- "Some claims about the Zettelkasten are merely sensational—like the claim that for Luhmann writing was easy—and the implication that writing will be easy for you, too." - "Some claims about Zettelkasten are utterly ridiculous—like the claim that connecting information in a meaningful way results in information that "almost cannot be forgotten anymore."" - Acc. to Scheper, Ahrens could have argued that antinet not having search function, takes longer, and is harder is actually an advantage/strength. - Ahrens's mistake centers around a situational attribution error many tend to make today. - Wikipedia zettel is not a true antinet zettel - "Even Johannes Schmidt, who studied Luhmann's Zettelkasten system closely, seems to commit the same fundamental attribution error (in attributing the power of digital tools to being better at developing thought). Schmidt does this w()hen lauding Luhmann for seemingly creating "a modern computer-based database system by applying the multiple storage principle," and devising it "as early as the 1950s–1960s."7 Schmidt points out that in doing this, Luhmann anticipated and built (conceptually) something that "would become the common technology of hyperlinking in the era of the World Wide Web."" - 7. Johannes Schmidt, "Niklas Luhmann's Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine," in Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, edited by Alberto Cevolini (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 309. - Zettel antinet is an intrapersonal **knowledge development system** and not an interpersonal **information sharing system** like WWW. - Fundamentally, Schmidt is describing the analog version of Wikipedia, the equivalent of Paul Otlet's Mundaneum, both of which are systems founded on order. Luhmann's Zettelkasten system was founded on chaos. - Zooming in On Wikipedia and Delineating it From a Zettelkasten: - If we hold that information is defined as data (or facts) that are systematically presented in a given human-readable context, whereas knowledge is a mix of information, experience, and intuition, then it becomes clear that Wikipedia is an information system.16 - 17 Myths of Zettel: [[Zettelkasten]] - WIKI VS ZETTEL: - That is, extrapersonal communication is information-based; it's not knowledge (which is experience- and intuition-based). - The simple fact is this: Wikipedia and Zettelkasten systems are vastly different. They're different in nature, and their goals are different. Wikipedia and hypertext information-heavy websites are perhaps in the same family. One is a lemon, the other is a lime. They're the same genus, yet they're different species. The Zettelkasten is in its own category altogether. It's closer to being a mango than it is to being a citrus. It's not even a close cousin of Wikipedia or websites. As a different species, Zettelkasten operates in a different class than Wikipedia. - This is so because the Zettelkasten is concerned with knowledge, not information. For instance, one rather intelligent individual who is seemingly proficient in information science outlines different families of systems (like Wikipedia, wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, and Zettelkasten).22 Each of these items is of a different family and species. They don't even communicate with one another, nor do they understand the same protocols. They're altogether operating in a different context, and operating for a different purpose. Overlooking the different contexts creates a false understanding. - The problem with such a declaration is that Luhmann's system is an intrapersonal knowledge system designed to develop ones own thoughts; whereas Wikipedia, wikis, and digital gardens are extrapersonal information systems sometimes forged through interpersonal collaboration. The **Zettelkasten is not designed to be a linkable idea database that allows for others to connect to it and mix it up with their own ideas.** - In brief, you cannot remove the so-called (and errantly-conceived) barrier created by the meaning and interpretation of each individual person's experience from a system like an Antinet Zettelkasten. Why? Because it's intrapersonal. You cannot separate the consciousness from the system because, **well, that's precisely what the system is, and what it's designed to contain—one's consciousness, one's internal ghost, one's mind.** - ==Addendum: a neurotic filter of some sorts that pores through your collected and cohesive mental models forged together by your own brain fixations and patterns== - The digital lacks in its ability to **force one to actively process one's thoughts.