221 - Communication is the act of conveying meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic rules. - Wikipedia
Communication is an important skill to develop in life because it is necessary for cooperation. Whether that be working with others to implement a solution you generated or communicating your contribution to our collective understanding of the universe.
Visual Communication
Written Word (Blog Posts, Wiki, Books, etc)
Pictures (Photographs, Paintings, Movies, etc) - tell a story through strict visual art to communicate an experience
Combination (Comics, Graphic Novels, etc) - my favorite example of this would be the work of larry gonick
Body Language (e.g. pointing, shrugs, facial expressions, etc)
In the first case, it is simply tracking where you come across information without the intention to track every existence of it. In a sense, this is what the zettelkasten is about, saving interesting information that may not have immediate use.
You can think of the zettelkasten as an idea tracker. So for a graduate student, I think of three realms of knowledge that these ideas exist in. The zettelkasten is about tracking the knowledge existing in all three realms. First Realm + Second Realm = Third Ream.
The first realm is established knowledge. This means reading the works of your professors and their colleagues, laying out a map of what the established knowledge on a subject matter looks like.
The second realm is new information. Because creativity comes about from the interaction of your old knowledge with new knowledge, it is important to be taking notes on the new knowledge you purposely expose yourself to.
The third realm is your creative output. Creative Knowledge is the byproduct of mixing the former to realms. It is an important to track this information because it can help keep from retreading areas you’ve already explored. You can make more informed exploratory decisions by knowing where the dead ends have been.
Because our memory systems aren’t designed for the long term tracking of such information, it helps to have an external system that can track all the knowledge/information you are working with. This is why we have books. Books are a form of externalized memory. Zettelkasten is just another way of organizing and engaging with your externalized memory. It is also a way of more easily integrating others externalized memory (books written by others) into your own thinking (zettelkasten).
225 - Note Sequence vs. Latticework for Creative Output
Placeholder Text - write about how the magic of a zettelkasten comes not just from creating note sequences but the interaction between note sequences and how they contribute to each other. See multiple storage and abstracted concepts. This is important to keep in mind with the pizza note sequence because it is just one note sequence. So you won’t see the true utility (link) of the zettelkasten. But it is still useful example to have.
One of the core issues with sharing information over the internet in the form of a blog post, wiki, or zettelkasten, is that of the users prior knowledge. This issue becomes heightened when the user doesn’t necessarily want to take the time to fill in their prior knowledge gaps. Users will be more likely to engage with the material if you make the acquisition of the prior knowledge as easy as possible. This is why clear, concise and structured writing is so important.
Structured content allows the reader to more easily structure build a mental model on which to hang new information as they come across it while reading.
Surprising connections can be ones that people have previously discounted but end up being right or ones that haven’t been thought of. That could mean connecting two concepts that people didn’t realize were connected. The more informative, the better.
Think of your zettelkasten as a giant box of legos, with each individual lego being a piece of information (concept, commentary, reference, etc) in the form of a note. As you collect more and more legos you organize them (zettelkasten workflow) in such a way that when you want to go build something you are able to get all the pieces you need.
You can then take these legos (information building blocks) and organize them into different structures to create a bunch of different things. What you end up making are made up of all the same thing (information) but are different depending on how you structure them. These different structures are blog posts, books, presentations, and wikis.
You collect and organize the legos until you have enough to build a structure. In the same way you collect and organize information in the zettelkasten until you have enough notes to use for a wiki entry, blog post, or book. In this situation, the difference between a wiki and zettelkasten is that you might not use all the information on a topic for the wiki entry that you have in your zettelkasten. Zettelkasten is your loose collection of information, sometimes it includes incorrect information that you later correct in your research process.
I think how successful a zettelkasten user is depends on the person and how they communicate with their zettelkasten. Luhmann published prolifically with his zettelkasten. His output was a byproduct of the interaction between what he put in the zettelkasten, his default brain, and how the two communicated with each other.
Just because you create a zettelkasten, doesn’t mean you’ll somehow create great work. It is just a tool. Some people suck at using tools and others create amazing masterpieces with them.
