https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC3_VFFJlSY

Lois Weber<br /> - First woman accepted to Motion Picture Director's Association, precursor of Director's Guild<br /> - First directors committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences<br /> - Mayor of Universal City<br /> - One of the highest paid and most influential directors in Hollywood of her day<br /> - one of first directors to form her own production company

See also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Weber

Where are My Children?, Universal's top film of 1916, written and directed by their top director Lois Weber, discussed abortion and birth control. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1993.

See also - Stamp, Shelley. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. University of California Press, May 2015. ISBN 9780520284463

Watched this last night

https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/episodes/dream-factory

This is interesting background given her subsequent blockbuster film Where are My Children? (Universal Studios, 1916) which covered abortion and birth control.

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

https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la

This is a stunningly excellent little series! It started auto streaming last night after I watched PBS News Hour and I watched it in the background all evening.

I'd seen at least one episode previously, but definitely worth re-watching in its entirety. So much history hiding around us...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-to-use-its-vs-its

Something interesting here about a "gossipy collaboration" of an address book that crystallized a "sexual memory...told by spaces".

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

via mention of the bar in "Lost LA" Coded Geographies Season 2, Episode 6

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/26/business/retail-returns/index.html

https://warrenellis.ltd/isles/wrangling-writing-on-wordpress/

See especially P. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Ample evidence has shown that increasing taxes in Western countries along with the states' power to use it during the majority of the 1900s not only reduced inequalities but encouraged growth.

Welfare state has largely been given a negative connotation in America beginning roughly in the 1980s during the Reagan administration.

Will Piketty continue this negative tone here?

Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge-podge

How is this broadly related to the intellectual history of commonplace books, zettelkasten, and other note taking matters.

I recall an idea of a Hodge-podge book from my youth, but these may have been published children's activity books for fun rather than collecting tidbits as in something closer to a scrapbook.

Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo - Thought about this randomly while editing notes for [[Forte2022]]

Not a half bad sentence to end the whole enterprise with.

smart marketing for those who may be more naïve...

All this description and prescription, then say this?!

I'll agree that each person's system should be their own and work for them, but it would have been more helpful to have this upfront and then to have looked at a broad array of practices and models for imitation to let people pick and choose from a variety of practices instead of presenting just one dish on the menu: P.A.R.A. with a side of C.O.D.E.

The Tacit Dimension, by Michael Polanyi

how is this related to the curse of knowledge?

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.<br /> —Thomas Jefferson

This entire chapter thus far (to the end of this section at minimum) sounds like it would have been better motivating material.

It also has a more touchy-feely and less concrete nature which puts in the self-help category and not so much in the tools for thought space.

How is the paradox of hoarding related to the collector's fallacy?

Regardless of how much you collect, you can't take it with you. So what's the value? - Having and using it to sustain you while you're alive. - Combining it in creative ways to leave behind new ideas and new innovations for those who follow you. - others?

This also happens with the techniques of orality, but from an entirely different perspective. Again, these methods are totally invisible even to an expert on productivity and personal knowledge management.

Not even a mention here of the ancient Greeks bemoaning the invention of literacy as papering over valuable memory.

The broad audiences for this book.

This may have been better place in the introduction to draw these people in.

This is an overly painful Western cultural viewpoint and totally erases orality and oral cultures from the discussion. We can and should do better.

This chapter is too entailed with productivity advice, which can be useful to some, but isn't as note taking focused for those who probably need more of that.

What is the differentiator between knowledge workers, knowledge creators, students, researchers, academics. How do we even clearly delineate knowledge worker as a concept. It feels far too nebulous which makes it more difficult to differentiate systems for them to use for improving productivity and efficiency.

While one can certainly capture a lot of cruft that isn't actionable or easily reusable, it's a fable that the best ideas will come back around. All too often the really brilliant ideas can be quickly lost to the wind if not captured immediately.

He's got a very specific type of notes for productivity compared with the sort of notes a student, academic, or researcher might take. This has consequences to the sort of system one has and how productive or not it is.

At some point in the book he sounds as if he's talking about notes for content creation/production, but he's also mixing in work productivity sorts of notes which can be treated dramatically differently.

Modern systems need to better distinguish between these two sorts of modes. (Are there others?) What should we even call these things to distinguish them and how they might be differently handled?

What do the two things have in common that allow them to be conflated? What is different that suggests distinguishing them and separating them?