** Even in terms of storage, as it applies to the long-term development and compounding evolution of one's thoughts, digital still stands inferior to the Antinet Zettelkasten. - I can think of one way to get around this. First, hybrid antinet: you think on paper first and then summarize your thoughts on digital so they're easily searchable whenever you don't have time to go through the index and search for it in the box. - "The information and thoughts within digitally-housed content are often decayed and lost because they cannot be seen. They are sucked into a black hole of cyberspace. As I write this, I have a brick of notecards next to me. An entire cabinet of 4x6" notecards in a box. They're screaming at me to develop the ideas that reside on their cards. They urge me to transform them from paper format to digital format. They urge me to write them out in my text editor so that they can be published to the entire world." - Ok then. I can see why. You really have to work twice as hard to get yourself to not forget about all of the other notes you already have in the digital bank. - "The encouraging thing is that once the notes are in such a state (in analog form), it's much more enjoyable to go through them and write them out (into your writing software or onto the page). With digital notes, you're faced with disentangling mountains of information and copy-pasting digital notes." - Nobody got time for that though. In this fast-paced economy, we are all trying to publish as fast as possible??? - "Indeed, writing turns into an active process; it's not a process wherein you simply copy-and-paste your digital notes. With an Antinet Zettelkasten, the process of writing is a lot more active, and I daresay, a lot more fun!" - I think this is true but I really want the ease of the hybrid system. - "While digital information takes up less physical space and it is searchable, it also makes you lazy in processing information by turning it into knowledge." - This is true so I think a "random note finder" will suit you well to kind of randomize your thought processes for some novelty and getting those sweet evergreens. - Also I think a disciplined routine like, "Get 5 notes a day and process them into evergreens" is gonna make up for the internal "blindness" of digital systems. - "Your notes should not be published. Your refined and processed thoughts should be published. Your work and your knowledge should be published. Your notes, to others, are simply information. When you process the notes and convert them into a format for others (such as an article, paper, presentation, or book), you then convert that information to knowledge so that others can apply it to their lives, and convert it to wisdom." - I think this is true. It's pretty useless for others to sift though even though they might access it. Because it's especially suited for my brain because I have been able to sift though all of them and have written them all myself, the ghost of the zettelkasten and its patterns are a reflection of my brain. - New word: overhead: a cost or expense - "I agree with Yuval Noah Harari. As a dataist, I believe that all data should be freed; yet, we must also consider the appropriate time in which the data ought to be freed. It shouldn't be freed while a writer is alive. It should be freed after they pass. Use the finite mental energy you have to develop your notes and create knowledge. After you pass away, leave it to others to digitize and publish the raw material (the backstage of your thinking process)." - The Urge to Publish - "The urge to publish notes may stem from a desire to receive feedback for your work. It may come from the doubts experienced in wondering whether the material selected from readings is even relevant or important to your audience in the first place." - "Still, we must fight against the internal voice of resistance. There are several practices that are a better use of a writer's time compared to publishing notes and tending a digital garden: (1) **you can create short articles (from entire chapters or snippets of your chapters in your early drafts). This is something I do.(2) You can also recruit beta readers to read early versions of your work and provide feedback.** These two things stand as a more worthwhile practice than building out some pretty (but pretty useless) digital garden." - "Backlinks are overrated. They are weak associations that are perhaps worse than worthless—they are attention burglars. They rob your attention of its potential, and redirect your attention onto notes that will merely distract you." - Caution yourself with backlinks. You are very distractible and will lose the thread if you keep adding irrelevant things than what you intended. Or maybe try a hybrid approach where you balance your original path of "links" selected and then the backlinks in the digital garden that were naturally there already. - **It steals time**: "A robber is someone who actually steals something. A burglar is someone who has the intent to steal something. The goal of the Antinet Zettelkasten is to develop thought. Features that distract from this process are worse than worthless, they are attention burglars. They're not attention robbers unless you actually do click on a backlink and get robbed of your attention. Rather, backlinks are attention burglars because they have the intent of stealing and wasting your time." - "Within the scientific disciplinary field of human memory studies, the concept of remote association entails thoughts and memories that are remote. In other words, they're not contiguous (located on the current stem the thought lives on). Such remote associations have much greater strength in moving forward (that is, jumping to the next related thought) than they do moving backward. The backwardmoving associations are "weaker associations." 