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Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

otherlife.co

41–50 of 99 posts

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#41

I hope this isn't true, hah. I don't really invest in any existing PKMs but i nevertheless spend a fair bit of time writing the foundation of my own. Regardless of the implementation, i want something to archive and/or retain (in the working memory sense) my conclusions. As without repetition i feel like a majority of what i read, and any conclusions therein, evaporate. Maybe the author would argue that if i want to…

> and any conclusions therein, evaporate. I'm in a similar but different boat: my brain remembers the conclusion but discards all of the "useless" details used to arrive there. This works fine on a personal level, but when someone challenges your position, you find yourself unable to defend it because all of the supporting details have long since evaporated. So PKM might be useful to archive away the details after yo…

> I'm in a similar but different boat: my brain remembers the conclusion but discards all of the "useless" details used to arrive there. This works fine on a personal level, but when someone challenges your position, you find yourself unable to defend it because all of the supporting details have long since evaporated.

> So PKM might be useful to archive away the details after you reach a conclusion.

100%. I hold the same mindset!

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#42
Roam user here. My experience is that it's not about the graph as a whole, it's about the neighborhoods. I never look at the graph view and I don't meaningfully use the global structure of the graph for anything, but I find that projects develop local neighborhood graphs that are definitely useful.

The thing Roam-style note taking software accomplish is letting you be productive by organizing bottom-up rather than being forced to decide what notebook/tab/folder any given new thing needs to go in. It's very pragmatic and low-bullshit in that sense. Being able to make references to other nodes (rather than only to other pages) is also very pragmatically useful in my experience (e.g. refer to a TODO I wrote in my weekly TODO list when writing my daily TODO list, so when I check off a daily TODO it's also checked off in the weekly list), and I never saw anything like this in pre-Roam tools like OneNote.

I get that other people operate differently and are obsessively "gardening" their graphs and searching around for connections to make. I don't do any of that. Doesn't seem valuable for me in particular, though maybe if I were a professional writer, I could imagine it being useful.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#44

I hope this isn't true, hah. I don't really invest in any existing PKMs but i nevertheless spend a fair bit of time writing the foundation of my own. Regardless of the implementation, i want something to archive and/or retain (in the working memory sense) my conclusions. As without repetition i feel like a majority of what i read, and any conclusions therein, evaporate. Maybe the author would argue that if i want to…

> and any conclusions therein, evaporate. I'm in a similar but different boat: my brain remembers the conclusion but discards all of the "useless" details used to arrive there. This works fine on a personal level, but when someone challenges your position, you find yourself unable to defend it because all of the supporting details have long since evaporated. So PKM might be useful to archive away the details after yo…

I've been playing with an app idea that helps people communicate these sorts of conclusions to each other to whatever level of detail they require. You can drill all the way down to the premise/axiom level if you want but you don't have to. The graphical animation is nice, but like you say, a private wiki can get you most of the way there.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#45

> The problem with the Knowledge Graph ideology is that everything in your mind is already situated in a graph structure. That is precisely the problem. It’s big and complicated, with way too many connections everywhere. There’s no good in replicating that web in digital form. 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 p…

The problem I see is, as you say, not the structure of personal knowledge, but recall . Once I can recall something, that usually leads me to where I need to go. It's sometimes that initial failure to recall what I wanted to remember that can prevent me from acting until much later. This is why I don't like any structure to my personal data. I throw every single thing I jot down into Apple Notes and either I'll come…

> Once I can recall something, that usually leads me to where I need to go. It's sometimes that initial failure to recall what I wanted to remember that can prevent me from acting until much later.

Exactly my frame of thinking, if I start worrying about structure, I forget the thing I wanted to write about in the first place.

> I like Apple Notes, but it really sucks in a lot of ways. The search function is crappy as crap gets. I don't know how indexing could be so poor. There's no way to tag or label notes other than by placing notes in folders. Notes does nothing to try and help you extract meaning from your unstructured text.

It lets you get the job done quickly, you just remembered you had to write something down, you can just write it down as quick as possible without worrying about other nonsense.