Which digital tools are better for each of these? Do some handle both well? Should there be a mental or physical separation of them?

Am I just wholly wrong here?

Nice that he differentiates specifically between notes and to-do items.

The creative parts of cooking are all done way before setting out the mise en place. Restaurant cooking is all about process for speed grinding it out. It's about efficiency. Few line cooks or chefs in a professional kitchen are exercising any sort of creativity, it's nearly 100% skill and production in the most repetitive way.

Anyone who tells you different is selling you something.

Dan Charnas, Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2016)

mise-en-place is an example of a means of thinking externally with one's environment

link to - similar ideas in Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind

Do we? Really? This definitely needs reframing and books like this that play on these sorts of fears are both partially responsible, but are also preying on an atmosphere which they're propagating.

This is the sort of sad thing that a productivity guru would say...

I'm guessing it's just the fact that I have an advance reader copy of the book that accounts for the missing index in my copy.

If not, then dear G-d!!!

A few corrections based on my suggestions already... 😁

https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes

The origin of the phrase Building a Second Brain.

Come be a part of my sales funnel!!!

ugh... This should generally be sacrilege, but it's even worse when having a solid index (which is roughly the purpose that tags support) is an important part of any commonplace book, especially since John Locke, which a resource Forte has cited elsewhere in his book.

Another example of [[self-important capitalization]] here. ugh...

This is possibly a better name for it...

Sadly, I've already forgotten his self-defined version of IP and I can only think of intellectual property. Is footnote mention linking it to intellectual property certainly didn't help things.

This is part of why using popular acronyms that aren't descriptive or clever is a bad naming practice.

At least two examples of the book attempting to engage the reader in carrying out the principles within.

I wonder how many tried?

This does make me wonder again, how much of this particular book might be found in various forms on Forte's website, much of which is behind a paywall at $10 a month or $100 a year?

It's become more common in the past decades for writers to turn their blogs into books and then use their platform to sell those books.

He says this, but his advice on how to use them is too scant and/or flawed. Where are they held? How are they indexed? How are they linked so that finding and using them in the future? (especially, other than rote memory or the need to have vague memory and the ability to search for them in the future?)

When working on a project, to stave off potential procrastination on finishing, one should focus on the minimum viable version and finish that. They can then progressively enhance portions and add on addition pieces which may be beneficial or even nice to have.

Spending too much time on the things that sound nice or that one "might want to have" in the future will be the death of the thing.

link to: - you ain't gonna need it - bikeshedding for procrastination

questions: - Does the misinterpreted-effort hypothesis play a role in creating our procrastination and/or lead to decision fatigue?

A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.

This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.

Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.

A lot of this is geared toward the work of re-contextualizing one's work and projects.

Why do all this extra work instead of frontloading it? Here again is an example of more work in comparison to zettelkasten...

Forte is fairly good at contextualizing people and proving ethos for what he's about to present. Essentially saying, "these people are the smart, well-known geniuses, so let's imitate them".

Humans are already good at imitating. Are they even better at it or more motivated if the subject of imitation is famous?

See also his sections on Twyla Tharp and Taylor Swift...

link to : - lone genius myth: how can there be a lone genius when the majority of human history is littered with imitation?

HA!

It's easier to write when you know where you're going. As if to underline this Ernest Hemingway would end his writing sessions when he knew where he was going the following day so that it would be easier to pick up the thread of the story and continue on. (sourcing?)

(Why doesn't Forte have a source for this Hemingway anecdote? Where does it come from? He footnotes or annotates far more obscure pieces, why not this?!)

link to - Stephen Covey quote “begin with the end in mind” (did this prefigure the same common advice in narrative circles including Hollywood?)

A missed opportunity to reference the arts of rhetoric here. This book is a clear indication that popular Western culture seems to have lost the knowledge of it.

As a reminder, in the review be sure to look at and critique the invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery of the piece as well as its ethos, pathos, and logos. :)

This idea doesn't appear in Steven Johnson's book itself, but only in this quirky little BoingBoing piece, so I'll give Forte credit for using his reading and notes from this piece to create a larger thesis here.

I'm not really a fan of this broader archipelago of ideas as it puts the work much later in the process. For those not doing it upfront by linking ideas as they go, it's the only reasonable strategy left for leveraging one's notes.

Of course they'll struggle here because now they must recontextualize a huge amount of work and fill in all the details with things they might have also collected and linked previously.

