No.19636
One of my favourite threads here over the years was about "organisation of knowledge", which I think was lost during that soyjak raid a few years ago. I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately so I wanted to bring this thread back. Unfortunately the wayback machine didn't have the full thread, but I was able to get the original OP.
>I've always been studying something, even when school finished, but I've never really been one to keep my notes or revise them very often. Now, I find myself going back over some of the material because I need to use it in my work. I find myself wondering if my notes would have been useful if I stored them in a better format and revised them more often.
>My questions to you guys are
>How do you organize your knowledge?
>Do you prefer a unified format, a subject-specific format, or an even more granular format?
>Do you build hierarchies, use tags, or do something else?
>Do you maintain an index specific to a particular audience or subject (e.g., the front page of a wiki)?
>How do you reference other materials (e.g., books, online articles that might disappear).
>Does your format cater to a specific study style? Is it different for different subjects?
>When your note corpus starts becoming large, how do you navigate through it? Searching? Hierarchy? Something else?
>Do you find that your notes match your thinking style several years later, or do you find that you have changed, causing the notes to be less useful?
>Do you focus on creating notes that help you achieve different tasks (e.g., task-based learning)?
>Do you focus on organizing knowledge by minimizing concepts and maximizing orthogonality between concepts?
I'd also like to add the questions
Do you use a specific note-taking system? (Outline, Cornell, etc.)
How do you go about actually committing things to memory?
No.19637
>>19636>How do you go about actually committing things to memory?If you ever encounter a proposition, try to prove it yourself. If you find yourself unable to, then you should go over the proof, try to understand it, and then redo the proof a day later.
This always works for propositions of math, (analytic) philosophy, and logic where everything can be proven using only deductive reasoning and axioms/premises*. It somewhat works for science when it's easy to recreate an experiment (like Ampere's law) or when a certain scientific principle follows from others you've already established (like the conservation of energy and momentum in classical mechanics) however sometimes you're just going to need to trust previous scientists and the results they've received from their experiments.
It may also work for subjects in the humanities e.g perspective in art but I doubt that many artists have a strong understanding of projective geometry (if any at all) to be able to derive it on their own.
Anyways the idea behind all of this is that if you really understand the underlying logic and reasoning of why a certain statement is true, it is significantly easier to remember it.
*Except when your axiomatic system can encode PA as according to Godel's theorem.
No.19638
>>19637I wrote a lot more than I needed to uh-
TL;DR Make sure you actually understand the given information. One way of doing this is by trying to prove that the information is correct
No.19644
Personal Wikis, second brains, I have no use for none of that. I keep most what I read in my brain, I just let it be absorbed and be integrated in my "world model", even if that means losing sight of many details. I also usually remember roughly from which book I got a certain idea, and can refer to it at any point. I do keep a structure of sorts, it is simply the filesystem hierarchy of directories where the books are stored. The books themselves serve as a kind of reference. It doesn't matter that I haven't read all of them, for a great many of them, I've read just a few chapters, or even just the preface. Enough to have an idea of the contents and the style of each of them, and where I can reach for more elaboration, specific information, whatever.
In this sense, it _is_ like a second brain which I can consult at any time but which I haven't yet absorbed into the first one, the first one is a view of the forest, the second one holds the trees, it can also be thought of as a map of the forest.
No notes of my own, I don't need that. But sometimes I do wish I had a more or less convenient way to keep some notes from books I read. The reading app I use lets me highlight text, and keep bookmarks, but that metadata resides in the app and not in the ebook files themselves, not every book is properly OCR'd and I can't highlight shit, and the app is just the front, which I use in the reading device, which is not the same as the storage device, the reading device may stop working at any time and I would just get another one.
I do keep notebooks at home, those I use heavily. I use them for language learning, which involves: vocabulary lists, paradigms, structural analysis of difficult sentences, copying texts, and plenty of exercise drills. Of this, the paradigms and vocabulary lists are the only bits that I refer to, and they occupy relatively small part of the notebook's contents and I usually stop needing most of that material at some point. I gotta say, I really enjoy having my notebooks scribbled with text written in strange scripts from all over the world. Sometimes I say, regarding my lack of creative skills: my notebooks are my craft :-)
I have been interested in the topic of structured notes, personal wikis, all that stuff, but I don't really know what I would put in such files. I also don't want to spend a lot of time learning the ropes of some system like org-mode or whatever, when all I want is to keep notes. Then again, if I think about it, I realize there isn't really anything I would put in those files. I would instead want to write essays, to put into words my thoughts and insights I have on different things, structure them accordingly, argue carefully, and so on. I need to get some practice with that, but I open the text editor and I get a writer's block. Interestingly, if I am writing on the blog, I can just let the words flow and post my thoughts, which I ruminate for a few days before, in one sitting.
