I largely disagree. I suppose there are different types of notes:
- Kind of "fetishistic" notes that people are taught to take in schools/universities, where you basically just copy over the contents of a lecture/textbook/article, without reprocessing them and with no specific goal in mind.
- Project-relevant notes, of two types:
- "Stream-of-consciousness"/brainstorming notes, where you frantically write down the contents of your chain of thought to not lose track of its different branches and to be able to re-enter the flow state the next day or if interrupted.
- More persistent notes containing distillations of your streams of consciousness, and any other information about the project you'd like not to forget (e. g., some tricky but forgettable edge cases).
- More general context-relevant notes, taken in anticipation of projects you might start in the future.
They have different levels of usefulness:
- (1) are indeed basically useless. Maybe this is the type of notes most people end up taking, and that's what generates the opinion that note-taking should be minimized?
- (2a) are explicitly transient, of course. Ideally, they'd be continuously edited down to 2b. (I still keep them in case they'd be valuable later for e. g. fine-tuning a (local) LLM on them or something.)
- (2b), I think, are invaluable. Maybe if you have really good memory, or if you're working on one thing at a time only and never have to go back to a previous project, you don't need them? But that's not the case for me at least, not maintaining those types of notes would lead to pretty important information falling through the cracks. These are the notes in the reference class of "leaving comments next to bits of code that have to be weirdly-shaped in order to avoid a weird bug", which generalizes beyond programming.
- Another source of utility here is preserving information about "paths not taken". When working on some theoretical problem, you may end up adopting some very promising-seeming assumption and running with it. After a while, that assumption would be baked into your model of the problem so deeply it might be difficult to imagine a world without it – which would be lethal if the assumption was wrong. Seems important to explicitly keep track of it, in a format that isn't as corruptible as your brain.
- Yet another potential source of utility here is that you can copy-paste them into an LLM if you need to give it context about your project (if they're written in a comprehensible-enough format, which mine admittedly often aren't).
- (3) is tricky, because there's a very fine line between it and (1). It's easy to fetishize the process, end up taking notes in anticipation of projects you'll never actually end up needing to do, or to take very useless notes which could just be replaced by the link to a relevant Wikipedia page (or, nowadays, by asking a question to an LLM). But if done right, they can be helpful, and if correctly organized, I don't see how they can really get in your way during your normal operations.
"People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism."
Guilty as charged. I do not regret my crime and I will attempt it again.
1I disagree with the derision toward (1). It's true they are often useless, especially if copied without understanding, but the process of taking notes, I find, helps with 3 things unrelated to later reference:
- Because I write slower than I think, writing an idea down forces me to engage with it more deeply.
- Writing things down is a recall task, and recall tasks are required for forming lasting memories.
- Writing down specific details forces you to double check that you correctly understood the detail.
So I don't think the only value of notes is later reference, but I agree with and appreciate what you say about (2) and (3).
Fair point. I meant specifically the case of copying without understanding/without "turning the ideas over in your head", though. Like, literally writing down a lecturer's speech, or copying down what's written on some slides, without engaging in any "conceptual rephrasing", without comparing it to your other knowledge and trying to see how it connects, what background shapes it allows you to see, etc. That latter stuff is very important, but I'd classify it as (2a) types of notes.
Oh, I see. Yeah, (2a) is good, but "to not lose track of its different branches and to be able to re-enter the flow state the next day or if interrupted" makes me think it doesn't apply to things written down not for the sake of the written down thing but because of how the act of writing something down changes how you are thinking and retaining knowledge.
I largely disagree.
Disagree with which bits precisely?
I think, to use your taxonomy, I'm trying to formularize how to produce types 2b and 3. Take the note - "Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers". To you this might seem like a type 1 note - it's a "who did what" statement. But actually it's probably closer to type 3 in that it points to a implicit vague goal I have about appropriating the film grammar and design language used in opening title sequences of both films and television shows, which is a highly compressed and efficient form of storytelling, and making self-contained stories with it.