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

Missing here is the creative divergence of creating plot points which could be later connected. This part of the process is incredibly difficult for many as seen in the poor second act development in most of narrative history. Beginnings and endings are usually incredibly easy, but the middle portions for connecting the two is incredibly hard.

Is this because creating connections between the ends when there no intervening ideas to connect is nearly impossible? How can one brainstorm middle plot points so that they might be more easily connected?

Tiago Forte frames the creative process in the framing of divergence (brainstorming) and convergence (connecting ideas, editing, refining) which emerged out of the Stanford Design School and popularized by IDEO in the 1980s and 1990s.

But this is just what the more refined practices of maintaining a zettelkasten entail. It's the creation of profligate divergence forced by promiscuously following one's interests and collecting ideas along the way interspersed with active and pointed connection of ideas slowly creating convergence of these ideas over time. The ultimate act of creation finally becomes simple as pulling one's favorite idea of many out of the box (along with all the things connected to it) and editing out any unnecessary pieces and then smoothing the whole into something cohesive.

This is far less taxing than sculpting marble where one needs to start with an idea of where one is going and then needs the actual skill to get there. Doing this well requires thousands of hours of practice at the skill, working with smaller models, and eventually (hopefully) arriving at art. It's much easier if one has the broad shapes of the entirety of Rodin, Michelangelo, and Donatello's works in their repository and they can simply pull out one that feels interesting and polish it up a bit. Some of the time necessary for work and practice are still there, but the ultimate results are closer to guaranteed art in one domain than the other.

Commonplacing or slipboxing allows us to take the ability to imitate, which humans are exceptionally good at (Annie Murphy Paul, link tk), and combine those imitations in a way to actively explore and then create new innovative ideas.

Commonplacing can be thought of as lifelong and consistent practice of brainstorming where one captures all the ideas for later use.

Link to - practice makes perfect

If the creative process has timeless principles found throughout history, why aren't they written down and practiced religiously withing our culture that is so enamored of creativity and innovation?

As an example of how this isn't true, we've managed to lose our commonplace tradition and haven't really replaced it with anything useful. Even the evolved practice of the zettelkasten has been created and generally discarded (pun intended) without replacement.

How much of our creative process is reliant on simple imitation, which is a basic human trait? It's typically more often that imitation juxtaposed with other experiences which is the crucible of innovation. How often, if ever, is true innovation in an entirely different domain created? By this I mean innovation outside of the adjacent possible domains from which it stems? Are there any examples of this?

Even my own note taking practice is a mélange of broad imitation of what I read combined with the combinatorial juxtaposition of other ideas in an attempt to create new ideas.

Is this really what our brain does best?

What about on evolutionary timescales? Is this what brains were meant to do?

https://wayneforte.com/

https://fortelabs.co/blog/wayne-lacson-forte-on-my-way-to-me/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEjbE688EVw

By writing down and collecting ideas slowly over time, working on them in small fits and spurts, when one finally comes to do the final work on their writing project or other work, the pieces only need minor shaping to take their final form. This process allows for a much greater level of serendipity, creativity, and potential sustained genius of connecting ideas across time to take shape in a final piece.

How does this relate to diffuse thinking? How can slow diffuse thinking be leveraged into this process?

Writing down fleeting notes while walking around can be valuable as one's ideas brew slowly in the mind (diffuse thinking) in combination with active combinatorial creativity, thus a form of Llullan combinatorial diffusion.

Many business books seem so shallow and often only have one real insight which is repeated multiple times, perhaps to drive the point home or perhaps just to have enough filler to seem being worth the purchase of a book.

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is an example of this, though it shows a different form of genius in expanding the idea from a variety of perspectives so that eventually everyone will absorb the broader idea which is distilled to great effect into the title.

One can plan and make explicit space for creativity.

To test one's own understanding of a topic one has read about and studied, it can be useful to discuss it or describe one's understanding to friends or colleagues in conversations. This will help you discover where the holes are based on the person's understanding and comprehension of what you've said. Can you fill in all the holes where they have questions? Are their questions your new questions which have exposed holes that need to be filled in your understanding or in the space itself.

I do this regularly in conversations with people. It makes the topics of conversation more varied and interesting and helps out your thinking at the same time. In particular I've been doing this method in Dan Allosso's book club. It's almost like trying on a new idea the way one might try on a piece of clothing to see how it fits or how one likes it for potential purchase. If an idea "fits" then continue refining it and add it to your knowledge base. These conversations also help to better link ideas in my thought space to those of what we're reading. (I wonder if others are doing these same patterns, Dan seems to, but I don't have as good a grasp on this with other participants).

