Tools For Thought: From the Memex to index cards

In this talk I show why and how you should build your own system for thought on top of other people’s tools for thought in order to improve your thinking. I do this by connecting zettelkasten to Miller's Law to better note taking to better thinking to managing your inevitable decline with a combination of digital and analogue tools.

In the end I ask: what is to thought what literacy is to reading and writing?

Transcript

1. Tools For Thought:
   From the Memex to index cards
   Why you should build your own system for
   thought on top of other people’s tools for
   thought in order to improve your thinking
   Ade Oshineye
   

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2. “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”
   Hegel
   

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3. Tools For Thought are the new hotness
   

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4. Brief history of Tools For Thought
   Europe
   ● Conrad Gessner 16th century Swiss
   naturalist is the earliest known user of
   Zettelkasten
   ● Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book Zettel
   ● Niklas Luhmann’s 90k slips in his
   Zettelkasten
   ● Tim Berners-Lee wanted to manage
   internal documentation at CERN and we
   got the web
   North America
   ● Vannevar Bush’s Memex in As We May
   Think never got built
   ● Douglas Engelbart wanted to augment
   human intellect but we got hypertext and
   the mouse
   ● Ted Nelson’s Xanadu offered a rich
   vision of hypermedia with bi-directional
   links and transclusions
   ● Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb
   ● Atul Gawande and his Checklist
   Manifesto save lives every day
   

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5. History is written by the...losers?
   

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6. Another lens: Low cunning vs High modernism
   Conrad Gessner 16th century Swiss naturalist is the earliest known user of Zettelkasten
   Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book Zettel
   Vannevar Bush’s Memex in As We May Think never got built
   Douglas Engelbart wanted to augment human intellect but we got hypertext and the mouse
   Niklas Luhmann’s 90k slips in his Zettelkasten
   Ted Nelson’s Xanadu offered a rich vision of hypermedia with bi-directional links and transclusions
   Tim Berners-Lee wanted to manage internal documentation at CERN and we got the web
   Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb
   Atul Gawande and his Checklist Manifesto save lives every day
   

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7. What are Tools For Thought? A guiding vision
   “By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a
   complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive
   solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the
   following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful
   degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions,
   better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed
   insoluble. And by “complex situations” we include the professional problems of diplomats,
   executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers—whether
   the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated
   clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain
   where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist
   with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and
   high-powered electronic aids.” Douglas Engelbart
   

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8. Chunking express
   We think in chunks of negotiable abstraction and
   recursion
   Miller’s Law (7+/-2) is true-ish: human brains are
   limited
   Hacks for these limits:
   Notation to create more compressed chunks
   Composing chunks
   Intertwingling chunks
   

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9. What are Tools For Thought?
   Chunks == thought legos == cards == notes == blocks
   

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10. What are TFT? Mechanisms for playing with chunks
    More and better chunks to bypass human limitations
    Better recall of chunks
    Better recall of connections between chunks
    More sophisticated manipulation of chunks
    TFT == technologies that help you better manipulate chunks
    

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11. What are TFT? Better communication
    

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12. What about another layer?
    

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13. Systems For Thought
    Layer on top of your TFT that aligns and magnifies their impact
    Your choices
    Your routines
    Your habits, conventions and practices
    Your pipelines for connecting various TFT
    

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14. Example
    Luhmann felt he was communicating with not through his Zettelkasten
    TFT as a medium for interchange between:
    Past-me
    Current-me
    Future-me
    Both approaches require different periodic routines and artefacts
    

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15. The current Tools For Thought scene
    Note-taking text editors e.g. Keep and Obsidian
    SaaS e.g. Notion and Roam
    Visual thinking e.g. Muse
    Digital Zettelkasten e.g. Zettlr and The Archive
    Collecting e.g. Pocket and Evernote
    Spaced repetition e.g. Anki and Supermemo
    Prompting e.g. Orbit and Subconscious
    Personal digital gardens e.g. Compendium
    

