Unconscious R&D (2021)

This is interesting, but it stops right as it was about to pay off. It identifies and describes a problem, but that's it. Other posts didn't provide any more insight into the issue either.

I agree, I had the same experience: "it stops right as it was about to pay off."

I had expected it to link me to some piece of software they were launching. Instead, I've taken the three problems outlined to be anti-patterns for my own work which I think I can overcome using the software I've already got.

The author is trapped in a delusion. Hopefully temporary. He makes a set of hard judgments that are rather arbitrary. For instance, he says it would be better to be presented scratch notes instead of a blank page. But the editor can’t know what I want to write or do. A blank page can be a heuristic for new capture.

And there is a heuristic called the forward-backward method, which involves thinking backward from a conclusion to the premises. I often use it when I write. That means starting from a title or a template for the final form of the work and then filling it in. I wrote a book, once, by copying the format of another book I found at the bookstore and just replacing it with my content.

There are many ways to go about creating things. I don’t want tools that constrain me to one “best” way.

Is the problem in editing a document, or just editing long documents?

Tip for long documents: If you have an outliner that works, and can fold text, it is fairly trivial to reorder your work, and arrange it like paper furniture in a model of a room, until you get it just right.

For normal stuff, I do this on a smaller scale all the time, right here in the "add comment" box at HN... type up ideas in a stream of conscious fashion, review what I've written, and then click the button.

Then I review it again... and sometimes go back and edit for clarity.

You can do all that in any text input field of sufficient size... Capture | Organize | Synthesize

There are no new tools required, just some skills/habits to learn.