- [<] Status Log - created:: 2021-09-13 - status-updated:: 2022-03-22 - current-status:: #articleseed/thoughts - [S] Marketing - purpose:: update the workflows described in the [zotero workflow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbGJH08ZfCs) video and [notes into articles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5N_x2so0g) video; describe how I have adapted the Zettelkasten process. Explain how I think the [[12b6c The Folgezettel concept is useful even if you don't use them]] & [[zettelkasten single-file filing]] stuff all ties together. - [b] References - this discussion in the Obsidian discord [2022-03-29](https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/710585052769157141/958480223253463040) (start there and go back, not forward). ## II. Highlights & Annotations The bedrock of my notetaking is nonfiction texts, whether they be tweetstorms, pop history books, email discussions with experts, journal articles or press releases. ### IIa. How to decide what to highlight There is absolutely truth to the idea of the collector's fallacy I have seen students highlight literally every sentence of a article because they think everything in there is important. And that has just never been my personal problem. So I tend to err on the side of not capturing enough. But there is a flip side to that. And I understand where the collectors fallacy thing is coming from. It's just not a problem that I personally have. I am much more likely to not have bothered to write down the whole thing that I read it but have to go back through my history or recreate the Boolean search in Google. And sometimes that's hard. So I actually, I my problem is not capturing enough. And part of the reason that I'm writing this is because I would like some more acknowledgment that is actually a phenomenon that does indeed happen. It's not all people highlighting everything and not being able to pick out what's important. Some of the problems that people face is that they don't know what's important, so they don't highlight anything. There there is a middle ground. My rule of thumb is to highlight things I can imagine a use for. ### IIb. The value of annotations It's a good habit, when highlighting, to write down _why_ you highlighted something. I do this often but not always. ### IIc. Filtering things through your own perspective Teachers — either in a schoolhouse or on the internet — will often say that your notes should be in your own words. I have given this advice myself — but I don't put everything in my own words. Am I a hypocrite? Ehhhhhh... Putting things in your own words is a useful exercise. Something something there is absolutely value in putting things in your own words, but don't get so caught up in rephrasing things that you spend more time rephrasing things than you do actually synthesizing and playing with the ideas. If you read a sentence that is just facially true and obvious, and you're afraid that you're going to forget it. But it's useful, like a date or a timeline. And you're the ones synthesizing all of those pieces of information like that's useful to have. It's useful if it's useful, keep it I don't think very many definitions have a place in a knowledge management system. But the more obscure you get, the more difficult something is to find, the more likely I think it is that it has a place in your notes. Like I keep track of who precisely the scythians are and who precisely the Hittites are, because a lot of encyclopedias are sort of written for layman and very messy around the edges. And I like to be precise when I'm talking about the Phoenicians there are Entire books devoted to the question of who were the Phoenicians? Were they an ethnic group or they illegal group? Or are they a religious group? What does it actually mean to be Phoenician? So I have a note for that, even though it's technically a definition, because I am able to make the decision on my own. That just googling it doesn't give me enough of the true things that I have come across in my reading. So I don't reword everything, because sometimes the precise language that somebody gave me is what I need. For example, the I took notes from a lecture about Mesopotamian academics. And I wrote an asked historians answer about it. That took directly from my notes, and the guy who did the lecture reached out to me and was like, Hey, you, I don't know you're not quite right. Like, there's, there's some phrases that I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have put it like that. And that's the thing to remember, right? Like, when you put things in your own words, you are losing meaning, you are less likely to be accurate. If you are not yourself an expert in the thing, there is real and genuine value in keeping track of the actual thing, from your actual primary source, or your original source, so that you can compare what you thought against what it really said, I have had this come up on multiple occasions where the thing that I thought was true, is like, maybe not quite true, as I read other sources on the subject. So I'm like, read somewhere that Socrates, you know, changed his mind about tyranny after experiencing life in Syracuse, but that's like, that's a misinterpretation of the thing that I read a reasonable one, like it made sense when I wrote it. But the more I dug into it, the more I realized that Socrates actually didn't change his mind. He just actually, I think it was Aristotle. Like, he just kept throwing himself at the problem of the philosopher King and desperately trying to teach this, you know, tyrant, that he could be a better leader, and it never really worked. And for any rational person, they probably wouldn't change their mind. But as far as I can tell, Aristotle went to his