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16. The current Tools For Thought scene
    Lots of fragmentation
    Lots of unproductive tool-hopping
    Orthodoxy nudges people towards writing down
    other people’s ideas
    Pockets of knowledge accretion
    Interwingling rather than categorisation
    

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17. Spaceships for the mind
    10x thinking and moonshots
    1 big bet
    Pattern of heroic failure that mocks success
    Transmission of flawed lenses to future generations
    Search for the ‘one best way’
    Search for the ‘one best tool’
    Spaceships for the mind place a ceiling on our imagination
    

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18. Bicycles for the mind
    1.x over time => compounding
    Bicycles for the mind place a floor under our imagination
    

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19. Some bicycles for your mind
    Instead
    Checklists
    Index cards
    

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20. Some bicycles for your mind
    Instead
    Spider diagrams
    Maps Of Content/Speculative outlines
    

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21. Better note-taking
    Capture atomic and evergreen chunks in your own words
    Connect and intertwingle these chunks
    Create multiple speculative outlines as tentative lenses
    that reuse these chunks
    Use journals to connect chunks over time
    Review and refine these chunks
    Over time your (types of) chunks will settle into pace layers
    

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22. Note-taking to sense-making
    Taking notes: source to corpus without touching your mind
    Making notes: you have to decide what you actually think
    Other people’s thoughts stick out
    This corpus becomes a mirror that enables metacognition
    What do you do about beliefs that didn’t age well?
    Do you keep yourself honest?
    Can you?
    

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23. Better selves vs managing your decline
    How do we send help to future-me?
    Establish notation
    Evolve notation
    Capture insight
    

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24. Better selves vs managing your decline
    What do we wish future-me could send to current-me?
    ???
    Move cognition from endo-self to exo-self to enhance and then preserve it
    The balance between endo-self and exo-self must shift as we age
    The SFT we’ve established in advance of decline can help us navigate that re-balancing
    

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25. Trusting the other guy?
    

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26. Getting your hands dirty: heuristics
    ● Do your own thinking
    ○ Craft your own routines
    ○ Use your own notation
    ● Make the tools conform to you
    ○ Expect your tools to go away over time but ‘simple endures’
    ■ Local-first with cloud backups
    ■ Bet big on plain text
    ■ Establish analogue baselines
    ○ Use many tools on the same corpus not 1 corpus per tool
    ● Think of the notes as cards and play with them accordingly
    ○ Bet big on hypertext
    

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27. Getting your hands dirty: Dusk
    ● Folder of text files versioned with Git
    ○ Obsidian vault pointed to the folder
    ○ Slowly ingesting notes/data/references from every other tool into this folder
    ● Simplenote as a mobile inbox/outbox
    ○ Copying notes into Obsidian vault
    ○ Resonance calendar
    

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28. Getting your hands dirty: Dusk
    ● Google Photos
    ○ Paper notebooks
    ○ Index cards
    ○ Drawing apps
    ○ Diagrams: spider
    diagrams, 2x2s, etc
    ● Missing: scheduled prompting
    

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29. Getting your hands dirty: recommendations
    ● Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/
    ○ Roam Research: https://roamresearch.com
    ● Alex Komoroske’s Compendium is open source:
    https://github.com/jkomoros/card-web
    ● Actual analogue cards in a zettelkasten
    ● Build your own software...
    

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30. Open problems, literacy and the undiscovered
    country
    ● 1 player to N Player
    ○ This isn’t collaborative editing of notes but intellectual tennis
    ● How do we effectively prompt and nudge future-me?
    ○ How can we be good ancestors to our future selves?
    ● How do we make the material of thought legible enough that it’s possible to perform
    structure-preserving-transformations and refactor our own minds?
    

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31. What is to thought
    what literacy is to
    reading and writing?
    

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32. Bibliography
    How to take smart notes, Sönke Ahrens
    Tools for thought, Howard Rheingold
    The Turing option, Marvin Minsky and Harry Harrison
    Notebooks of the mind, Vera John-Steiner
    

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