31 Within the Antinet Zettelkasten, there will be an abundance of useful cardlinks you create. These cardlinks are forward associations made possible by the built-in Folgezettel structure. Your Zettelkasten will also contain an abundance of forward remote cardlinks. You will have your hands full with these most potent of links that render the existence of backlinks less important in the grand scheme of things. In brief, focus on forward associations, not backward associations. Don't get caught up on backlinks or the illusion that they're somehow useful. They're not. If they are, create a forward association (a cardlink) that points to them." - I don't currently understand this but I find that the visual flipping of the physical zettel is a potential groundbreaking feature. With digital, I just jump from back and forward towards the index and I don't really stray far away from the specific context of what I'm researching. Whereas when I'm in my physical antinet then all these different cardlinks behind and forward are all from different indexes and it's not as related to each other as when I'm just clicking things inside a zettel note. - Maybe if I want a desired outcome, like whether or not I want a broad-strokes approach where I take from a lot of sources then I consult my antinet, then if I want to stay within the context more I will stay in digital. - "The Zettelkasten was initially thought of as a mere storage container for notes. It was designed to be a forgetting machine—that is, a machine that allows you to forget things. However, the exact opposite occurs when using the system: you'll have a harder time forgetting the things you put into it! This happens due to the analog nature of the system forcing one to neuroimprint ideas on their minds. This, of course, happens to a much lesser degree with a digital Zettelkasten." - Reason for Antinet Luhmann version - Two primary things drove Luhmann to create his Antinet. First, he wanted the assistance of a person with an extremely sharp, intelligent mind. Yet, lacking funding, and due the expensive cost of hiring talent, Luhmann essentially needed to create his own metaphysical genius assistant. 33 He needed to create any entity to think for itself, and communicate with him. He needed a mind in a box, or a ghost in the box as he termed it. - "The second thing Luhmann needed (to serve as a necessary but secondary feature to a system that could think with a mind of its own), was a system with... its own memory!" - "This memory aid ended up supercharging Luhmann's mind. It unlocked a unique working relationship with the Antinet. The deliberate process of writing by hand enabled Luhmann to peruse his thoughts(written in his own handwriting). In effect, this enabled Luhmann to not only inject a thought onto the notecard, but a piece of himself—his consciousness—onto the notecard. Each individual notecard not only contains a thought, it contains a piece of one's consciousness. It creates an experience wherein you essentially communicate with your past self (this creates the ghost in the box effect)." - "The Antinet with its emphasis on writing by hand, develops one's faculties for later recollection and for recognizing interesting patterns upon rereading what has been written. Familiarity, which entails repeated exposure to an idea or concept, is developed by writing by hand and by reviewing information during the process of searching through one's Antinet. **Recollection, the process in which we recall what we have become familiar with, is enhanced through the process of developing thoughts within contexts of the Antinet.** Here, **"contexts" refers to the branches and stems of thoughts you develop in your Antinet. These branches and stems, over time, form your own "tree of knowledge."** As knowledge scientists have observed, **both familiarity and recollection paradoxically transform notetaking from a system designed to store memories into a system that both stores and enhances memories.