How to make a complete map of every thought you think (2003)

For the brave among you, I actually can recommend reading some parts of it. His main ideas are quite interesting. I wasn't really able to follow, but nevertheless I was able to get something out of it. I find the idea and subject interesting, and I would really love to learn more about his expieriences, but it's very difficult to read because of all of his temperament.

I stopped reading when I noticed I started missing the actual descriptive information of his attempt to capture all of his thoughts. It is buried in a whole lot of strong opinions about details like what paper to use. At some point somewhere at the beginning he says he'll just spit the text out since it is better if he serves any readers with this than providing nothing. And actually that he spits this text out is kind of a perfect summary of how I feel when reading.

I wish he had been slighly more relaxed when writing this text. But I guess he practised his approach to get a complete map of his thoughts in a equally unrelaxed manner. In his defense, he says somewhere he is 25 (at the time of writing) and that is probably were some part of his energy comes from. I am not much older and multiple times while reading I asked myself whether - or to what extend - his text is a look in a mirror. And promised myself to take care to be less convinced of my own conclusions.

I would not be suprised if this approach backfired to a certain degree as it would just increase the amount of thoughts, thus distractions.

Most philosophers just end up with even more questions than they started with and end up dying miserable and frustrated.

This is a stark contrast to, for example, Krishnamurti's teaching which could be summed up as "observe your thoughts without trying to analyze them, just sit still and observe them, and notice that each time you try to analyze the thoughts it's the thoughts trying to analyze thoughts, so you will just spin in circles: so just observe, and something magical will happen.", which eventually leads to some kind of an eureka moment in the mind which magicaly resolves this issue and this thought doesn't appear again.

So now this is really not a thought anymore but a instinctive understanding. Eg first you had to thought and concentrate when you walk, but now you never think about walking, it's instinctive.

The more you focus on walking down the stairs the more likely it is that you will trip.

The author's mistake, from eg Krishnamurti's perspective, is that he belives that thoughts are good: but the best understandings that you have, the things that you do best, you don't actually think about at all. So this more eastern style "no mind" philosophy tries to move one away from these schizophrenic thoughts that constantly invade one's mind and towards "understanding" (cessation of intrusive thoughts by understaing what causes a thought to intrude the "stream of consiousness" and disturb the human).

Do you remember the Microsoft Research project, MyLifeBits?

The guy wore a camera with a recorder (SenseCam). It would record his entire day, his interactions with people, etc.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/mylifebits/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/sensecam/

Interesting. But how does the author expect anyone to implement a grand scheme of organizing their thoughts when they can't even be bothered to organize the implementation guide, by their own admission?

Wow, blast from the past! I can't believe I'm seeing Lion Kimbro on Hacker News. "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think" went very mildly viral in 2003 or so and I was in school at the time. I became kinda fascinated with his speakeasy.net page (which never changed, even to this day) and his advocacy for RDF and web ontologies, which was totally foreign to me at the time. I always thought his quote "Data and Algorithms are not Aware. Time is an Invention of Awareness" was so badass in 2003. This page is part of what lead me to study computer programming. Dang. What a nostalgia rush.

It’s been nearly 20 years. I’d love to read a followup. Was it all worth it?

I read the Introduction and would love to try a compromise. I'd start writing things down more and revising them for clarity. I wouldn't go all-in.

I am very intrigued by this system which smacks of Getting Things Done (he even mentions how to integrate it) but its so disorganized and all over the place it seems a bit schizophrenic.

I'm working through it and I can almost physically hear his voice through it. It's brilliant writing. I know this style and can see how it works, and I can imagine a person giving it as a very enthusiastic lecture. It's a rhythmic patter that uses spaced repetition and diversions that make you go back and re-read the important parts. Just like comedy, it sets things up and knocks them down in stacks, and so if you go with it, you will remember it just the way you would remember a joke. This is a really fine example of persuasive writing. Cheers.

>Even if the computer is fast, you still need software that won't get in your way

This still strikes true today

Also, the idea is fascinating but everyone thinks differently and the method he described isn't universal.

And taking notes with such granularity is likely less useful than just recording the "best" ideas that come to mind (though noting every even somewhat useful thought would be an interesting short term experiment).

For the interested, there is a PDF: https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/book.pdf

See also Hack 17 in Mindhacker: 60 Tips, Tricks, and Games to Take Your Mind to the Next Level (not the best link but you'll get close: https://books.google.no/books?id=kh8NbTzaalwC&printsec=front..., at the end of the section he recommends not following the 2003 book...)

I find it interesting to try and create a system for mapping your thoughts in this manner, but the way it's presented here makes it somewhat not approachable.

On the other hand, one of the great pleasures in life is sorting out your ideas on a piece of paper, and I find that that's not a process I would necessarily want to over engineer. The structureless search after the refined form of your own thoughts is a huge advantage at times.

At 107 pages, roughly, this is a lot to digest. Fortunately, I found someone made an awesome one-page summary illustration. https://sachachua.com/blog/2013/10/visual-book-review-how-to...

This reminds me of another note taking system of a more successful writer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386630

ADHD brain would like a word.

A few friends have brought this to my attention, and one said that I should share some updates, which I am happy to do.

It'd take another book to write a re-treatment of notes and notekeeping, but three major emphasis would be:

1. Time, or rather, "epoch" or "period," are more important than subject. Subject is secondary to epoch, but still important.

2. Proper placement is more important than the capacity to link distances via page numbers. Page numbers are valuable, but the page numbering scheme I used was overboard. Valuable for mapping out every thought, but not valuable for living a life and getting benefit from notekeeping. Page numbers and links are exciting at first, but a poor substitute for things being where they belong in the first place. So I keep much more white space now, and I structure things as I develop, such that there are places for information to be integrated in.

3. "Don't write letters to dead people." This is about a principle of action. It is important to think about: "Who is going to read this note?" Yes, you, of course. But you -- when? I now take a much more mission-centric approach to my projects and my research. YES, sometimes you really are working on a twenty year mega project. I have projects like that. Other times, it's: "This is valid for 6 months." Or even just 1 month. This relates to pre-deleting, but it's important to have a sense of -- like in Death Stranding, you are preparing for a trip. What are you bringing? What are you not bringing? What is disposable? What will you need? My notes are far tidier than they were back 20 years ago.

Zettelkasten I think is a good path -- as far as I understand it, it is: "networked islands of structure." I'm all for it.

Today, I do a lot of research into networked data, and mediums for expressing code and data.

For example, I wrote a system called "Minicubes," which I intend to redo in Python+Tcl/Tk -- you can see a demonstration at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvPyLDXZlb4

I think a lot of the promise of computer notes and programming and such, would do well to focus on the medium that we use. I would like to see text files replaced with an easily parsable "schematic" medium, for example: https://communitywiki.org/wiki/SchematicMedium

If anybody would like to talk, I encourage you to find "Lion's Internet Office" on the Internet, and come and stop by. I'm happy to answer questions, learn about people's projects, and I love collaborating with people on things. We have a somewhat monthly group discussion chat in real-time, too, where you can introduce yourself, or ask questions, etc.,.

Thank you for your attention, I deeply appreciate the comments from people -- the positive ones are profoundly appreciated, and the "negative" ones are -- I kind of grin, because I think that they are also correct! Thank you.

I didn't read the article, I'm just here to point out how weird and wonderful it is that it's 2022 and I'm looking at a URL with a tilde in it, like my first URL ever had.