Comment by diziet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diziet | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, Mind Maps are not great for organizing information, learning things or keeping track of things. Notice how the Github read-me itself is formed like a Table of Contents. Table of Contents (or other organized lists) are better for organizing your information and placing it in thematically similar topics, etc.

In cases where you're presenting or recalling information, the more linear narrative of a Table of Contents is superior. Use your brain's natural triggered associations to tie subjects together or to recall related topics, and use hard-copy writing to commit concrete, factual and clear information to that 'external' memory.

There is a reason that we've been using TOC like structures much more than Mind Maps. Mind Maps are terrible. We use TOCs, concrete lists, tools like Universal Decimal Classification and Dewey Decimal Classification to organize information, because they work and cover up the weak areas that human brains have.

Google Image search "Mind Map". You will see colorful distracting pictures like this: https://www.mindtools.com/media/Diagrams/mindmap.jpg

If you want random associations, follow links on the web. Browse Wikipedia, open new random tabs. Learn new topics, discover new interesting things! Just don't use Mind Maps.

Author of the project here.

I do agree with you that mind maps have their flaws and limitations. But I found most curated list and most content in general to be quite rigid in structure. These mind maps should let the users explore and be guided through arrows.

And the big problem that I find is that google and other search engines are a black box. You have to know what you want to ask for to get an answer. The poses a big problem because many don't know what to ask.

Wikipedia is great too but I found it to lack in the visualisation aspect. Everything is connected but many people don't know exactly how and where and with what it is connected. These kinds of visualisations are very popular on the internet (https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap is one example) because they do bring clarity as to what it is the person doesn't know. However this repository although great, it just shows an image.

With these mind maps I can replicate the same but make it interactive. Now users can not only see what they don't know, but if they do want to learn it, they don't have to waste time online finding resources, they just click on a link and see what the best way of learning the topic is. If any questions arise when they are learning the content, then the search engine of their choice will answer these questions.

I also try to solve the problem of dependencies of knowledge. For example if user wants to learn 'machine learning'. I show that machine learning requires knowledge of statistics and linear algebra (http://i.imgur.com/A75JMNt.png) and then give links to the mind maps of both of these topics so user can learn them. There should be no wandering around and wasting time finding resources and being lost.

You can also think of this project as an index of links similar to what Google has. Only instead, the index is human curated and it is an open canvas that all can explore.

Checkout Moonwalking with Einstein And Anki

I find the most valuable point is the last: whereas, sure, you can go on wikipedia and find dependencies of an area of knowledge, that three of prerequisites makes more sense to be presented as a flow converging on a point, rather than having to dig deeper until you find a node you already understand.

A suggestion for your product: build these dependency graphs automatically, and let users mark subjects as already satisfied. That way you can omit digging into dependencies that are satisfied. If you really want to be righteous, recursively mark the dependencies of the satisfied dependency as also satisfied. That way a user can pick a topic and find everything that still remains to learn to get to that point.

And you can have the best of both worlds. Generating a linear progression of things to learn becomes a simple matter of printing the dependency tree in postorder.

Have you explored taking links from Wikipedia and adding them into your visualization? It might be interesting considering most articles have resources at the bottom.

I do link to wikipedia articles on nearly all nodes. I just expand it with more learning resources after. I think wikipedia is always a great starting point for learning about any subject. Or you meant something else?

I meant crawling wikipedia to add nodes automatically

Oh I see. I think something like this has been done before and the results are usually messy. Although I do want to use algorithms and curate things in a more 'smart' way that I do now. A bonus point of doing it by hand is that I take in the time to understand the topic for myself and actually understand why that node goes there and not in some other place.

You've created a significance map of your own conception of these subjects. It is, afterall, a mind map.

On a side note, I would subdivide Philosophy into Epistemology, Ethics, Naturalism, and Phenomenology and reclassify/reassociate accordingly.