Link to :<br /> - Ahren's idea of writing to expose understanding<br /> - Feynman technique<br /> - Socratic method (this is sort of side or tangential method to this) <- define this better/refine

There is lots of serendipity here, particularly when people are willing to either share their knowledge or feel compelled to share it as part of an imagined life "competition" or even low forms of mansplaining, though this last tends to be called this when the ultimate idea isn't serendipitous but potentially so commonly known that there is no insight in the information.

This sort of "public serendipity" or "group serendipity" is nice because it means that much of the work of discovery and connecting ideas is done by others against your own work rather that you sorting/searching through your own more limited realm of work to potentially create it.

Group focused combinatorial creativity can be dramatically more powerful than that done on one's own. This can be part of the major value behind public digital gardens, zettelkasten, etc.

I like that he touches on one of the important parts of the gardens and streams portion of online digital gardens here, though he doesn't tacitly frame it this way.

Visual cues one can make in their notes and user interfaces that help to focus or center on these can be useful reminders for what appears in particular notes, especially if visual search is a possibility.

Is this the reason that Gyuri Lajos very frequently cuts and pastes images into his Hypothes.is notes?

Which note taking applications leverage this sort of visual mnemonic device? Evernote did certainly, but other text heavy tools like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam Research don't. Most feed readers do this well leveraging either featured photos, photos in posts, or photos in OGP.

The area of serendipity becomes much more powerful when one has ideas both directly interlinked, ideas categorized with subject headings or tags, or when one can have affordances like auto-complete.

The method Forte suggests and outlines allows for some serendipity, but not as much as other methods with additional refinements. Serendipity in Forte's method isn't as strong as in others.

In this section he's talking about some of the true "magic of note taking" which is discussed by Luhmann and others.

link to:<br /> Luhmann's writings on serendipity and surprise when using his zettelkasten (Communication with the Slipbox...)<br /> Ahrens mentions of this effect

Coming back to the beginning of this section. He talks about tags, solely after-the-fact instead of when taking notes on the fly. While it might seem that he would have been using tags as subject headings in a traditional commonplace book, he really isn't. This is a significant departure from the historical method!! It's also ill advised not to be either tagging/categorizing as one goes along to make searching and linking things together dramatically easier.

How has he missed the power of this from the start?! This is really a massive flaw in his method from my perspective, particularly as he quotes John Locke's work on the topic.

Did I maybe miss some of this in earlier sections when he quoted John Locke? Double check, just in case, but this is certainly the section of the book to discuss using these ideas!

This same sort of principle is seen in philanthropy circles where the group already has commitments for a large proportion of the end goal before they even announce the campaign.

Is there a rule of thumb for this in philanthropy? 50%? What is it called, ie does it have a specific name?

What relation does it have to the Pareto principle, if any?

Forte frames things primarily from a digital perspective so he talks about folders and tags, but seems to wholly forget the grand power of having an subject index. While they're broadly the same, it's as if he's forgoing two thousand years of rhetorical tradition to have something that seems new and innovative, but which are paths that are incredibly well travelled.

no mention of the affordances of being able to cross-link things or even transclude them from an original location (which works for one currently) to another useful location.

The studies quoted here are in the mid 80s and early 90s before the rise of better and easier UI methods or more powerful search. I'd have to call this conclusion into question.

There's also a big difference in what people know, what people prefer, and what knowledgeable people can do most quickly.

Cross reference this with Dan Russell's research at Google that indicates that very few people know how to use ctrl-f to find or search for things in documents. - https://hyp.is/7a532uxjEeyYfTOctQHvTw/www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6KFtW4a4Ozr81GI1cxaBQ

Relate it to the idea of associative (memory) trails (Memex), songlines, and method of loci in remembering where things are -- our brains are designed to navigate using memory

a nod to digital gardens

I'm curious how he's going to outline this practice as there's been no discussion of linking or cross-linking ideas prior to this point as is done in some instantiations of the zettelkasten methods. (Of course this interlinking is more valuable when it comes specifically to writing output; once can rely on subject headings and search otherwise.)

This pulls into question our zeal for innovation. Most thought is created and honed against other pre-existing thought.