** - I wonder if you could shortcut your memory without using repetitive exposure which is tedious. MMM? - Maybe the [[Method of Loci]] really is going to supercharge how you work with your antinet. - Method of loci existed for a very long time but it hasn't been used by Luhmann if he relied on Antinet only? - "Recall that memories are your mind's representation of stored thought, and a thought is your mind's metaphysical representation of physical reality." - Luhmann's system was able to overcome 2 types of memory [[interference]]: - **Retroactive interference**: Upon learning something new, he had to be able to force himself to go back and review what he already knew or learned, so that he could pick up where he had last left off. This enabled him to refresh his memory of the already-learned concept and spot any contradictions in his memory when processing and writing out thoughts about the new aspects of the concept to which he was introduced. He would install the new concept behind the most related concept that was already in the zettelkasten. - **Your application:** benefit of this is it would force you to be able to recall what you already learned, directly going against BASB: "Your mind is for having ideas, not storing them" Whereas Luhmann's was "forced him to go back to REVIEW and then BUILD UPON those ideas to spot any contradictions or errors. Maybe BASB is just for people who prefer to not have any effort in remembering, but this remembering is useful because it also forces you to build upon a specific thing or concept you invested in instead of just laying new upon new idea into a pot of mixed ideas hoping they will add up to something (collector fallacy?). Also you will not proceed to very groundbreaking knowledge if you don't actively try to think and remember past work and meld it in your present. CONNECT IDEAS from past to the present. Instead of being redundant. The advantage of digital is probably that you can find where to put the note faster. - **Proactive Interference** - Proactive interference prevents us from thinking clearly, too, through being our own worst enemy due to false beliefs. Remember that we carry information with us everywhere we go—whether in the form of facts, beliefs, knowledge, or opinions. These are all just metaphysical representations of reality that rely on our memory for their operation. There's one problem with this, however: **one's memory may be based on assumptions and oversimplified representations maintained in order to support the whole story.** In other words, human memory is a whole system made up of subsystems. **Sometimes the content of the subsystems (the exact memory that motivates a particular response) is missing but is unquestioningly assumed in order to fill out the bigger picture of the story you're telling yourself. These assumptions, while useful, and sometimes accurate, are also not perfect. They can go unquestioned and unanalyzed for years, which in turn prevents new, deeper, elevated learning.** - Antinet snaps you out of robot autopilot muscle memory of writing things out of habit. Forces you to check retroactively and peruse your knowledge. - You must exercise your mind to find and search for the most related idea already installed in your Antinet, at which point you're likely to come across contradictory knowledge, or perhaps even discover previous thoughts that indicate you've already thought of such a thing. In either case, you're snapped out of your autopilot muscle memory state of mind. **You are forced to either elaborate on the thought, or explain why the contradiction is incorrect.** - ==ADVICE: Every time you learn something new, afterwards during the processing at the end of the day or early morning, you must ask, have I already thought about this before? Then search for specific notes in your digital antinet index== - "Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet, in a turbulent world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn." - Adam Grant. [[Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know]] - "A key reason the Antinet is not a memory tool—**but a thinking tool—centers on its proficiency in encouraging the surfacing of the parts of your thinking that are, upon further rumination, actually potentially inaccurate.****The Antinet (thanks to its structure and analog form) ends up bringing to surface, exposing, and evolving your thoughts in a manner different than its digital cousins.**" - I think this is only true if you don't have both systems - I think the disorganization of papers in real life is more manageable than digital disorganization. I mean, if it's already all somehow in the system of the digital, and it's not organized, then why even bother? It's like digital system is supposed to be for the "final form" of these notes instead of the hotbed. The antinet is where things might evolve in "real life" in front of you. I find that my macbook disorganization is scary and I don't want to have to skip from one note to another. I prefer to have all my notes in front of me and have a text editor blank paper in front as my main "evergreen" storage receptacle. - Also added to the fact that writing really does force you to think through your ideas. Instead of just copy pasting which is what you usually might do if you're still just surveying a particular book for bib notes to be developed into your own ideas and addendums later once you've selected the relevant information. As