A way of distilling it might be:
Learn interesting thing -> think about kind/type of event/decision this is useful for -> think about specific instance this would be useful for (or three) in explicit detail -> write that down
What I'd need to do to improve my notetaking (and tell me if this is wrong) is go a step further rather than say "this vaguely points towards this goal". I should stop, brain storm exactly which techniques from, say the still-photographs chronological progression of Cheers, or the family dynamics in a single shot from Rosanne and how I might build a self-contained story about that. Not just saying "it would be cool to do something based on that" but actively writing down what might be a candidate to apply those techniques. Coming up with a story, even if it's as simple as "girl meets boy, from wrong side of the tracks" "kind died, queen died of grief". Because again, now I'm leaving less work for future me.
If I learn about some cool new FFMPEG ability, "oh wow, I can make a carousel with this commandline, that's cool" - I should stop - and think about what kinds of video content I would want to stack horizontally and scroll. Why? What content would suit it? I should have a provisional answer. This increases the chances of me using that note.
Another source of utility here is preserving information about "paths not taken". When working on some theoretical problem, you may end up adopting some very promising-seeming assumption and running with it. After a while, that assumption would be baked into your model of the problem so deeply it might be difficult to imagine a world without it – which would be lethal if the assumption was wrong. Seems important to explicitly keep track of it, in a format that isn't as corruptible as your brain.
Yep, hard agree.
Except, annoyingly, I often find myself with the inverse. My baked-in assumptions are correct (or at least, right within the specific way I've chosen to do something - Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem - every complex system is always in a failure but some components are compensating for it). I've erected Chesterton's Fence and forget why I did and quickly remember why with disastrous results.
I love discussion of notes! I definitely share a lot of feelings from this post.
I like the lens of looking at the self at different instances of time as part of a team. It seems that your perspective is missing a clear distinction of what I see as the 3 roles that different versions of yourself perform while taking notes for reference. First there is information gathering and submission to the note archive. Then there is processing and indexing. Finally there is retrial and reference. It might be that you are quickly switching between these roles, or you might treat them as separate activities depending on the kind of notes you are taking, but there seems to always be an interplay of these 3 elements.
So it doesn't seem like predicting the needs of the retriever should be the job of the submitter. Rather, the indexer should be creating a system that allows the submitter to easily submit notes while also allowing the retriever to find the archived notes that are relevant to what they are doing.
But it does make sense for retrievers to make requests for submitters, like "I'm looking for notes relevant to this project", or "I want to remember songs I liked from this genre". It kinda seems like the complaint of this post could be recontextualized as there being an impression that there is a retriever who wants a list of interesting and amusing factoids. Maybe this is a false belief and you should stop taking notes without some specific query they are in response to, or maybe you could put factoids in an anki deck and review them periodically because doing so would bring you some sense of enjoyment or well being.
Though, "notes for reference" is not the only point of notes. Notes also help with the practice of recall and focus on details.
2
1the 3 roles that different versions of yourself perform while taking notes for reference
That seems like a reasonable decomposition.
The Holy Grail of note-taking software, for me, is something that would put the indexer out of the job. Some framework that makes it trivially easy for the submitter to place the note in the "correct" place to begin with, or which guarantees that the retriever would be trivially able to fetch all information from the notebase that is related to a given arbitrary query, and which would work without you-the-person needing to engage in time-consuming, often boring and unproductive-feeling notebase management/refactoring. Seems like a major challenge, though.
Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. I kinda get the desire to eliminate the indexer but I feel like it's almost the submitter and retriever I would automate and I would only do the indexing work. In a sense the indexing feels like matchmaking between submitters and retrievers who should get to know one another and promoting especially important submission or retrieval work.
But I use my notes to manage my focus and use a heavily modified version of bullet journalling with emphasis on flexible, manual, indexing work. But I wouldn't claim my system is particularly good, just that it colours my perspective.
Responding to "Misses the point" tag on
It kinda seems like the complaint of this post could be recontextualized as there being an impression that there is a retriever who wants a list of interesting and amusing factoids.
I think this maybe came across as a stronger sentiment than I meant it to be. Sorry.