> What I want more than anything that tries to impose the job of organization on to the user is something that lets me treat it like a dumping ground, does its best to extract any implicit structure or meaning and keywords from my notes, lets me add relationships optionally, and then gets out of my way. I don't need silos or folders or schemas or graphs or any such nonsense.

Exactly, this is what I am thinking too, organization shouldn't be worried about when you just want to write something down NOW, as apposed to later after you've worried about organization and you've forgotten the thing you wanted to write about in the first place.

The actual thing that you are using the write notes on should do the organization itself, make tags automatically and link notes automatically, without you having to worry about anything, that for me, is the best way.

And you should be able to search through notes quickly and find keywords etc.. all just by looking at what is inside the notes that have any sort of structure.

> lets me add relationships optionally

Totally agree, relationships should be worried about after the note has been written down, not before.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#46
Wow, does this ring true for me. I had been using Evernote for at least 7 years, then switched to Notion a few years ago, completely "reinventing my digital life" and creating my "Second Brain" with the P.A.R.A method by Tiago Forte.

I loved that for the first few months, then slowly but surely the sheer amount of interconnected nodes became... oberwhelming, to the point of me almost completely stopping to enter in new data.

I recently realized that I kind of hated my Second Brain, and did a painful migration away from it, to the stupidly simple Notes.app (the built-in Apple one).

Feels much better now: Less worrying about bloat, I deleted a bunch of stuff and do less procrastinating and fiddling about with the structure of it all.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#47
PKM is not bullshit; it is extremely helpful to a lot of people. This article seems a bit pointless. Yes, the graph is used to advertise a lot of these systems, but the point of the graph isn't the graph itself; it's just showing the power of backlinks. I use Obsidian and haven't looked at my graph since I started. But I use backlinks regularly. The graph is merely advertising the power of backlinks.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#48
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend a workflow for obsidian? Or some pointers for resources. I am struggling to "get" how to take notes with it and I am feeling a lot of friction

Second this. I even have a bookmarklet in the browser that adds text selection or a page automatically to Obsidian. And yet, when it comes to saving something I feel is important, the maximum I can do is just create another note and put the text/link and forget. I feel like I need to find proper place for this note in the folder hierarchy or think how to categorize it ("should it go to the Economics->Behavioral or So…

The best workflow is to consciously underthink it. If you find yourself spending more than 10 seconds thinking of where to put something then you're doing it wrong. Force yourself to go with the first place you were thinking. You'll most likely find it later using search tools.

Sometimes you don't even need to take notes. Just the act of pasting in a link or a snippet from an article you read is enough to reference it in the future.

If you insist on making things clean, then you can use some sort of version control and review all the notes that you've taken once a week and organize them better. The most important thing is to take the note.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#49

I take notes relentlessly with Obsidian and I'll honestly never go back. I would have been more stubborn about this earlier on in my career. Now I realize that I've probably forgotten more over time than I ever would have imagined so I realized having good notes is critical for me. I end up looking up answers on stack overlflow and then realize I wrote them. To each their own.

Obsidian is an amazing piece of software.

Perhaps PKM as a cottage industry is overdone, and the author's point that everybody's system is highly personal and should not be replicated is valid. That said, Obsidian has allowed me to organize all of my reading, learning, writing, and thinking into a format that allows me to recall knowledge and make connections that I wouldn't have otherwise found. Seeing in what other contexts you have read about a concept or a historical figure or an essay, etc. is so valuable for life-long learning that I can't imagine going back to disconnected or separated note-taking.

Re: Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit

#50

I take notes relentlessly with Obsidian and I'll honestly never go back. I would have been more stubborn about this earlier on in my career. Now I realize that I've probably forgotten more over time than I ever would have imagined so I realized having good notes is critical for me. I end up looking up answers on stack overlflow and then realize I wrote them. To each their own.

Obsidian is new to me, thanks for the recommendation. I see the files are local, does the app need to phone home for anything? I'd like something that will still work even if the company goes away at some point.
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