If you do follow QCE, or any other highly structured system for your notes, you are essentially condemning yourself to do the work every time you read/write something, categorize it appropriately in this database.
The counterargument to this claim is that people who are doing knowledge-synthesis research projects need some way to organize their information anyway, and having three note types is not much more work than one note type, especially considering the potential benefits, so it is just as well to use a simple data model like QCE. But keeping it simple to reduce mental “friction” is good advice.
Joel Chan’s paper “Knowledge synthesis: a conceptual model and practical guide”, linked in the original post above, lists some of the potential benefits of the model:
- “Effective synthesis: This model allows for rich layers of context to aid synthesis. Distinguishing between observation notes and synthesis notes helps prevent me from rushing too quickly to generalizations, and allows for careful, nuanced questioning of past claims (e.g., does X really not work?), and consideration of possible syntheses between opposing claims…”
- “Reusability of ideas across barriers of time, people, projects, and disciplines: I believe this flexible compression not only helps synthesis right now, but also enables me to earn compound interest on the notes over time. One mechanism by which this happens is that the overhead for regaining context for my notes is reduced for my future self, and possibly for others as well, since the details are much more directly accessible through the three-part model. This is important, because the devil/diamond is in the details, and details fade over time from memory. I suspect that synthesis notes and systems that omit details (or at least make it hard to access details later), will have a much shorter half-life. A less obvious benefit of retaining context is an increased capacity to notice points for intellectual progress, since anomalies and inconsistent results can often be a pointer to where a conceptual breakthrough is most needed…”
- “The ability to distribute the synthesis process: If I’m right that these sorts of notes are more shareable, then I should be able to distribute the process across a team of people. Hopefully this also means we get to substantially reduce the time needed to do effective synthesis. I am testing this hypothesis right now with my lab, and hope to get others to join me.”
Another way of stating these benefits is that it makes the reasoning process transparent via a shared schematic language in the structure of the notes, so if you give the notes to someone else (including your future self who may have forgotten what you were thinking when you took the notes), then that someone else will be able to make sense of them easily and see where more research needs to be done.
Chan’s QCE data model is similar to IBIS, another model that has been used for similar purposes for a long time (since the 1970s). For more info about IBIS in Obsidian, see the forum topic: Tips for making an issue-based information system