I'm pretty interested in the model of a "future self" and "past self" or "retriever" and "submitter" who are trying to coordinate with each other. I'm not saying I'm correctly understanding the point of the post, but it seems like the problem of past self creating a bulk of poorly organized notes that future self doesn't want to deal with can be looked at from different angles:
- Past self was imprudently collecting ideas into notes like they were shiny stones picked up and put in a pocket and promptly forgotten about. (problem with submitter)
- Past self is putting in work to build something but is let down by future selves inability to build on their work. (problem with retriever)
- The system by which notes are getting from the past self to the future self is failing to connect the correct instances of submitting with the correct instances of receiving. (problem with indexer)
My above quote was looking at the first, problem with submitter, as the submitter having incorrect beliefs about what would be useful for the receiver. What might this incorrect belief look like? Possibly that the receiver will benefit just from lists of interesting and amusing factoids.
In response to "Seems Offtopic?" tag on
or maybe you could put factoids in an anki deck and review them periodically because doing so would bring you some sense of enjoyment or well being.
This was in response to this kind of idea:
I’ve instead burdened my future self with, what appears to be, rubbish.
It feels to me that you wouldn't write something down if you thought it was rubbish. There was something about it that appealed to you, either because it seemed important or you had some other affection for the idea, but there is a mismatch between the sense of importance you felt writing it and later reading it.
At times in my life, I have put random ideas that I have affection for, like factoids or quotes, into an anki deck and reviewing them every morning. Thinking about it now, I might start the habit again. I wasn't really trying to commit anything to memory like how anki is normally used, instead, I was using it to periodically remind myself of things. I really liked a few things about doing this:
- It kept me connected to the context where the idea seemed useful, avoiding the phenomenon of looking at an old note and thinking "What does this even mean?" or "Why did I think this was important to write down?"
- Reviewing the same ideas when I had different contexts let me notice different aspects of them and connect them to other ideas.
- I could choose to delete notes if I no longer felt the sense of affection or usefulness that justified reviewing them, which gave me a better sense of what kinds of things I was trying to focus on and what things were ok to not focus on as much.
- It made me very aware of the cost of trying to pick up ideas and make them part of my context when I was taking this kind of note, which helped the note taking version of myself better decide if things were worth writing down for general review, or if they should be archived in some other way, or just forgotten.
In the second sentence of my original post I wrote:
I’m principally interested in recording good ideas, tactics, or facts that help me do and finish tasks well.
I do not understand how "interesting or amusing factoids" helps me tactically, or do and finish tasks well. Therefore I think it is entirely unconnected from the point of my notetaking, and my original post. Nor do I think an Anki system solves the core problem of how to convert notes into actions, or better, more efficient behaviors or completion of tasks.
It feels to me that you wouldn't write something down if you thought it was rubbish. There was something about it that appealed to you, either because it seemed important or you had some other affection for the idea, but there is a mismatch between the sense of importance you felt writing it and later reading it.
Something can be appealing but still utterly useless, and therefore rubbish. Most of my notes are therefore rubbish because they do not help me operate tactically or help me do and finish tasks well.
For example, I may write things that appear to have some relevance to online content creation, perhaps with the vague idea that "this will help me promote my videography business" and then never figure out how to usefully integrate them into promotion content or a advertising strategy, therefore: the note was rubbish, useless. Maybe I'm missing something here, but how does Anki reviewing or better recall help with integration? If the note is useless and rubbish, it doesn't magically become useful if I can remember it as an 'amusing factoid' without application or utility.
I do not understand how "interesting or amusing factoids" helps me tactically, or do and finish tasks well.
It's the "good ideas" aspect. Good ideas can be good because their useful, or just because they make you feel good. People feeling good is the ultimate terminal value imo. But honestly that sentence wasn't the most salient thing to me while I was responding. If you feel it should have been I am sorry.
how does Anki reviewing or better recall help with integration?
Continuing with your example of online content creation facts for promoting a videography business, The facts have some relation to aspects of your strategy, but different aspects of your strategy will be salient to you on different days, so by reviewing that fact on different days you increase the chance of having the relevant strategy context in mind when also bringing the relevant fact to mind so that you can see how it applies to your strategy. That is assuming the fact has any relevance to your strategy. If it is indeed completely useless, then yeah, it was a waste of time to write it down, but I don't think you can really get a sense of what things are going to be useful to you without writing down things and they checking, and remembering, whether they turned out to be useful or not.
If the note is a burden, I'd say it is a problem of the note-taking system rather than of the note itself.
