Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

The reason I love the Personal Library Science space is directly due to its emergence of information features in a personal library against the idiosyncratic processes of resonance and attention in their creators.

The whole discourse around PKM is a problem of the pluralistic framing in modern society that we hide behind individuality while missing the basic points. "Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy, and the opposite isn't an authoritarian ontology that people think they are protecting against.

Instead the basics are this: Whatever system you currently have to store/search/synthesize/and share information CAN and SHOULD be introspected to improve itself. Some functions are matters of time and space cost/benefits, other metric functions are qualitative, but can be experimented against and improved greatly with creativity and testing.

These discussions always conflate the different types of "notes".

Broadly, there are two very different kind of notes. First, there are notes whose purpose is to be easy to find when you need to recall some bit of information. Then, there is note taking in service of learning.

These two are very different in goals and thus very different in terms of optimal strategy.

Also, there is note taking in service of creation, where the end goal is neither recall nor learning, but to create notes to share to other people, often for artistic purposes but potentially also for reference or learning. These are also different from note taking for personal reference or learning.

Great advice, thanks!

> Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign

I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point.

When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop.

One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.

>"Use whatever works for you" is intellectually lazy

it isn't in a space that's full of snake oil salesmen trying to peddle you solutions you don't need. The problem with the whole knowledge management thing is that it's full of people obsessed with appearing intellectual and productive while never actually producing anything worth mentioning despite their gazillion knowledge hacks, which was the point of the original article.

Just like any other 'life optimization' cottage industry, stop over intellectualizing, stop inventing problems that don't exist and do something useful instead is perfectly valid, much needed advice

Half right, but no. It IS intellectually lazy precisely because as you pointed out, snake oil salesmen exist in the space. Because of them, well meaning people who can inform people of the very real trade offs of different storage or search techniques are all bucketed together without nuance, which is by definition lazy.

As such, people who are interested in learning more about how to have an intentional relationship with their library are left with a freshman level understanding of the topic.

The goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of the problems and solutions tried in the past, and give people access to creative ways to build (and share findings from) their libraries.