Research

In How To Take Smart Notes, “research” is reframed from a credentialed activity into something everyone who reads, learns, and writes is already doing. The book’s claim: “Studying, done properly, is research, because it is about gaining insight that cannot be anticipated and will be shared within the scientific community under public scrutiny.” Studying does not prepare you for independent research — it is independent research; nobody starts from scratch, and everybody can already think for themselves.

The corollary is that research is inseparable from making ideas public. “There is no such thing as private knowledge in academia… An idea kept private is as good as one you never had,” and “a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all.” Writing is the medium of research, so if writing is the medium and studying is nothing but research, there is “no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.” Kyle links this to his own recurring thesis of Learning in Public and Information Ingestion — doing everything (reading, listening, tweeting) with the purpose of feeding public thinking changes how you do all of it. Research, on this view, is the public, reproducible, written pursuit of insight, of which the slip-box (Zettelkasten) is the workshop.

Where this appears

• How To Take Smart Notes — “studying, done properly, is research”; the argument that knowledge must be made public/written to count, tied to Kyle’s Learning in Public thesis.