they say, "read with purpose and intention" and not try to absorb everything like a machine because unfortunately that is going to take up a lot of your RAM and you're not unlimited. - "Regardless of Ahrens's oversight, the fact is, the Zettelkasten is not primarily a tool for aiding one's poor memory. It's just as much a tool for developing one's thoughts, both (1) in the short term (through writing by hand), and (2) in the long-term through evolving thoughts." - Purpose of Index - Cannot be replaced by a digital search because "**the index serves several purposes. Luhmann says, "We must regulate the process of [the] rediscovery of notes."4**8** The solution to that is the index. The index forces you to stamp and neuroimprint a key term on your mind. It enables you to explore your Antinet and stumble upon accidents and creative insights. It enables you to read differently because you've undertaken the deliberate process of stamping the key term in your mind."** - WORKAROUND: loci method or memorize through anki the key terms you have collected. Separate letters each deck. - what would be the benefits of key terms memorized as opposed to search? - Stumbling upon accidents and creative insights happens when you forget where else this key term occurs and try to recall, then you try to find a related memory and find a related concept in the index, then you get the note. - IT BASICALLY ASKS YOU TO ASK OR QUESTION - I think the repetitive neuroimprint does little to our unreliable memories. It's always been known that our memories are fallible and we forget a lot of the terms unless these are deliberately memorized in a systematic way and not neuroimprinted (which is less efficient) through repetition. The systematic way is through ANKI or [[Method of Loci]] Not "stamping" - A QUESTION I HAVE: What would an index look like as a [[memory palace]] - p.25-26: [[maintenance rehearsal]] vs [[elaborative rehearsal]]. - former produces enhanced long term **recall** - latter produces enhanced long-term **learning** - You need both but what if loci holds all the answers? Or at least a large slice of the pie? - antinet requires review and elaborate acc. to scheper. but what if you can also do the same with digital? however it would really be less efficient because you would need to click from one to the next without the structure provided by the antinet already with its tree-like instead of index-facilitated backlinking - "by simply stripping this process from the zettelkasten and replacing it with a digital search function, you're effectively stripping the zettelkasten of its full power." - how is this so? isn't the shuffling through index cards virtually the same if you have loci-fied or anki-fied the key terms? - It wastes a lot of time on "reading, processing, and sifting physically through your cards one-by-one" unless you deliberately choose to do this instead of going straight to the point of your search for the specific note that you remembered. Why would you need to sift through each note again and again unless you had time to burn? Maybe BASB has some things to say about this imbalance? - stopped: p.29 AUG2922 - [[September 1, 2022]] So I really do think this whole antinet is for people who have slightly eidetic memory to begin with. Or close to it. - Or those who don't mind the extra [[Time]]. Noticed that maybe Scheper is privileged in that he has a [[Wife]] who may take care of everything for him while he does all the [[Knowledge Work]]. While I have to wash dishes, have multiple disabilities, low [[Energy]], chaotic biochemistry that makes me extremely fatigued and [[Sleep]] like a rock for hours on end at irregular hours that wreaks havoc on my routines. (For example, today. Aug31-Sept1). I have no idea why my body just shuts down. I sometimes wonder what my [[brain]] is doing that makes me extremely fatigued. On the one hand, the [[brain]] consumes a lot of [[Energy]]. And I have been having extremely worrying dreams as of late. I don't think it's [[Paranoia]]. It's just that it's disease upon disease and humanity being forced to deal with [[Nature]]. I haven't even watched 2012 lately. I am really not going to be a billionaire in this life so there is no way of survival if the worst comes for the Philippines and my family is going to die probably because our [[wealth]] is more future-based in that the land is just waiting for corporations to buy it. Maybe it's my weaning off Depakote also. I can't accurately recall what about my dreams are so scary but I do remember a zombiepocalypse. Also I forgot a dream that I had about Stanley and I don't think it's just [[Nonsense]]. I mean I stalked him like a day ago and he is apparently on Github and actually knows how to code. Wow. Anyway, in the dream I had it's like it's still apocalyptic and not the zombie dream. I don't know but it's like the signifier thing again where I'm only left with the trace of meaning because unfortunately my mind has deleted the details.