Some of the fun of note taking is not only rewriting an idea in one's own words for potential understanding, but expanding upon it to extend the ideas, sometimes based on our pre-existing world view and knowledge. The rest is linking this idea into place with our other knowledge and then combining an permuting it with that knowledge to create new knowledge.

This seems to be a building block of the broader idea of "combinatorial creativity".

link to: - Annie Murphy Paul's contention that imitation > innovation - Lee Vinsel's The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most

can imitation lead to innovation?

innovation is the use of combinatorial creativity to make new things... rarely, if ever?, is true innovation made from whole cloth, there is always(?) something used as a base which is extended.

Intermediate Packets juxtaposed with Second Brain, it would have been better if he could have given a better analogy than intermediate packets to create some parallelism with Second Brain, alas... lack of creativity?

Notice the importance he's giving to Intermediate Packets by artificially capitalizing it. An indication of attempt to commoditize and sell "note taking" as a product.

link to https://hyp.is/OKlVhPBCEeyX96cojNH8rg/www.danah.org/name.html

The majority of content one produces in social media is considered "throw away" material. One puts it in the stream of flotsam and jetsam and sets it free down the river never to be seen or used again. We treat too much of our material and knowledge this way.

He uses the idea of "wealth" here for notes created in a commonplace instead of "treasure" or storehouse as is the historical tradition, this is an indication of a complete schism between the older traditions and the new.

another example of the idea of "magical" experience that comes when taking notes. This one isn't about idea creation or even serendipity though, but relates specifically to being "bulk productive".

example of the creation of a buzz word for something not really quite necessary. It's useful to give names to things, but this is just a synonym for a note, isn't it?

definitely not as developed as "second brain"

Example of someone else saying this...

We focus too much on the achievement and the end goal and the work and process doesn't receive its due.

unsourced

would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write.

Not really enough evidence for a solid quote here. What was his source?

He cites the following shallowly: <br /> - Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories: Positive Obsession (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 123–36.<br /> - 2 Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2020).<br /> - 3 Dan Sheehan, “Octavia Butler has finally made the New York Times Best Seller list,” LitHub.com, September 3, 2020, https://lithub.com/octavia- butler-has-finally-made-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/.<br /> - 4 Butler’s archive has been available to researchers and scholars at the Huntington Library since 2010.

oops... in the opening seconds, Scott Young unconsciously says

[Tiago Forte] has written a very interesting book, "Building A Second Brain", which is all about how do you take smart notes...

wrong guest!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVQXwu6Yu8Y

Holiday's system is roughly similar to the idea of a commonplace book, just kept and maintained on index cards instead of a notebook. He also seems to advocate for keeping separate boxes for each project which I find to be odd advice, though it's also roughly the same advice suggested by Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit and Tiago Forte's recent book Building a Second Brain which provides a framing that seems geared more toward broader productivity rather than either the commonplacing or zettelkasten traditions.

I suspect that if you're not linking discrete ideas, you'll get far more value out of your system by practicing profligate indexing terms on your discrete ideas. Two topical/subject headings on an individual idea seems horrifically limiting much less on an entire article and even worse on a whole book. Fewer index topics is easier to get away with in a digital system which allows search across your corpus, but can be painfully limiting in a pen/paper system.

Most paperbound commonplaces index topics against page numbers, but it's not clear to me how you're numbering (or not) your system to be able to more easily cross reference your notes with an index. Looking at Luhmann's index as an example (https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V) might be illustrative so you can follow along, but if you're not using his numbering system or linking your cards/ideas, then you could simply use consecutive numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 92000, 92001, ... on your cards to index against to easily find the cards you're after. It almost sounds to me that with your current filing system, you'd have to duplicate your cards to be able to file them under more than one topic. This obviously isn't ideal.

One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"

aside on serendipity

As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

https://hybridpedagogy.org/ethical-online-learning/

An interesting perspective on ethical and supportive online learning. More questions and explorations than answers, but then framing is a majority of the battle.

I'm generally in agreement with much of the discussion here.

This was a fabulous piece for "thinking against". Thanks Sean Michael Morris, and Lora Taub.

I definitely got far more out of it by reading and annotating than I ever would in its original keynote presentation version.

This makes me wonder how one might take a community chat space like the IndieWeb chat and replicate the experience for a classroom or for an entire university? It would require a huge amount of tummeling?

phatic communication is important in the social interaction components of education

How can this be put into edtech?

This sounds godawful and unproductive.

The answer shouldn't necessarily be to figure out how to quantify the online unseen portions of the learning process.

