Posted by MrVandemar 3 days ago
I've developed this weird addiction to making notes in Obsidian. It wasn't really about learning or understanding anything. I bought into the illusion that having notes in my PKM meant I had actual knowledge. Bigger graph = smarter me, or so I thought. I even started reading books just to feed the system: Look at me with my 3,587 notes this year - aren't I clever!"
Currently, I am just taking notes where it really matters: Readme, documentation and some loosely organised markdown files
The problem likely is an obsession with any of the following:
Trying to keep your notes accurate.
Trying to have a "good" organizational scheme (categories? folders? tags?)
Trying not to have your notes on a topic fragmented. (Didn't I write about this before? Let me find my earlier note and add to it. Oh, and let me find the appropriate places within a note to add the new info).
I've suffered from all of the above. Late last year I decided to start afresh. I use org mode + capture. All notes go in one org file. I don't try to find a prior note on the same topic. I just tag the new note (hopefully with the same tag as before), and start writing. I don't check if I've written some thought before.
I then have a function that takes a tag as an input, and creates a new (temporary) org file with only the entries from that note. It's in the same format as my blog's publishing SW, so if I want, I can output to HTML and view it in the browser - with each note being a blog post.
6 months in, though, I've never needed that function.
What I like about this:
I enter freely without worrying about how it should be organized - I tag it with whatever comes to mind at the moment.
I rely on basic search when looking for something. It's not great, but I'll live with it.
If I ever do work on a long term project where I can work only very sporadically, that export function will be handy.
I never randomly browse. The fact that the file has X notes not acted on - doesn't bother me. That it's all in one file - is surprisingly nice. Since it's in Org mode, I can always do queries on it (but haven't so far).
> Write fragmentarily and read collectively.
I felt a lot lighter just writing things without thinking about organization too heavily and howm gave nice tools to find/see what I needed.
Don't get me wrong - it's still critical to keep track of important information in one way or another. But your own thoughts usually aren't part of that. You are always you, so given the same situation, your future self will likely come up with the same idea you have now (or something even better). That's why keeping track of quick ideas rarely bears fruit.
What you really need to track is unusual information:
- something not from you
- something you can't easily reproduce
- something that sparks new ideas you wouldn't have on your own
In other words, keep the sources of your ideas, not the ideas themselves. This leads to a much lower noise-to-signal ratio because you're more likely to consume well-formulated information, at least much better written than your scattered quick notes.
Every once in a while I boot up a 15 year old Evernote archive or scroll through my Notes.app to get a new glimpse into the things my younger me was up to. It's often endearing, and it also reminds me of how much I will forget about myself in another 10 years, yet these were the things that I spent my free time doing, and this person used to exist. I feel like an archaeologist into my own life.
Even my most technical notes are laced with the residue of my character that I can see myself in.
I'm super sentimental though. I could scroll back to an ancient journal entry and probably make myself tear up if I consider it long enough.
It actually did make me tear up a bit.
I even feel nostalgic and tearful looking at random doodles on a piece of paper that I did during my first job many years ago.
Of course the answer is deeply personal. My take is that I agree with the author on that knowledge should be inhabited, as I quoted Arendt on a former blog entry of mine [2] "For memory and depth are the same, or rather depth can only be reached by man through remembrance.".
If your journey using whatever tool du jour helps you, more power to you! But if it feels like a burden, drop it and adapt. In my process, I tried many different methods of note taking, but the one I haven't dropped is pen and paper. The act of writing is thinking to me. I do not have a plan to go through what I have written and treat them as a fortuitous encounter rather than having a procedure/method in place. But I still find the idea of having digital notes somewhat appealing, luring even.
[1]https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/cognitive-offshoring-and-th... [2]https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/on-taking-notes-and-learnin...
There is also a lot, I do not share. I keep a personal diary and since 2010, I am recording my daily activities in Moleskin daily planners (the only planners I have found that have the same space for Saturdays and Sundays as for working days).
While I do think that deleting the whole thing is extreme, I can imagine that there is a level of catharsis experienced by that.
Lately I have subscribed to Oliver Burkeman’s (author of “4,000 Weeks”) line of thinking where life, and subsequently thoughts, are more meant to be experience rather than optimized. For me, I have seen a negative drop in “life enjoyment” when I have tried to capture everything, and have yet to realize the results and even stick with it consistently (which may be the reason for not seeing the positives).
I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.
I resonate with this a lot. But in the opposite way of what the author implies here.
Since I've start 'reading to extract', my attention span improved a lot. I feel my reading pattern is like that of the pre-social-media self again. Simply knowing that I'm going to write some notes down makes reading a much more engaging experience for me.
By the way, this is what I wrote into Obsidian after reading this article:
> [url]: The author deleted their Obsidian database of 10,000 notes. I do not agree on this approach, but they raised some interesting issues. Quote:
> > The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold.
> > That self never arrived.
> I am probably making the same mistake, and should be reviewing my notes more often. Perhaps I can delete some outdated ones every once in a while, instead of deleting the whole database like the author did?
> It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
> but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.
> A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions...
> A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it...
> There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts
> The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it.
> ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up.
> Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.
Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it.
A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.
Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer!
Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
LLM generated writing doesn't quite feel the same for me, the words are the content but they lack human touch, context, intention. The equivalent would be the photographer uploading their photo to ChatGPT and asking it to regenerate the image. The output wouldn't feel right, it is more like losing something than gaining.
Everyone had the ability to write before chatgpt, they had the ability to get their thoughts across if they so wished, whereas with photography it lessened the burden of having to buy an entirely seperate device.
if I move myself into the shoes of a photographer or someone with an affinity towards photographing I kind of get that when taking pictures is a big part of your life the camera starts to get ingrained with that but for others it wasnt just a step from camera to more frictionless camera it was a step from nothing to camera.
Whereas everyone has a brain to think things and to try to communicate what they are thinking and feeling, large language models did not enable that, they did however enable lazy people to swap out the work with a robots response or malicious people to spam the internet
That is yet be proven, comrade.
> Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)
> But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a 3 inside)
> Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. (2)
> The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside again)
> It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2, 2)
I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)
I do think there's too much of it here, and specifically too many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.
SCNR
To me it's more of a stream of consciousness style of writing.
Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments), but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it is not even close to that, look at an actual example like Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.
So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the style is so mode-collapsed ( https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and not reading it?
We taught them.
One irony now being that that form of skilled writing is inevitably and sometimes falsely accused of being machine-written.
It takes much more skill to write concise than verbose.
If you are writing to explain, being concise is a useful asset. If you are writing to entertain, or for pleasure, verbosity and flair can be better.
I don’t get the feeling the author is trying to convince anyone of doing anything. They are sharing their experience, probably writing for themselves above everyone else. They should do it however they prefer.