Note-taking

A central practice in Kyle’s Open Source Knowledge thinking and the engine behind this wiki itself. The anchoring book is How To Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens, whose Zettelkasten slip-box reframes note-taking away from accumulation toward transformation: “the slip-box does not put the learner in the centre… Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking.” Kyle folds this into a Culture of Questions in his Open-Source Knowledge research, alongside Andy Matuschak’s “Why Books Don’t Work.”

The sharpest case for it comes from The Collector’s Fallacy by Christian Tietze: reading without taking notes is “a waste of time in the long run,” because the information stays in short-term memory and is forgotten, while taking notes “permanently integrates the text’s information into your own knowledge system, making it available forever.” Tietze’s remedy — Research, Read, Assimilate; rinse and repeat — frames note-taking as the assimilation step that turns mere collection into actual knowing. Umberto Eco supplies the negative version (in How to Write a Thesis): photocopying a text gives “the illusion of having read the text already.”

The Notetaking Cold War by Dan Shipper reframes the whole subject as “philosophy in action”: the Tiago Forte-vs-Conor White-Sullivan debate over how to organize notes (actionable PARA hierarchy vs. infinitely-flexible bidirectional links) maps onto a two-thousand-year-old split between Essentialists (truth as a relationship between statement and reality) and Pragmatists (truth as what works). A note, Shipper argues, is a box you can stick anything into — information whose use is unpredictable — which is exactly why it resists organization. David Perell adds the social dimension in his Twitter workshop: “note-taking is a conversation with your past self.” The practice also surfaces historically in Saints — No Unhallowed Hand, where Kyle flags the discipline of Eliza R. Snow’s careful minute-keeping and “home literature.” Kyle threads this whole cluster — note-taking, Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Management — into the conceptual ancestry of his own LLM wiki.

Context: Note-taking as a knowledge-work discipline saw a software-driven revival in the late 2010s — Roam Research, Obsidian, Notion — popularizing networked-thought tools and methods like Zettelkasten and “building a second brain.”

Where this appears

• How To Take Smart Notes — the foundational text; Zettelkasten as transformation, not accumulation.
• The Collector’s Fallacy — reading without notes is a waste; notes as what integrates information permanently.
• The Notetaking Cold War — note organization as philosophy; Forte vs. White-Sullivan, essentialists vs. pragmatists.
• Open Source Knowledge research — note-taking as part of the Culture of Questions thread.
• How to Crush It on Twitter — David Perell and Matthew Kobach Workshop — “a conversation with your past self.”
• Saints — No Unhallowed Hand — record-keeping and “home literature” thread (Eliza R. Snow, Susa Young Gates).

Quick Capture links — April 30th, 2020

Link Kyle saved to this topic in his April 30th, 2020 Roam “Quick Capture” log.

• https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/274209/ — The Atlantic, on note-taking.

Saved from Roam

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