(That said, I think it is possible that all existing systems suck, and we need to invent something much better.)
1If the note is a burden, I'd say it is a problem of the note-taking system rather than of the note itself.
In my case it's not the individual notes that are burdensome, it's the sheer volume of notes that is the burden ("the dose makes the poison"). As the notes I have to recall, digest, and pass judgement on increases, so too does the cognitive load. The kind of notes I'm talking about should aid in making decisions or improving processes: more notes and dead-end paths slows down the decision making process. That's robbing my future-self.
What's interesting is preemptive "sorting" goes against one of the core tenants of Zettelkasten which promotes this idea of connections between atomic notes arising organically.
I am curious about Gwern's Suggestion of what to do with lists one is not sure how to sort, but I cannot understand the suggestion.
I am curious about Gwern's Suggestion of what to do with lists one is not sure how to sort, but I cannot understand the suggestion.
I am just guessing here, but it's probably something like this: Find a way to calculate the "distance" between the items (in case of notes, perhaps if they link to each other, they are "closer"; or maybe also if they have the same keywords, dunno), then create an N-dimensional structure out of that, then find the longest dimension in that structure and project all nodes to that axis, and now you have a linear ordering that feels somewhat meaningful. (Probably not exactly this.)
As the notes I have to recall, digest, and pass judgement on increases, so too does the cognitive load.
Yeah. In my opinion, an ideal system should somehow take into account that some notes are old, unreviewed, etc., and give those notes lower priority, e.g. they would be displayed in a gray color and come later in search results. So they mostly wouldn't bother you, unless you find them by a hyperlink, or you use the right keywords in search.
I haven't tested this idea in practice. It's just based on my intuition of how human memory works. I mean, with humans we don't have this feeling that learning about new things is mostly a cognitive debt. (Or do we? I think a similar sentiment was expressed in a Sherlock Holmes book, where the genius detective said something like "I don't want to know that the Earth is round, because that is irrelevant to my work".) That's because our memories are connected by associations, and the frequently recalled ones are more likely to come to mind. Maybe we could capture this intuition in an algorithm.
Yes, although more concretely it would be to use an off-the-shelf neural embedding, then cosine distance, and then TSP (or one of the many other algorithms) to find a linear ordering which minimizes the total distance. I never got around to TSP or anything fancy because I discovered for my use case, the dumbest possible greedy algorithm (define the starting point as the newest entry; take the nearest entry as the second entry; repeat until you run out) worked well, so I never got around to seeing if the fancier ones delivered a visible improvement.
I don't know how well exactly that would work in a Zettelkasten context with a lot of notes, rather than a relatively limited set of curated notes. A seriation approach which works nicely at n = 20 might perform very badly at n = 20,000, if only because a list of 20,000 items is hard to make useful.
My off the cuff suggestion would be that you would want to instead initialize a tag-category hierarchy and work within it from then on: create a tag-category hierarchy automatically, and seriate within that. Something like, do k-means clustering of the 20,000 and break them up into 10 clusters; label with a LLM; break each cluster up into 10 sub-clusters; label; and so on until you have 10-100 notes in each cluster (so maybe 4 levels), and then seriate within the lowest level clusters. The expert human then can superimpose some additional metadata and rewrite names etc to improve the inferred taxonomy. Only the most pathologically obsessed Zettelkasten user would ever do it by hand, but even a noisy and inapt breakdown is a lot better than a flat list of 20,000 (no mater how well seriated that is)! See https://gwern.net/design#sort-by-magic and https://gwern.net/design#future-tag-features
Yeah. In my opinion, an ideal system should somehow take into account that some notes are old, unreviewed, etc., and give those notes lower priority, e.g. they would be displayed in a gray color and come later in search results. So they mostly wouldn't bother you, unless you find them by a hyperlink, or you use the right keywords in search.
Oh cool. You got me thinking and I might walk-back from what i said earlier - maybe individual notes are a burden? For example, let's say I'm working on a title sequence for a sitcom, specifically it's a Dark Comedy about an Oncologist. And I need to make some decisions about what style, what content etc. etc.. So I type "title sequence" or "opening credits" into my note taking system and it comes up with the example from my OP:
"Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers"
Imagine that's the note in full. And it's top of the heap. So I go to youtube and watch the opening titles of Cheers, and other television shows the firm worked on. (Adding further to the burden: maybe I make some more notes, or observations. Notes create notes - when does it end?)
