Josephine

Motivation and Method I read the book How to Take Smart Notes a couple years ago and have tried to keep my notes together in a Zettelkasten ever since. I currently use Obsidian, which contains 2500 individual notes collected over two or three years - some abstract to encourage being hooked up to anything and some as concrete as possible to attain specific insight. However, despite the enjoyment of keeping my notes in one place and looking at all of them in a big network, very few of my additions have come from connections between notes. I want to see if I've hit diminishing returns or if original insights are still available with this method. To that end I'm generating 25 random numbers between 1 and 2500, collecting the results to make a toy Zettelkasten a hundredth the size of the full one, and seeing how many meaningful ideas can be developed from it. Playing fast and loose with priors here, a graph with 25 vertices can have a maximum of 300 edges, and by Sturgeon's Revelation I'd expect only 10% of these to be good. So: if I find 30 worthwhile connections or products, I'll be satisfied. Now to roll. The 1%-Zettelkasten 1. Satellites (onto-cartography) - ontological machines caught up in the "gravity" of "bright objects". (See this post for more details.) 2. Ancestors don't die young - for some definition of "young"; all of our ancestors lived long enough to reproduce. 3. Biennials - plants that take two years to fully grow. An important distinction if you ever need to plant crops for food. 4. "Death extinguishes envy" - a quote that stuck with me, though it's not fully true. Death removes us from the social world and solidifies a much kinder impression of us than the average person might have during our lives. 5. Diffuse responsibility - the well-discussed state where 100 people seeing a problem will do nothing because they each feel 1/100th the responsibility. 6. New senses make new media - speculation. A new medium can be developed by findi