grave thinking that, you know, the philosopher King was a good idea. So you want to keep the original source, I think, because then you can, you can reference how to figure out whether you were wrong or two sources disagree. And that's actually really important when you are trying to figure out what truth is. Now, if you are trying to, you know, study language, or study programming, or, you know, figure out economic systems, maybe what you really need is to put things in your own words, so that it's all your own understanding. And like, if you are taking notes about notetaking, then yeah, maybe you only need to put things in your own word, because it's what the original source said, doesn't matter. But if you are doing any kind of intellectually rigorous work, then you absolutely need to be able to refer back to the original source. And make sure that you didn't screw something up in translation, because the internet is a game of telephone and reading somebody's interpretation of somebody's interpretation of somebody's interpretation of somebody's interpretation is the best way I know of to get something just absolutely wrong. I am sure that somewhere in this when writing things in my own word, I have slightly misstated something that another note taker said, I am sure that in putting things in my own words, I have fucked up something that Nick Milo believes about the linking your thinking kit, I have probably screwed up a major point of what the Johnny decimal system is about. And it works for me. And that's fine because this is something that I have turned into my system. And there are very low stakes for you know, Miss attributing the precise phrasing of how Tiago forte does the Paris system in my real life. But things get trickier when you are talking about the domestication of horses, or whether or not the corn genome is something that originated in one place or money. And one of the best ways to track this down is to be able to track down your sources and compare the data. So if I just have a note that says, you know, look, corn husk was created in, you know, the 1800s and whatever this is wrong, fix this, then that is a hell of a lot less useful than a note that references my original note So Something so I can cross reference later when I'm like, wait, this book says that horses were domesticated, before the cart, and this book says the horses were not skimmed after the cart. And I need to compare those two and make a determination that's a heck of a lot like more sensible than having to suffer notes that say contradictory things and not knowing why or where I got that idea from. So yeah, I like to keep the original shit on hands. And I don't actually feel any need to rewrite everything in my own words, because I am capable of interpreting something and interpreting it in my own head. The reason that people tell you to rewrite things, in your own words is because of the same logic that says that you can't, that you don't really understand something unless you can explain it. There is genuine value in exercises for teaching kids. teach other kids. I know that a lot of really smart people, especially in the rationalist community got real angry that their teachers, you know, made them spend their time after they've done their work teaching the dumber kids stuff. But it's not just because the teachers are lazy or they needed to give you something to do. It actually makes you a better thinker and a better learner to have to explain something to somebody else. The process of articulating something out loud to somebody else who thinks slightly different than you is makes you better at understanding the thing you were dealing with. It's a real phenomenon. So yeah, I'm not saying that rewriting things in your own words is bad. I'm just saying that you can take shortcuts. If you need to. ### IId. Claim statements - reference [value of consistent naming schema](https://www.obsidianroundup.org/consistent-naming/) ### IIe. Atomic notes When I first started out in Obsidian I went back and forth about refactoring my notes. There was a lot of pressure to make everything truly atomic. When I first started out with Obsidian, I didn't really understand atomic notes. I had been looking for a place to store worldbuilding notes — I was trying to create a wiki, so I wrote everything out wiki-style, in overviews and summaries. I wasn't confident in my "insights" — I wasn't used to that kind of notetaking and it felt pretty foreign. More than that, it felt pretentious. I grew into it slowly. - [I] Metaphor about why I hate science and teaching oversimplified stuff first, but you gotta -- primary vs secondary for example. Reference how Zettelkasten is part of my notes, not all of it MOCs are for thinking. blah blah blah. I do basically all the systems at different points in my vault. . The Zettelizer script helps me with this, but it's basically the same system I was using before, just faster and more comprhenesive because it's automated. The actual file that it creates is ust contains an embed. It's the opposite of how concatenation or note refactor ideas work. So I'm often in edit mode, I have to flick over to preview mode in order to actually see the events. So if I'm looking for something more complicated than just the top level thing in a source, I will often paraphrase things into the note but it's from and that really works for me. I do you think there's value in paraphrasing some of the time just not all of the time. And that's that's a decision that you start to get a sense for as you go there Ironically after Christian helped me make the Zettelizer, he created his own version of the script that does things "the old fashioned way" and a lot of people prefer this. My way makes more sense to me though.