In the same sense, you can think of your brain as an information processing program and the zettelkasten as a plugin. Plugins don’t guarantee success, but powerful ones can act as a great multiplier in the knowledge work you do.
mediocre general skills (e.g. average guitar player, which there are a million of)
mastering specialized skills that are undesirable (e.g. masters in obscure literature, see Note)
Note: I often still think a lot of the masters in obscure literature are still valuable, its just harder for the average person to find a job with that skillset. But if you are productively contributing to our global knowledge base, then that is good. Same goes with Philosophy degrees, there is so much bullshit literature produced by PhD students, but if done right, the philosophy degree will give you a great thinking tool set.
234 Luhmann Conceptualization of Zettelkasten was geared towards a grand theory. That is why he was focused so much on abstracting concepts from books and connecting them. Because this isn’t everyone’s goal, they should be careful about hyper focusing on concepts as what they wanted abstracted.
Second Zettelkasten
Over the course of his forty years of academic work, he developed a universal theoretical framework — i.e. sociological systems theory — capable of covering nearly the entire spectrum of social phenomena. In doing so, he placed great emphasis on conceptual and terminological consistency and was receptive to theoretical developments not only in sociology but in other academic disciplines such as philosophy, law, theology, biology and cybernetics in particular.
Whereas his initial publication activities were more strongly focused on the fields of administrative and organizational studies, he turned to developing the key elements of his sociological work in the period from 1962 to 1997, which involved considerations on the methodological and theoretical foundations of a theory of social systems, a comprehensive theory of society, as well as studies on the link between the structures and self-description of modern society.
The later collection (c. 1963–1996) covers the major part of Luhmann’s publication activity and, from the beginning, clearly reflects a sociological approach.
Luhmann never explained why he started a second collection in the early 1960s that was largely intended to replace the first one – which can be assumed from the fact that the numbering of the cards started with number one again. One can suspect that this had to do with his turn toward sociology in the early 1960s and his first drafts of a universalistic theory of the social, which required re-conceptualizing the structure of the collection. Accordingly, the two collections are only loosely connected, i.e., there are relatively few references between the collections where even the same (key) concepts are involved (such as role, informal organization, institution).
"Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics.[1] It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals.[2]
Plant breeding can be accomplished through many different techniques ranging from simply selecting plants with desirable characteristics for propagation, to methods that make use of knowledge of genetics and chromosomes, to more complex molecular techniques (see cultigen and cultivar).
Genes in a plant are what determine what type of qualitative or quantitative traits it will have. Plant breeders strive to create a specific outcome of plants and potentially new plant varieties." - Wikipedia
Zettelkasten Concept Breeding
Remixing the plants and creating new variations in hopes of creating something better. If you think of the plants being pieces of written work, then what would be the seeds? What would be the traits that make the seed?
The seed would be the primary idea you find within your zettelkasten, and you get that idea by copying, transforming, and combining different concepts within your zettelkasten.
Good point about keeping in perspective the particularities of Luhmann’s own theoretical commitments! What is distinctive about his sociological “Systemtheorie” is at least the following:
he was convinced that abstraction is the path to insight (his seminal book “Social Systems” opens with a comparison of his theory to flying above the clouds and only occasionally glimpsing the land below);
he was suspicious of what he dismissed as “old European” assumptions about what happens in the social world being a matter of individuals engaging in intentional actions for reason. Rather, according to Luhmann’s systems theory, structures reproduce themselves and interact with one another via “autopoetic” processes that have nothing to do with people understanding or consciously guiding what they are doing.
I think that especially this second point is related to the tendency among some Zettelkasters (and, perhaps, Roamans) to hype the idea that the well-ordered ideas will magically form themselves, bottom up.
One thing I really like about the way in which many on the Obsidian forum approach PKM – and I’m especially thinking of @nickmilo and his LYT approach – is the acknowledgement that there is plenty of intentional thought that has to go into curation of notes, to thoughtfully pruning the garden, as it were. Maybe this approach worked automagically for Luhmann himself, but I doubt it works for many people. What must of us need are tools that encourage a mix of intentional curation and unintentionally connection.