But it still doesn't actually resolve the decision: what this Dark Comedy about an Oncologist title sequence should be?
See, all the unreviewed old, low priority notes could be greyed out. But does it solve the problem, does make the decision any faster? No. that defeats the entire purpose of writing the note, because a note is work that is speculating on a payoff. Too many of these (as is the case with me) and the whole pattern is useless.
Through having written all this out in a reply, it seems to me the solution is simply: I should instead speculate on why they opted for historical photographs rather than write the factoid- i.e. the note should speculate on what was the reasoning behind that choice. Producing a note more like:
Castle Bryant and Johnston probably opted to make the opening titles of Cheers with static, historical photographs, which serves as a macrocosm for the lives of the main cast, who are stuck in a routine of coming to the bar - Sam in particularly clinging to former glories
And even better note, I would make observations from other Castle Bryant and Johnston title sequences and speculate on why they opted for the creative decisions they did - before I commit the note to my file!
The action and location, around the table of Roseanne shows the family dynamics literally around the Matriarch like a working class Queen's court...blah blah blah while the single unbroken camera shot produces a feeling of... rah rah rah
I think this is better because if I make these observations at the time I write the note, rather than when I recall the note, I've shifted the work from my future-self to the past, and it provide heuristics or ways to think about the Oncologist Sitcom decision (or other, similar, decisions!).
So individual notes can be a burden if they don't provide readymade answers. The bottleneck isn't searching or recall for relevance - if the notes are too spartan they aren't useful even if they are relevant. The issue is providing ways of making decisions and doing things well: and one way to speed up the process is by front-loading speculating on why a decision or action was taken. Rather than taking a spartan note.
Associations are fine - but what's more important (in my view) is heuristics, rules, and techniques that are immediately applicable.
Notetaking isn’t just for recalling things you read in a book. I’m principally interested in recording good ideas, tactics, or facts that help me do and finish tasks well.
Although, if you’re in the habit of reading great authors, that’s a pretty good reason to take notes. Why reinvent the wheel, especially if you have access to the best ideas in history? However, the impetus for notes includes so many sources other than books. The impetus can come from conversations, lectures, your own stream of consciousness, and even dreams.[1]
Notetaking, when successful, moves the burden of searching for information, or thinking from some point in the future to now. You’re outsourcing your future self’s thinking and searching to the present (and, potentially, a third party whom you’re quoting or paraphrasing).
Write too many notes, and the opposite happens. An excess of notes burdens your future-self, making them responsible for sorting and evaluating your notes, on top of deliberating how to best do the task these notes relate to.
I’m a lousy notetaker and a prolific one. I have a huge collection of digital notes, clippings, paraphrases, essay-ettes and memos, amassed over the decades. And hardly any of it ever influenced an important deliberation. This is almost certainly because I have it ass-backwards: instead of outsourcing my future self’s thinking and searching to the time I took or wrote each note. I’ve instead burdened my future self with, what appears to be, rubbish.
There won't be a later...
Broadly, the solution is simple, "just think more now”. More now? But how!?
It's another of those annoying "devil in the details" "draw the rest of the owl" situations.
I’m currently trying to develop tactics and rituals to put that into practice. The solution, counterintuitively doesn’t seem to be “I need an easier way to keep notes” or something an app can solve. Writing notes haphazardly, inspired by any seemingly interesting thought or quote, is probably only adding to the mountain of trash.[2] And further burdening my future self to sort through it. I suspect the solutions looks more like how to learn soft skills - emphasis on using notes as launching points. And similarly Murphyjitsu - imagine I put the note into practice, the outcome was bad, why?
Notes can be non-verbal. Graphs and symbols can be notes. Playing a guitar riff into your phone recorder that you may later write a song around is a note. Sketching a hand or a facial expression as a study for a painting is a note. There is a superficial overlap to pins on Pinterest and fashion moodboards.
Not an original idea at all, here I outsource (emphasis mine):
"People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are."
Unbundling Tools for Thought - Fernando Borretti