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Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
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Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#82Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, et…
> A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. Let's be fair, this article is about this exactly. > That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. (...) How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world? (...) The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. and then tries…
Indeed. My point was to agree with the author in their rebuttal of the original piece.
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning: I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't…
> ...typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough What sorts of things are you writing into your markdown file? After 3.5 years of uni I still don't know how or why to take proper notes to enhance my learning.
> I still don't know how or why to take proper notes
I find that there is some element of ritual to "proper" notes. Its personal, and everyone differs. Any given system may sound logcal and sensible, but its most important that you write something, anything. Everything else doesnt really matter. I like to use real paper and pen, and start with a wide ruler drawn margin on the left (of course, you can buy paper with this. I prefer to do it by hand. It feels right.) and the date and subject at the top. Then I put keys on the left (page numbers, question numbers, subtopics, speakers in a meeting) and values on the right (insights, things that seemed cool, the steps of a particularly tricky bit, definitions of words)
I put a dash before tasks I have to do, and a question mark on words or concepts I heard but didn't understand and I need to go look up later.
Literally none of this is necessary. It supports my learning only in the sense that it makes me feel like im doing things right. I rarely ever come back and read them (usually only ad-hoc looking for something I knew I wrote but cant remember, not a structured review of them). Your system is for you to figure out yourself. A lot of it came from imitating my math teachers. But maybe the description helped?
Some days I write the date and a margin, and nothing else. No pressure, not every day is a notes day. Some days you learn a ton, and others don't challenge you at all. Thats normal too.
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#84Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, et…
>Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. Yes, but, the _shape_ of something does offer affordances of what it makes easier or harder to do. So "obsidian" vs "saving files on my computer" does seem to be a legitimate question.
I agree with you. For example, [[links]] are a useful affordance for thinking that wasn't as popular before Obsidian. However the original piece was asking:
> Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems?
My question is: in a world where photography didn't exist, how would your life have been different? How would everyone's lives be different? It's a counterfactual that's impossible to answer meaningfully. Similarly, we can't measure how the world is different as a result of the popularization of [[links]].
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#85I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of "scratchpad thinking" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I've tried Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian. I've tried little journal apps on my phone. I wrote my own little "microblog" in Django to make it easy to collect and annotate links, quotes, snippets, and images from around the internet. And what I always keep coming back to is plain text files and folders of saved images and files, as well as paper.
For text files, I always have one generic TODO.md file that uses the `[ ]` todo and `[X]` done notation, and a couple of more generic text files like "work.md" or "solace.md" for more free form writing. There are also folders and text files for specific topics, like quotes, poems, etc. It's very important to have a scratchpad that you can just open up and start typing without thinking about how to categorize it, because you might lose the precious thread of the thought while debating which category to use, and you can always shelve it later if it's worth keeping. Zero friction to start typing is crucial.
On paper, I use a simple loose leaf and folder system. I used to use bound journals, but since 80% of what I write down is thrown away, loose leaf works better. Have a pile of about 10-20 pages. You fill up a page, and if it's destined for the circular file, dog-ear it; otherwise give it a title and date and move it to the bottom of the pile. When you run out of blank pages, go through and either discard or file each page in an appropriate manila folder. This works better than index cards (which are too small to contain a complete thought) or journals (where it's too hard to discard pages.) Lots of people use ring or disc bound journals for that, but I find that fiddly and not any easier to work with than loose-leaf, probably because I just keep everything at my desk and don't have to carry it around anywhere.
Paper has a massive advantage when it comes to diagrams, design thinking, and mathematical equations. I love LaTeX, and use MathJax on my personal site quite heavily, but its so much slower and less fluent than just writing equations on paper. I've tried tablets, and am really good at using draw.io (now app.diagrams.net) but when you're thinking freeform you want flexibility and fluency above all else and never want to be fighting a UI, which takes you out of the flow state. Ideas are fragile things, especially when newborn; any distraction is an unacceptable risk.
I used to use a custom Tesseract pipeline to OCR the pages I wanted to be searchable, but lately I've just been using ChatGPT, which seems to do just fine with my handwriting. As OCR got better over the years, I actually moved more towards paper, because what's the downside?
So, getting back to the point of the article: PKM tools are stuck in the unenviable position of competing with both paper and ordinary text files, and for me they just don't offer enough advantages.
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough What sorts of things are you writing into your markdown file? After 3.5 years of uni I still don't know how or why to take proper notes to enhance my learning.
> I still don't know how or why to take proper notes I find that there is some element of ritual to "proper" notes. Its personal, and everyone differs. Any given system may sound logcal and sensible, but its most important that you write something, anything. Everything else doesnt really matter. I like to use real paper and pen, and start with a wide ruler drawn margin on the left (of course, you can buy paper with t…
BTW, this is darn near to being bullet journaling. It’s also almost exactly how I ended up taking notes after experimenting with bullet journaling and throwing out the parts I don’t really use.
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#87Note Brennan, who wrote the article this one is responding to added an update: https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-... Brennan could have gone about a better more interesting route that I would have agreed with more, instead of incorrectly blaming Obsidian and conflating it with a specific PKM framework. I am an avid obsidian user and have avoided most PKM stuff, and instead just developed a P…
Because Obsidian is so barebones out of the box, people look for tools to help them organize things, hence looking for plugins.
I have to admit I'm one of those people that just doesn't "get" Obsidian. Every now and then when I have a specific thing I'm working on, I create a new vault, write one or two notes, and then inevitably never look at it again.
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#88Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, et…
> Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?"
I think you have to be somewhat careful with this line of reasoning - the camera put the portrait artist out of business pretty much permanently, and the spreadsheet had similarly cataclysmic effects on the accounting and engineering professions.
Just because these things are tools, doesn't mean they can't distort the world by their very presence. I'd be hard pressed to put my finger on the distortion caused by obsidian et al
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#89Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, et…
> A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. Let's be fair, this article is about this exactly. > That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. (...) How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world? (...) The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. and then tries…
The contribution of Excel, the most popular programming environment in the world, is undoubtable - therefore, not only has Excel accomplished something (popularize programming among non-programmers) but it's also easily measurable (it has done so more than any other technology in existence). It _is_ a genuine contribution to the world, by the tool itself, not just by what people use the tool for.
So, I disagree with this line of criticism - I think you very well can do those things.
Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. Let's be fair, this article is about this exactly. > That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. (...) How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world? (...) The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. and then tries…
The contribution of Excel, the most popular programming environment in the world, is undoubtable - therefore, not only has Excel accomplished something (popularize programming among non-programmers) but it's also easily measurable (it has done so more than any other technology in existence). It _is_ a genuine contribution to the world, by the tool itself, not just by what people use the tool for. So, I disagree with…
I don't disagree here. I just pointed out that above commenter seems to dispute the author without having read the article in full. Turns out, some of us are just bad at communication :)