@AutonomyGaps yep, I’m still trying to work out my thoughts around to what degree Luhmann’s system is specially designed for his project (abstraction of abstractions) and how much of it should be emulated. On one hand I can see how his system & workflow is advantageous for his specific project, but at the end of the day it is still a system for managing information, therefore I think it can be emulated to a degree. Remix you might say.
abstraction is the path to insight
There is a lot of truth to this generally speaking. Abstraction allows us to get more utility out of concepts and models (See Notes 41, 40, 39, and 38). You just have to be careful about running the risk of over abstraction, whereby information becomes meaningless/useless.
Regarding the second point, I imagine its a mix of hidden systems and people acting intentionally. I actually created a note about this the other day titled “Intertwined Concepts” because I notice a bunch of people acting like some concepts (e.g. nature-nurture debate) are battling each other when in reality they are intertwined.
encourage a mix of intentional curation and unintentionally connection
Yep I agree with this, I’m more interested in how to facilitate the unintentional connections. I thought of creating a program to help facilitate connections but I don’t have any programming skills unfortunately.
238 - Questions for Johannes F.K. Schmidt who is one of the scholars working on publishing the Luhmann Archive online. He seems to be the most knowledgeable, so thinking about questions I’d have for him is a good way to get at what I don’t quite understand about the zettelkasten.
Department Level
How did Luhmann’s department level categories work? Did he create them beforehand or did they emerge overtime? By the numbering system, it sounds like he created them beforehand. See 1 - Subject area below. This means that people are mistaken when they say the zettelkasten has a flat file structure or is heterarchy?
Note Contents
I wonder what the breakdown is (percentage wise) between the different types of content within a note (e.g. own thoughts, references to other notes, references to books).
Examples
Would love to see some examples of how disparate information was actually connected within his zettelkasten.
1 - Subject Area
Of course the file collection is not simply a chaotic compilation of notes but an aggregation of a vast number of cards on specific concepts and topics. This order per subject area on a top level is reflected in the first number assigned to the card followed by a comma (first collection) or slash (second collection) that separates it from the rest of the number given each card (see below). The first collection features 108 sections differentiated by subject areas, exploring and reflecting on largely predetermined, fairly detailed fields of knowledge in law, administrative sciences, philosophy and sociology, such as state, equality, planning, power, constitution, revolution, hierarchy, science, role, concept of world, information, and so on
242 - My Information Diet & Projects - I expose myself to a wide variety of information because I find it to be very enjoyable, sometimes to my detriment (scatterbrain at times). Thought I’d include this note here of what I’m currently reading/listening to in bits and pieces.
Updated Last: 9/10/2020 - I haven’t been contributing much to this zettelkasten lately because I’ve been reading books that don’t have to do with knowledge work directly.
Books
I’m really bad with books, as I like to start them and am slow to finish them, the big pile of books phenomenon.
Positive Psychology 101 by Philip Watkins (textbook)
Social Science: An Introduction to the Study of Society by Elgin F. Hunt (16th Edition, textbook)
Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (4th Edition, textbook)
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair
Grad School Essentials: A Crash Course in Scholarly Skills by Zachary Shore
How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco
Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown
Podcasts
I have a love/hate relationship with podcasts. They make for great background listening when you are doing busy work or manual labor type activities. On the other hand I get a ton of book recommendations out of them, which is distracting. I don’t listen to all these podcasts all the time, but instead listen to an episode if it sounds interesting.
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture
The Ezra Klein Show
In Our Time BBC
The Knowledge Project with Shane Parish
The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman
Tides of History
All Songs Considered (NPR)
Hidden Forces Podcast
Lex Fridman Podcast
Various Topical News and Politics Podcasts
Projects
These are a lot of projects going on at once, so many of them do not get love for long stretches of time. But I have a special bookmark on my browser for them, so they are not forgotten. They are just really long term projects.
Private Zettelkasten - where most of my notes and readings go
Obsidian Wiki - wiki I’m developing within my private notes collection, that I will eventually combine this with and make public using Obsidian Publish
Obsidian Zettelkasten - this public zettelkasten
Tools for Thoughts Zettelkasten - also created an experimental zettelkasten on the tools for thoughts forum because being able to make “note chains” using entire discords posts is a good experiment.
Simple Zettelkasten Guide - an attempt make a beginners guide to the zettelkasten
Pizza, Pizza, Obsidian Zettelkasten Example - showing how you can develop a concept within a zettelkasten