Kyle Harrison
article

The Notetaking Cold War

Dan Shipper 2020 View original ↗

The Notetaking Cold War

Author: Dan Shipper (in Superorganizers) URL: https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/the-notetaking-cold-war One-line: The Tiago-vs-Conor debate over how to organize notes is really a two-thousand-year-old philosophy debate — essentialists vs. pragmatists — about how the world itself is organized. #Note-taking

Highlights

  • How should we organize our notes? It’s the bugbear of almost every productivity nerd, and answers abound: notebooks, tags, stacks, kanbans, links, bi-directional links.
  • Tiago Forte thinks notes should be organized by actionability, and that each note should go in one and only one place in the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives.
  • Conor White-Sullivan thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking.
  • One obvious answer is that organizing information is just hard. But it turns out that it’s only really hard for certain types of information.
  • One way to think about knowledge management is as philosophy in action: As we think about the best folder structures and tag hierarchies, we’re really doing philosophy. And it turns out that there’s a two-thousand-year-old debate in philosophy that’s pretty similar to the debate between Tiago and Conor.
  • Instead of being about how notes are organized, it’s about the way the world is organized.
    • Essentialists
      • On one side of the debate, roughly are people who believe that there is a world out there, that it is universal, objective, and accessible by the human intellect.
      • We’ll call these people essentialists. (Philosophers like Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Descartes all fit under this label — though their philosophical stances vary widely)
      • Essentialists think about truth in a very specific way. They think that a statement is true when it reflects something essential about the way reality is organized. They think truth is defined as a relationship between a statement and a state of the world.
    • Pragmatists
      • One the other side of the debate are people who choose not to answer that question directly. They believe, roughly, that there is no objective place from which to decide what is true. They believe that there are many different ways to represent and organize reality.
      • We’ll call these people pragmatists. (Philosophers like James, Wittgenstein, and Rorty — though their philosophical stances vary widely.)
      • Essentialists have a representational theory of truth. They believe that a statement is true when it represents the state of reality accurately.
      • Pragmatists have an instrumental theory of truth. They believe that a statement is true when it works — that the only way we can know if something is true is if, by acting according to it, the world reacts in the way we expect it to.
  • Essentialists think pragmatists have a childish version of truth. They think that pragmatists are arguing that everyone can have their own personal version of the truth, which is counter to the very idea of truth. #Truth
  • Pragmatists think essentialists spend too much time Reading books and not enough time paying attention to how life actually works.
  • Essentialists have a hierarchical view of the world. Each object in the world should fit into one and only one category, and each category should nest within a well-defined hierarchy. You can see essentialist principles in many places — like the system we have for categorizing animals, Linnaean taxonomy. Each animal fits into one and only one kingdom, species, genus, etc.
  • So, is a chessboard one thing or is it billions and billions of things? #Intelligences
    • Essentialists might say that it is one thing — a chessboard. That it participates in some fundamental way with the is-ness of a chessboard. Other kinds of essentialists may say that though we call it a chessboard, that is actually just a nice shorthand for what it really is which is a collection of atoms arranged in a certain way that looks like a chessboard.
    • By contrast, pragmatists just shrug. They say it is both a chessboard and it is a collection of atoms. A chessboard is one way to talk about it in a particular context. A collection of atoms is another way to talk about it in other contexts. Both are useful shorthands, but they don’t indicate anything essential or deep about the chessboard itself. They’re just more or less useful descriptions.
    • “Concerning man’s premortal existence, the Lord revealed to Joseph Smith, “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29).
  • That’s what every piece of software does. Some pieces of software we call spreadsheets, some software we call CRMs, some we call Facebook, some we call Mario Kart. But they’re all fundamentally the same thing. They’re just ways to record, store, transform, and manipulate information.
  • In the case of a CRM the “customer” is a direct representation of something in the real world that you’re trying to record information about. When you use a “customer” record in a CRM it’s because you’re recording something about a real-life customer.
  • The more precisely we know what to use a piece of information for, the more precisely we can organize it.
  • When you use a “note” in Evernote you are not writing about notes. You are writing about an undefined and infinite number of different things. “Note” is just a catch-all term for a blank page. A “note” is a box you can stick anything into.
  • Notes, in the broadest sense, are not like this. They cannot be depended on to be part of a standard, well-defined process. A piece of information is a note when you have only a vague idea of how it will be used. Or, when you have one idea of how it will be used, but you think there may be many more ways it could be used down the road, too — it’s hard to predict.
  • Imagine you’re in their shoes. You believe that notes contain pieces of information whose use is unpredictable. You want to help people solve the problem of organizing these notes.
  • If you want to be able to organize notes, you need to do one of two things:
    • Make the use of the notes more predictable and part of a well-defined process
    • Create an infinitely flexible organizational system
  • Tiago Forte picked the first move. Conor White-Sullivan picked the second. Each choice has its pros and cons.
  • What makes Roam Research great is that it’s a lot like a language. A letter by itself doesn’t do much. But you can compose letters together to create words, and you can compose words to express an infinite number of ideas.
  • This is probably why Conor snuck a well-defined, and opinionated process into the feature-set for Roam: the “Daily Notes” feature. Think about it — without that, Roam’s blank page would probably be extremely intimidating for most users and they’d never get far enough to actually build anything.

How it connects

Referenced in