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How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

speakeasy.org

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Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#31

Post by cgore »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

That's very interesting. I foresee a problem with capacity. If you keep everything around eventually you won't be able to move anymore. I'm so happy that I'm beginning to forget some of the stuff from my childhood, to keep carrying that along forever seems like a huge weight. Forgetting is just like remembering: a blessing and a curse at the same time. It would be really nice if our minds could actively forget someth…

I have been keeping journals for years, and have most of it all the way back to around the age of 10 (I'm 34 now.) Generally what happens is that my really old stuff is just sitting in big plastic storage boxes, and I don't ever look at it except every few years when I feel nostalgic, so that doesn't become a problem.

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#32

Post by reginaldjcooper »

I've seen this one before and it looks interesting; but I've got a good enough system of notes. What I'd really like to do is keep a engineer's notebook about my software and record things I tested, what I thought, and the results, but I don't quite know where to start or what sort of system would work well for me. I guess I should be A/B testing that.

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#33

Post by jobigoud »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #28

>I wrote a book on a notekeeping system: How to make a complete map of every thought you think. >My notekeeping system has since dramatically changed, and is now, primarily, a simple chronology with some discipline connected to it. From the author's site.

Thanks for pointing this. Notekeeping is a very personnal process anyway. In my opinion he gave up on recording every thoughts because the software wasn't up to par with his specific structuration technique. (I do think that almost every one will have a different way to structure his external mind so that it is useful for him/her, generalized software will be frustrating).

I do record almost all my thinking. I use a very simple software called "the guide" (very lightweight outliner) and also use a mix of chronology and concept maps (basically mapping by concepts until the leaves, where each entry/page is stamped with date).

There was interesting ideas in the book (but it does look like a sample from a notebook :-)). I'll definitely take something out of it, starting with an attempt at collating my dozen of files into a global system.

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#34

Post by jobigoud »

leephillips wrote: post #24

I haven't looked at the book yet, but there is an obvious problem here with running out of stack space....unless you have some way of avoiding thinking about your note taking while you do it.

You just have a specific space where you put your notes about notekeeping.

While you take notes you don't think about it, just like when you think you don't think about it. (Taking thoughts notes is just like thinking out loud really, just it's searchable and can be structured).

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#35

Post by skmurphy »

I remember reading this when he first posted and finding quite a few good insights, some expressed a little idiosyncratically but I think that's in the nature of people doing original thinking. It's stream of consciousness but that fits with his goal to capture and curate his thoughts. The section that begins

   Here's a Speed List: "Electronic Collaboration"
in chapter 6 Intra-Subject Architecture (see http://speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/html/doc007.html ) contains good insights into how to leverage email, wikis, and mindmaps.

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#36

Post by jobigoud »

joshdance wrote: post #27

A man's thoughts are his own. How he choses to store or recall them is also his own. There is no one size fits all.

I firmly believe this as well.

Which led me to think that in the mid term future, there will be two kinds of people, those that can program the notekeeping software of their dreams, and those that will have to rely on one written by someone else and make their process fit in. (+ those that don't see the benefits or think they can just rely on their unaugmented brain to store/structure their ideas.)

Maybe in a more distant future, when the notekeeping is integrated in the brain, everybody will be happy.

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#37

Post by rob05c »

Udo wrote: post #23

I don't know how to say this delicately, so I won't: I'm having trouble distinguishing this book from the disjointed ramblings of a mad man. The RANDOM capitalization of VERY IMPORTANT WORDS! combined with the "snake-oil sales pitch" style of writing doesn't do this work any favors, but it's really the content where this comes up short. Apart from the premise of mapping every thought, no viable strategy is offered ac…

> the disjointed ramblings of a mad man.

"keeping a map of all your thoughts has a freezing eff ect on the mind."

"you will be IMMOBILIZED for the duration of your commitment"

Sounds like he went mad in the attempt.

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#38

Post by arh68 »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

That's very interesting. I foresee a problem with capacity. If you keep everything around eventually you won't be able to move anymore. I'm so happy that I'm beginning to forget some of the stuff from my childhood, to keep carrying that along forever seems like a huge weight. Forgetting is just like remembering: a blessing and a curse at the same time. It would be really nice if our minds could actively forget someth…

>inability to acquire new stuff or inability to focus due the large number of associations running out from each thought you have

It's exactly this. In the active mind (hyperactive, perhaps), the dataset is ever increasing and the memory banks are thrashing. On the best days, the cache is very deep. You never really know how deep the cache goes, though, so what might be the in L3 one day silently becomes /dev/null. This is a problem. (It's also, as you point out, a blessing)

A permanent store is the solution, but the brute force (write everything down) doesn't immediately solve the issue. There is no metadata in writing, so searching through papers involves full-text O(ludicrous) kind of searches. Every permanent store needs an index to be useful. It looks like the author has developed an extensive, coherent(?) way to colocate and index written information.

Considering how slowly most people can write, I'd be very curious to see how good mapping software could be used with ~300wpm stenographer-paced typing (Plover). Typing as fast as I can think into a searchable, sortable, arbitrarily small/large/nested/rearrangable/duplicable/etc medium is intriguing, to say the least.

EDIT: One more thing. The 'immobilization' that some ridicule is inherent in the medium: ink on paper. A written page is immutable and cannot show a diff. This is a bit like Purely Functional Data Structures. The 'structure' is at best just a single page, rewritten fairly quickly. As the ideas grow, sheet by sheet, editing a single page requires rebuilding the now-12-page idea. This is refactoring with pen & paper.

The only way to be 'mobile' is to either not write it down in the first place or to archive and never look at again. You're right in that rehashing old ideas thwarts gc: it's like burning an image into your screen, right into the phosphorus.

Re: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

#39

Post by bdg »

Udo wrote: post #23

I don't know how to say this delicately, so I won't: I'm having trouble distinguishing this book from the disjointed ramblings of a mad man. The RANDOM capitalization of VERY IMPORTANT WORDS! combined with the "snake-oil sales pitch" style of writing doesn't do this work any favors, but it's really the content where this comes up short. Apart from the premise of mapping every thought, no viable strategy is offered ac…

I've been reading a chapter a day since this was posted and... I'm done with this. The rambling effect and raving about types of stationary and importance of stationary is just... I don't have any words to describe this.

I can't help but come to the conclusion he's nuts.

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