Gerrit Scholle — LessWrong

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Review: How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler, Charles Van Doren)

The book as well as the Zettelkasten method in itself doesn't directly solve the problems you stated in your article. It isn't a system that tells you what to extract out of the books you read. There's a lot of discussion of what to extract and how deep to extract in forums, and the tequnique itself doesn't prescribe anything.

The main problem the ZK tries to solve isn't curation of what to extract from your sources. Instead, it tries to solve the problem of information siloing that happens when you take classic notes about books th... (read more)

Review: How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler, Charles Van Doren)

Gerrit Scholle6y20

My approach to the margin note/marking conundrum:

I primarily use digital sources. Most e-book software has an option to just look up your mark ups, and to extract them. This makes things easier. What I'm describing here works with physical books as well, so I will describe different processes for physical and e-books as necessary.
I use mark-ups as a 'look at this passage a second time' marker. I use two markers (Marker colors or marks like a cross and circle on margin). One is for 'moderately interesting', another is for 'res

Gerrit Scholle6y10

I have read How to take smart notes by Söhnke Ahrens, in its German original language. A few observations I've made:

The book, despite its English title, isn't really about note taking in general. It describes how to implement one specific note-taking technique, the Zettelkasten (ZK), or slip box, method. The premise is that you need to do knowledge work in order to write something like a master thesis or scientific paper.

The strength of this method is to avoid putting knowledge you extracted from books into information silos. Instead, extra

Answer by Gerrit ScholleJan 25, 2020200

I believe what you describe is something that arises from internet dialogues and how generations that grew up 'digitally native' use culture techniques learned on the internet to shape dialogue.

The internet and social media also makes dialogue and monologue that would've been fringe positions more visible, and lead to electronic screaming matches between bipartisan opinions. In the real world, positions and party lines are drawn in part by physical separation - bars that are frequented by a certain clientele, neighborhoods that draw specific... (read more)

Terms & literature for purposely lossy communication

Answer by Gerrit ScholleJan 22, 202050

Progressive Summarization by Tiago Forte is a note taking technique that focuses on compression as the primary knowledge work that you do on information (books/articles/lectures). For this technique, loss of information by summarizing further and further is a feature of knowledge work. It's called "progressive" summerization because you do not compress all sources as much as possible. Instead, you begin by marking up your source. Then if the information is useful you summarize further in a separate document, and so on.

This is a usage of information loss as

... (read more)