Episode AI notes
- Transitioning from analog to digital in personal knowledge systems is a topic of discussion in the personal knowledge community. Atomic notes, where one idea is captured per note within a loose structure, can be easily translated from analog to digital systems.
- The analog system of atomic notes and branching ideas consists of roughly 70,000 interconnected units. The system features atomic notes with one idea per note, connected in a loose structure by standing order. The notes are not hierarchical and allow ideas to branch out.
- The speaker explains that in a note-taking system, it is crucial to focus on the concept and idea behind the word rather than just the word itself when creating links. Signifiers can be understood by assigning each note a number and using alphabetical letters to add comments.
- Note-taking should focus on understanding the concepts and ideas behind the words, rather than just the words themselves. It’s important to link to content that is relevant to the idea being developed, even if it doesn’t contain the exact same word. Notes should be embedded in sentences that describe the connection.
- Intentionally embedding links within descriptive sentences helps to avoid collecting random overwhelming links and provides a rationale for connecting specific ideas, facilitating quicker access to deep work. Distinguishing between doing the work and meta work, such as organizing ideas, is crucial.
- Effort in linking leads to more selective and thoughtful linking, as it forces one to think more on the content level. The work of linking is actually the thinking work, and not just housekeeping. Describing the connection between two notes requires forming an argument using words.
- Encouraging students to reflect on their own ideas and judgments while taking notes can help in understanding and engaging with arguments more effectively. This approach can lead to improved quality of written papers as it promotes ongoing thinking process and makes explicit the student’s thoughts about the subject matter.
- The process of idea processing involves collecting ideas, connecting those ideas to identify relationships, and contextualizing the connections to understand why they matter. This process encompasses encountering ideas, triggering personal thoughts, establishing relationships between ideas, and understanding the significance of these connections.
- Contextualizing connections between ideas helps explain why they matter. Having distance from one’s own thoughts is crucial for changing one’s mind about something. The podcast emphasizes the importance of note taking as an integral part of the thinking process itself.
- Professionals in careers with a focus on continuous learning seek a system that extends beyond individual projects. The distinction between their professional and personal interests is often indistinct, leading them to seek a more integrated approach. A comprehensive learning framework is needed.
- The line between professional life and personal interest is often blurry. Many readers struggle to remember and recall the information they have read, despite feeling that the books have shaped their lives. A system is needed to capture and retain the main ideas from books.
- While the right tools are important, it is equally crucial to understand core concepts and principles when using them. Users should focus on customizing and inventing structure in tools to suit their needs, as the ways of working with each tool are not interchangeable. (Time 0:00:00)
Enlazar ideas no debe algo mecánico, sino involucrar un ejercicio reflexivo. Transcript: Speaker 1 And I think the mindset people often have when they link to a particular word, it’s a focus on the word itself and not on the concept and the idea behind the word. So Lumen also had an index to quickly find his way around the Zetal custom, but he also had like hub notes where he points to different aspects of a particular topic. And I think the difference between concepts and words are extremely important because you have to understand what you’re linking to. You’re not just linking to something that happens to have the same word, but you link to something that is actually on a content level relevant for the idea you’re developing. And that note you’re linking to might not even have the same word in it. It might be discussed with another term or another concept or another word. So it’s a system that nudges you constantly to reflect on what you’re actually talking slash writing about. And any connection that makes sense has to be a connection that is well understood. And I myself tried to link in a way that the link is embedded in some kind of sentence that describes the connection. So I don’t collect random links, which quickly become overwhelming after a while, but that I give myself an account on why do I link to that particular note? How is that helpful for the idea I’m trying to express the thought I’m trying to develop? And that gets you quicker into deep work instead of the shadow work where you more or less just organize the ideas? (Time 0:14:19)
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The value of intentional linking for enhancing deep work Transcript: Speaker 1 Tried to link in a way that the link is embedded in some kind of sentence that describes the connection. So I don’t collect random links, which quickly become overwhelming after a while, but that I give myself an account on why do I link to that particular note? How is that helpful for the idea I’m trying to express the thought I’m trying to develop? And that gets you quicker into deep work instead of the shadow work where you more or less just organize the ideas? Yeah, this is a subject I was hoping we would get into. I call this distinction the difference between doing the work and then doing what I call meta work, like working on the thing that enables the work. And one impression that I had about particularly about Lumen’s approach is that because it was analog, it required a lot of housekeeping. Maybe literally, in his case, because it is a big thing in his house. But interestingly, one of the things that’s emerging from this conversation that I had not fully groked before is that the process of having to think more explicitly about links is Part of the work. And it might be part of the value. (Time 0:16:10)
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El ejercicio de enlazar ideas de manera clara y significativa ES parte del trabajo. Transcript: Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that’s true. When you don’t have to put effort into linking, you tend to link too much and you tend to link to the things that pop into your mind most quickly. If you have to put a little more effort and time into it, you think more on the content level and you’re much more selective with what you’re linking to. And I think you really put it well. The linking work is basically the thinking work. It’s not housekeeping. It is actually the work. And that becomes obvious when you think about, okay, how do I describe the connection between two notes? You have to use words that form an argument. You have to use a word like on the other hand or a phrase like on the other hand or extending on that thought, see also, or another aspect of this is, or this poses the question. So you turn almost like a bullet point list of interesting ideas into something much more coherent. (Time 0:18:11)