Similarly how might one assess the end results of things which are non-literate?

I appreciate the poetry in this on top of the broader sentiment.

Beyond this, Gracie also had senses of timing and spatial skills that many also often lack. This is a sort of neurodiversity piece which some are either lifted up or pulled down by within our literacy-focused teaching system.

It may be a skill she's focused on improving, or one which she's naturally gifted and might improve upon to use in a professional career. Focusing on a literacy-only framing for her education is the sort of thing that, instead of amplifying her talents, may have the effect of completely destroying them, and her altogether.

Sadly, we seem to have othered orality and cultural practices which don't fit into the Western literate cultural box. This prevents us from moving forward as a society and a diverse culture.

In the 90's rap was culturally appropriated by some because of its perception as "cool" within the culture. Can this coolness be leveraged as a reintroduction of oral methods in our culture without the baggage of the appropriation? Can it be added to enhance the evolving third archive? As a legitimate teaching tool?

Beyond Eric's words here, I'm struck by the fact that he's able to do this "feat" orally in a way that I certainly cannot. Perhaps he spent ages slowly building it up and writing it down in a literal fashion, but I suspect that part of it is not and that it is raw oral poetry in a way which requires culture and oral practice that I wholly lack, but wish I had.

How can we better teach this?! Center this.

Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo

Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)

My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

If it's true that the movement toward technology is inevitable, how might we deal with it?

Compare this with the solution(s) that nomadic hunter-gatherers had to face when changing from a lifestyle built on movement to one of settling down to a life of agriculture. Instead of attaching their knowledge and memories to their landscape as before, they built structures (like Stonehenge) to form these functions.

Part of moving forward may involve moving back historically to better understand these ideas and methods and regaining them so that we might then reattach them to a digital substrate. How can we leverage the modalities of the digital for art, song, dance, music, and even the voice into digital spaces (if we must?). All digital or only digital certainly isn't the encompassing answer, but if we're going to do it, why not leverage the ability to do this?

As an example, Hypothes.is allows for annotating text to insert photos, emoji, audio (for music and voice), and even video. Videos might include dance and movement related cues that students might recreate physically. These could all be parts of creating digital songlines through digital spaces that students can more easily retrace to store their learnings for easier recall and to build upon in the future.

Groups in arts education rail against the loss of music, dance, and art in schools and indicate that it's important to a balanced education.

Why has no one embedded these learning tools, for yes they can be just that, into other spaces within classrooms? Indigenous educators over the millennia have done just this in passing on their societal and cultural knowledge. Why have we lost these teaching methods? Why don't we reintroduce them? How can classrooms and the tools within them become mnemonic media to assist both teachers and learners?

Perhaps we need to bring back examples of how to do these things at the higher levels? I've seen excercises in my daughter's grade school classrooms that bring art and manipulatives into the classroom as a base level, but are they being done specifically for these mnemonic reasons?

Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak have been working at creating a mnemonic medium for areas like quantum mechanics relying in part on spaced repetition. Why don't they go further and add in dance, movement, art, and music to aid in the process. This can be particularly useful for creating better neurodiverse outcomes as well. Education should be more multi-modal, more oral, and cease it's unending reliance on only literacy as it's sole tool.

How and where can we create a set of example exercises at various grade levels (similar to rites of knowledge initiation in Indigenous cultures, for lack of specific Western language) that embed all of these methods

Link to: - Ideas in The Extended Brain about movement, space, etc. - Nielsen/Matuschak mnemonic media work

https://boingboing.net/2009/01/27/diy-how-to-write-a-b.html

The perfect antidote to Hemingway's White Bull.

It no longer resolves, but outside.in sounds like the sort of project that fits into the sort of space similar to Darius Kazemi's Run Your Own Social.

Archive.org makes it look like a hyperlocal space done at larger scale though... perhaps in a shape more similar to Patch? https://web.archive.org/web/20090618030413/http://outside.in/

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-thought.html

Note the title "Tool for Thought" here. It does come five years after Howard Rheingold's book of a similar name.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlmRRSp2PoU

meh....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHw-WdiNbw

Example of someone's explicit note taking practice. While there's some missing context hiding without pre-knowledge of what a zettelkasten is, it's an n interesting example for modeling purposes for beginners.

https://www.higherlogic.com/blog/90-9-1-rule-online-community-engagement-data/

https://lordmatt.co.uk/technology/the-internet/all-the-active-indieweb-sites-i-have-found-so-far-june-2022/