I find mind maps to be an excellent way working. I've tried wikis, org mode, plain text files. The mind map is fastest way of tidying up a mess for me and I found I usually don't have time for doing much more. It's either that or a text file. I'm just not going to put in any more work despite my good intentions. If I need to publish something then of course I will put it in a document.

If I'm learning about something or just debugging or designing then I'll use the mind map like a text file. I just type a paragraph and hit return. Each paragraph is a node but initially it's structurally no different than a text file - a list of paragraphs. The big advantage is that later I can take some of those nodes and put them under a sub-node. Its a great filtering tool, (filtering in the sense of signal to noise reduction). Maybe it's just because I am naturally so disorganised that I like it. Stuff comes out of my mind unstructured. I need a refactoring tool and I want one that's as lazy/easy as possible.

Some kind of an org-mode tool can work ok but I found it to be too slow to create links and embed images. Wikis are just too painful. At least in a mind map what you see is what you get and in fact the structure is right in your face (a bit like lisp).

Mind maps are great for recalling terminology hierarchies (for the lack of better word). I have not used them much in my engineering studies but I have taken some courses in history and philosophy where I often had to recall lots of terminology related to, for example, certain time periods or philosophical theories. The spatial aspect of a mind map really helps me. Just drawing the map is usually enough for me to remember everything that's in it for a few days. I simply close my eyes and picture the map in my head.

This, however, requires that I draw the map myself by hand. Drawing it by hand forces me to carefully look at every pixel of the map. Adding some fancy fonts and pictures like in your example can help in the sense that you spend more time looking at the pixels.

requires that I draw the map myself by hand

And this is the secret. It doesn't much matter if you use tables or bullet lists or mind maps or whatever makes sense to you for the particular domain, it's the fact that you are organizing the info in your own brain that matters.

From a teacher-student perspective, mind maps seem to work best if the teacher presents the student with a partially-filled mind map and lets the students fill it in.

Mind Maps are definitely not a great way to be a 'canonical store' of information, but that does not mean that they are useless at all.

I find them to be great at brainstorming, for example. Dumping several related aspects of a project into the mind map feels very intuitive to me, no overhead involved at all. And it eases the cognitive load of several concepts floating around your subconscious and taking up your brain CPU.

For learning, I plain disagree with you. I even see your point that information may be better 'first presented' to a learner in other ways (although I've had good experiences with mind maps being a 'discovery' tools as well). However, learning has other moments other than the discovery. Mind maps are great at teaching how concepts fit together, and also good as a studying tool in the recall moment (rather than linear notes).

You may also view them as an 'index' to information presented elsewhere. Once a book was posted here on HN which had a 'graph of chapter dependencies' inside the book, which people loved. A graph of chapter dependencies is at least very close to a mind map.

By the way, since you mentioned UDC and DDC, even library science and information science courses do teach mind maps as tools as well. Because they have their uses, even if you know UDC or DDC.

I agree with your opinion referring to Mind Maps as is. However, I do think there's a non-linear representation schema becoming more available accordingly with VR growth.

Given how rapidly x+y values for mind-maps increase alongside content complexity for any one 'abstraction level'; constraints like screen space and uni-dimensional view-points for hierarchies come into play. It would be nice to easily see how core skills connect to different disciplines, say. Then again, side-stepping this by using different kinds of connections/views for nodes across levels may have an exponential maintenance curve. It reminds me of that old/strange hyper-connected theory for Internet infrastructure I can't remember the name of.

I'm keen to think of new methods for map-building since I find them personally useful, but I wonder if I suffer from the hammer-nail bias.

I think Mindnapa are better for this. The information is associated. For example you will need maths for some fields. Table of contents would mean duplicating links.

But... I also agree that everyone learns and parses information differently.

Im using mind maps since 13 years a lot and i think they're great for organizing information, learning things or keeping track of things, just needs 2 be done right.

I have some of them on big sheets of paper hang up to my walls (stuff im learning atm), some using software (ie budget or project planning), lots on b5 paper blocks and loads on a4... works well for me. as well I use it a lot when planning thinking about new/current software.

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