conceptos enlaces ideas PKM práctica
conceptos enlaces pkm práctica
Formular explícitamente tus pensamientos es parte de lo más importante de PKM. Transcript: Speaker 1 I think this is related to maybe the most important aspect of note taking in general, and that is if you want to change your mind about something and want to, well, if you want to change Your mind about something, you have to get some distance to that. And it’s very difficult to change your mind about something when it’s only in your mind. And the moment you write it down, you get literally some distance to it, and it makes it much more easier to deal with that as if it were a thought of someone else. And not writing explicitly what you think about something, what you read or have on your notes makes it very difficult to connect to that as something that is not just in the background And shaping your ideas, but it is something you can actually discuss and put into contrast with other people’s ideas. So getting this kind of distance to what is only implicit in the beginning is maybe the most important aspects of note taking in general. (Time 0:24:25)
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PKM como mente extendida Transcript: Speaker 1 I think it resonates with the idea of the external mind. I mean, you had any Murphy Poll on your podcast. So when I read her book, I thought, yeah, that’s very much a description of what I feel is a conceptual change in thinking about note taking. That it’s much less thought today as an afterthought and much more an integrated element of the thought process itself. And I think that is reflected in philosophical concepts about thinking. We used to think about thinking clearly as something that’s in your hat and writing as something that follows the thinking process. It’s kind of a recording of what has happened before. So there’s a representation of your thinking. But this representational paradigm is being discussed in philosophy for a long time now. But I feel there are so many practical implications that are not being discussed or now being discussed coming from a very different point of view. And any Murphy Poll describes how in different areas there is a change in how we think about the environment and how the environment is not just shaping our ideas, but how thinking itself Must be thought as being at the same time inside and outside our mind. It doesn’t really work seeing writing as an afterthought because it’s not. (Time 0:26:46)
4E cognición PKM
PKM permite acumular pensamientos para evaluar críticamente los nuevos. Transcript: Speaker 1 And in a way it answers a very basic want and that is, well, when I read a lot, I also want to remember some of it. And I think we all know this experience, but we look at the books we read and are astonished how little we are able to recollect from that. We do feel and know that the books we read kind of shaped our lives and we are different because we read them. But it’s difficult to retrieve the information. And if you just highlight stuff or write comments in the margins of the books, you don’t actually go back and read the book again if you need it. First of all, you need to remember in which book a particular idea was. So having a system in place that of course cannot capture everything you’ve ever encountered, but captures the main ideas and keeps them in play. Because the system forces you or notches you to connect new ideas with old ideas, which make old ideas resurface again and again. I think it’s a healthy dose of conservatism that counterbalance our excitement about new ideas. So there’s nothing wrong with new exciting ideas, but it’s even better when you have a system in place where you check how that connects to what you’ve previously thought and just check Isn’t really that new or is it new and in which way exactly? Is it answering a different question? Does it change to the question? Is it a new answer to the same question? And when you just read without writing, and connecting, you don’t get these prompts to these kinds of questions. But I think these are the important questions because everything we read in the past is not automatically useless after a while. We just tend to forget it and focus on the new. (Time 0:31:58)
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Los principios y rutinas son más relevantes que las herramientas. Transcript: Speaker 1 But there’s this implicit idea that all you need is a tool, right? All you need is the new shiny, no taking app. But my sense in working with these things and experimenting with them over the years is that having the right tools is one thing, but it’s more about certain practices and perhaps mindsets When using the tools. And I was just wondering if you had any tips for people who maybe they’ve discovered a new tool or they’re looking to find out about how to do this for themselves. Do you have any recommendations to help them get started knowing that this can be very overwhelming, right? Right. I think you’re completely right. The tools are important and they make a difference. And if you choose one tool, you will work differently than with another tool. It’s sometimes people talk about tools as if they are interchangeable and I don’t think they are. But you can use every tool in all kinds of ways. And I fully agree that the most important ingredients for working system is to understand the core concepts and principles and having an idea about what you want to achieve with that. Because you can easily use all the tools available as just a dumping ground for ideas and you just collect stuff and it won’t be useful over time. So you have to get used to make intelligent connections which are descriptive and will be useful in a year’s time when you forgot the context when you’ve written them down. And that is a learning process. (Time 0:37:47)
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La elaboración de la estructura de tu PKM ES parte del trabajo. Transcript: Speaker 1 So these two tools share the emphasis on bidirectional linking which I think is very apt for that system. I found those very simple in the setup. And they both come with the difficulty that they come with little structure. So you have to invent the structure yourself. And that is a reason I feel beyond the book. It could be helpful to guide people into setting their settle custom and the principles in these tools up. So you get a head start. But then people adapt their systems to their needs. And I think that’s kind of the beauty of it. And you shouldn’t expect that someone can hand you the perfect system or the perfect tool. And all you need to do is react to that and just use it without thinking about how to structure it. Because as you said earlier, the way you structure your ideas is part of the learning, part of the thinking process. And if you deal with a topic that is very hierarchical structured, you will end up with a more hierarchical structure. And if you think about questions which are very open into disciplinary, it’s much more apt to put the emphasis on the bottom up process and see what structure bubbles up. But there is no rule that you can just apply and you will have the perfect workflow set up. (Time 0:40:39)
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