Matt is building a list of sites that support Webmention (presumably those with the ability to at least receive them, as many which don't send them automatically could at least do so manually).

https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-identifies-godaddy-as-a-parasitic-company-and-an-existential-threat-to-wordpress-future

WordPress open source or WordPress.com? Recall that Automattic is a VC backed company now and Matt has a big dog in the hunt.

https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/spring-it-on

https://www.louispotok.com/spring83

https://tracydurnell.com/2022/06/10/following-people-outside-feed/

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/06/uber-ride-share-prices-high-inflation/661250/

...but we'll make up for it in volume.

https://cathieleblanc.com/2022/06/21/photo-sharing-work-flow/

Similar to the browser extension / "bug" that shows other Hypothes.is conversations and annotations.

This would be cool if it could be expanded to personal search to show you blog conversations or Twitter conversations of people you follow.

Link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/18/wikilinks-and-hashtags-as-a-portal-to-cross-site-search/ - https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/29/social-reading-user-interface-for-discovery/

Interleaving (aka mixed practice or varied practice) is a learning strategy that involves mixing different topics, ideas, or forms of practice to improve outcomes as well as overall productivity. Its opposite and less effective strategy is blocking (or block study or specific practice) which focuses instead on working on limited topics or single forms of practice at the same time.

This may be one of the values of of the Say Something In Welsh method which interleaves various new nouns and verbs as well as verb tenses in focused practice.

Compare this with the block form which would instead focus on lists of nouns in a single session and then at a later time lists of verbs in a more rote fashion. Integrating things together in a broader variety requires more work, but is also much more productive in the long run.

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

Annotations here: https://docdrop.org/video/ZJRDAEUhAsU/

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

higher order learning can lead to greater levels of productivity than lower order or rote methods

the research says is that students often don't use the right learning strategy because they react negatively to effort in fact it even is so well demonstrated that it has its own name it's called the ==misinterpreted effort hypothesis== it says that students tend to see a learning strategy feel that it is more effortful more challenging and as a result they will veer away from that because they feel that that effort means that they're either doing it wrong or that the technique is bad they consider more effortful learning with being a bad thing

Students will perceive learning strategies that require more effort and work on their part to be less productive in the long term, often when the opposite is the case. This phenomenon is known as the misinterpreted effort hypothesis.

Link to: - research in Ahrens that rereading and reviewing over material seems easy, but isn't as effective as directly answering questions and performing the work to produce one's own answer. - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010028519302270

https://bulletproofmusician.com/the-misinterpreted-effort-hypothesis-and-why-we-often-practice-less-effectively-than-we-could/

Link to: - plateau effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateau_effect, also described in Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours rule

Re-reading a text or our notes may seem like it's an easier and more productive review strategy for tests, but working through more difficult problems that require one to do work to come up with an answer are much more effective.

The practice or learning strategy that seems to take the most work is probably the most effective.

Interleaved practice methods are more effective learning strategies than block practice.

misinterpreted-effort hypothesis: the amount of effort one puts into studying is inversely proportional to how much one feels they learn.

Is this why the Says Something In Welsh system works so well? Because it requires so much mental work and effort in short spans of time? Particularly in relation to Duolingo which seems easier?

https://xeiaso.net/blog/site-update-hero-images

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/swift-selection-search/

link to - https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/18/wikilinks-and-hashtags-as-a-portal-to-cross-site-search/

https://www.mojeek.com/

https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/02/search-choices-enable-freedom-to-seek.html

User interface options in multiple search provider selection

Informational diversity is vital to a healthy society and economy.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/adding-an-index/

Tonz has an index now too!

https://linktr.ee/moonlion.eth

Vera aka moonlion.eth,

Explicit example of someone using a zettelkasten to develop ideas and create content for distribution online and within social media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vgtyuf/mastery_requires_theory_application_of_theory_is/

At some point that's what Nabokov's slip box looked like too.

https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/23/lifestyles-of-the-note-takers-intellectuals-vladimir-nabokov/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vj0blr/decidedly_inessential_share_your_physical_set_up/

An in-depth list of materials someone uses for their zettelkasten.

(Read when there were no comments; potentially useful for revisiting later if there are any.)

The slipbox and index cards on which Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote most of his works including Lolita using index cards in a slip box. He ultimately died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.

Index card on which Nabokov collated notes on ages, heights, and measurements for school aged girls as research for his title character Lolita.

