957312.html
Example of a literature review/research workflow using online repositories (like Google Scholar, Scopus, Clarivate, etc.), Zotero, Research Rabbit, and Obsidian.
What a lovely looking UI.
The data returned will also give one a strong idea of how many of their acquaintances have made the jump as well as how active they may be, particularly for those who moved weeks ago and are still active within the last couple of days. For me the numbers are reasonably large. 860 of 4942 have accounts presently and in scrolling through it appears that 80% or so have been active within a day or so regardless of account age.
https://www.goodreads.com/notes/59660671-building-a-second-brain/7458926-tiago
And as if I requested it this morning, here's an example of an author using annotations to create engagement/start a conversation/start an informal book club discussion using Goodreads and annotations on their own work.
cc: @remikalir
Not a hard silo quit of Twitter, but shows heavy preparation.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Just surpassed 130 thousand followers on Mastodon (link in bio). Would be thrilled for you to join us there.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 5, 2022
https://twitter.com/backlon/status/1602021333881487360
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding. https://t.co/qeD8iAapW7
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) December 11, 2022
https://www.goodreads.com/notes/57643476-annotation/3524158-markgrabe-grabe
I rarely see notifications from Goodreads about annotations (typically via Kindle) unless they're from the author of the book posting them, ostensibly to generate engagement with their readers. Interesting to see Mark Grabe sharing his annotations on @remikalir and @anterobot's book on annotation though. :)
This is about as close to the form factor of Niklas Luhmann's own zettelkasten box as I've seen.
By making an investmentup front to alleviate poverty, the evidence suggests that we will be repaid manytimes over in the lower costs associated with a host of social problems.
From a "business perspective", the US Government would be better off by minimizing the cost of poverty.
(Original highlight on 2022-10-18)
As has been demonstrated, it is not a question of paying ornot paying. Rather, it is a question of how we want to pay, which then affectsthe amount we end up spending.
There is, however, an argument often made with respect to not fully addressingpoverty and inequality. It is based on the assumption that there is a necessarytrade- off between having a strong economy and having a robust social welfarestate. The recent origins of this argument can be traced back to an influen-tial book entitled, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by the economistArthur Okun.
However, there is a second way of estimating the difference between the priceof ending poverty and what it is costing us. It is through a measure known asthe poverty gap or the poverty income deficit. This measures what it would costto lift all poor households with children younger than 18 years to the level ofthe poverty line. In other words, how much total income is needed to pull everyAmerican child out of poverty? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, thatfigure for 2015 was $86.9 billion.12 For $86.9 billion, every American householdwith younger than 18 years in poverty could be raised out of poverty.We can then compare this figure to our overall estimate of the costs of child-hood poverty, which is $1.03 trillion. Combining these two figures results in aratio of savings to cost of approximately 12:1.
By summing together these costs, the overall estimate is that in 2015, child-hood poverty in the United States was costing the nation $1.03 trillion a year.This number represented 5.4 percent of the U.S. annual GDP.The bottom line is that child poverty represents a significant economicburden to the United States.
to lowered economic productivity through reduced earnings. In addition,increased health costs amount to $192 billion, whereas costs associated withincreased crime and incarceration (increased victimization costs of street crime;increased corrections and crime deterrence; increased social costs of incarcer-ation) total $406 billion.
Childhood poverty results in an annual loss of $294 billion due...
For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.
The Golden Rule not only benefits your neighbor, but you as well.
Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6