Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

Yep. Graphs are not "scalable" unless the visual elements are meaningful in themselves; they are mostly for "feeling-good-about-oneself" --- "look at all the notes I took and linked!".

So why don't all my web browser keep a complete copy of everything I have viewed (ok maybe not those sites) - so I an do a text search for "that thing about female doctor who was first ever".

Partly because if I had that on my local disk I would not need to go to the google home page. More fairly that particular search has been followed by X thousand previous people and Voogle knows how many ended up finding something useful.

But this does not solve for Outlook. The second biggest search opportunity surely is corporate emails. Gmail must have shown the outlook product managers how to do search ... 15 years ago. Yet it is still clunky unintuitive slow and frequently wrong.

I can find anything very quickly. When search fails me because I forgot a vendor name or something, I just navigate the folders.

No software required other than what comes with Windows.

* We have different knowledge consumption habits. I consume a lot of snippets on the internet during the day and then consume books via an eReader, which allows me to dump the highlights straight to Roam. He prefers purely physical books and takes his own notes instead of capturing direct quotes.

* He is visio-spatial and I am verbal. He needs to draw, move, and position things (whiteboards everywhere!). Roam is useless for this.

* I tend to do more convergent thinking - I take in a lot of info from a lot of sources which, when thinking about the problem, tends to snap into view for me as something new. This works well in Roam because I can reference/quote things from across many areas rapidly.

> The concept of the Knowledge Graph deserves the classification of bullshit because its allure derives primarily from the false impression that it can mechanistically deliver—or substitute for—the brute, linear willfulness that defines all non-trivial writing.

This particular critique stood out as a bit strange to me, and maybe it is simply a difference and how my brain and the author’s brain works, but writing is linear (on a page) but the content gathering and referencing is not, which is where I find it most helpful. I brute force the narrative/story, but fill in with the details more slowly and with more references.

I completely agree with this, I'm not an organised person, I rarely write TODO lists, yet in Emacs with Org-Roam I thought I would be highly productive because I would start writing notes and linking them together or whatever magic Org-Mode has inside Emacs (if I can even be bothered to write a TODO list in the first place);

But I don't think Org-Roam is for me, I rarely wrote TODO lists even before using Org-Roam, and I'd have never heard of Zettelkasten or whatever until trying out Org-Roam, you could say that I'm not an organised person, and that is true, but I don't care.

Using a Zettelkasten system for people like me isn't going to work, it will never feel right to be honest, in the first place before trying it out I didn't want any of this stuff anyway, I don't need a graph linking notes together, I'm a simple man, just write a few notes sometimes.