More details at: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/b566a4/what_is_a_zettelkasten/

Wow. Even in the pinned post on r/Zettelkasten, they propagate the myth by implication that Luhmann invented the Zettelkasten.

They also suggest that Nabokov and Pirsig independently developed similar techniques rather than that it was a commonplace (excuse the pun) pattern in the broader culture.

The fact that there are three discrete emoji for the - card file box 🗃️ - card index dividers 🗂️ - card index (aka rolodex) 📇

indicate the importance of these older analog tools, even in a more modern digital space.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/comments/vidqg6/new_to_digital_gardens/

There's lots of detail, articles, examples, and exploration documented here: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book

🤣

Something I love here about the use of "bubble graph boys" as a pejorative to describe the productivity porn space in digital note taking.

https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/52-million-sale-of-tiffany-and-shops-in-old-pasadena-announced

What a zinger! 😜

Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.

I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.

Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.

If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/22/us/shootings-police-response-uvalde-buffalo.html

A "good guy with a gun" stopped a "bad guy" on average less than 3% of the time in active shooter situations in 433 events through 2021.

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

I can't help but wonder at the direct link here to Amazon with an affiliate link. I won't fault them completely for it, but for a site that is so critical of the ills of educational technology, and care for their students and community, the exposure to surveillance capitalism expressed here seems to go beyond their own pale. I would have expected more care here.

Surely there are other platforms that this volume is available from?

https://silviamaggidesign.com/design/ravelry-rebranding/

https://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/roughconsensus/2014/01/internet-vs-internet-the-consequence-of-capitalization/

http://www.danah.org/name.html

If it's true that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized instead of the more commonly capitalized "you", does this help to underline some of the self-centeredness show by most of the English speaking West?

from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

https://udlguidelines.cast.org/

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/bringing-theories-to-practice-universal-design-principles-and-the-use-of-social-annotation-to-support-neurodivergent-students/

A very brief primer on UDL and how Hypothes.is and social annotation might fit within its framework. There seems to be a stronger familiarity with Hypothes.is as a tool and a bit less familiarity with UDL, or perhaps they just didn't bind the two together as tightly as they might have.

I'm definitely curious to look more closely at the UDL framework to see what we might extract from it.

The title features neurodiversity, but doesn't deliver on the promise.

An interesting reframing would be that of social annotation with the idea of modality shifts, particularly for neurodiverse students.

I'm not sure I agree here as one can take other annotations from various texts throughout a course and link them together to create new ideas and knowledge within the margins themselves. Of course, at some point the ideas need to escape the margins to potentially take shape with a class wiki, new essays, papers, journal articles or longer pieces.

Use of social annotation across several years of a program this way may help to super-charge students' experiences.

Teachers can model their own reading and annotating practices for students, but this can be expanded when using social annotation. This will allow students to show each other a wider variety of potential note taking and annotation strategies which help to reinforce the teacher's own modeling. This can be useful modelling of a practice in public which has historically been done privately.

By featuring notes which might be reused for papers or developing later research, teachers can also feature the portions of the note taking process which can be reused for developing new ideas. How might annotations within a text be linked to each other outside of the particular flow of the paper? Might there have been different orderings for the arguments that may have been clearer?

What ideas in the broader class might the ideas within a particular text be linked to? What ideas outside of the class can be linked to those found within the text?

In less experienced groups, teachers might occasionally call out individual annotations in discussion to ask the group for what purposes a student might have annotated specific portions to highlight the various methods and reasons.

What are the list of particular note types here? - Paraphrasing segments to self-test for understanding - Creation of spaced repetition type notes for memorizing definitions and facts - Conversations with the text/original author and expansion of the ideas - Questioning the original text, do we agree/disagree? - Linking ideas from the text into one's broader knowledge base - Highlighting quotes for later reuse - others??

Link to - double-entry journaling in Bruce Ballenger<br /> - types of questions one might ask within a text, Ballenger again

Teaching reading strategies to students improves their overall academic performance, but this instruction is often limited to developmental reading or study skills courses.

ref: Saxby, Lori Eggers. “Efficacy of a College Reading Strategy Course: Comparative Study.” Journal of Developmental Education 40, no. 3 (2017): 36-38.

Using Hypothes.is as a tool in a variety of courses can help to teach reading strategies and thereby improve students' overall academic performance.

Universal Design for Learning framework https://udlguidelines.cast.org/