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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

I thought a lot about this and tried several different methods in my early twenties.

I encourage you to abandon this pursuit and let your human mind perform it’s most wonderful magic: synthesizing, compressing and expanding mental inputs.

Don’t get in the way of this magic:

throw everything you can into the input chute and marvel at the connections that result.

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I cannot echo this enough. As someone who's experimented with this a whole bunch with a million things, here's the thing I realized: Get good at understanding what the COMPUTER is good at vs what the HUMAN is good at. For me, all the wasted time was a result of me misunderstanding and mixing these two up.

Namely: Things like mindmaps and lots of little individual connected nodes (e.g. Obsidian) appeal in theory to human minds, because that's how our minds work.

But for me, I realized they weren't good tools for this because my brain is much much better at doing this than the software.

Ah, yes then: The software is good at 1) writing things down verbatim for detail and 2) re-reminding me of them when I go to look at them. The other stuff, the thinking and the connections, that's ME. That's NOT the software.

So for me that means. What I look at on the computer needs to be dense and well organized, not a mess of nodes. Which usually leads back to bigger, simpler chunks. I still use http://zim-wiki.org, but try to minimize the number of pages.

(To go broader, yes, this has very much deepened my skepticism of AI and machine-sentience)

I'd say decent notes are still important in a way that's not contrary to what you're saying. Our minds are very good processors but are not the best memory banks. Knowing what to take note of is part of that skill.

Sure there are people with eidetic and impressive memories but for most it's easier to just take notes of something and know where to look for the info later. That's one reason why I still keep to-do lists and calendars. Sure I can just use my brain to store all of these things, but it's easier to just have notes to look back onto and use my mental energy for other tasks it's more suited for.

Did you know how to take notes for technical know how's?

>abandon this pursuit and let your human mind perform it’s most wonderful magic: synthesizing, compressing and expanding mental inputs.

Not sure if you're trying to convey some "zen" advice but the way I actually synthesize & connect information is to take notes. My previous comment on how many thinkers use notes like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30331114

If you're suggesting that the mind makes more synthesis & connections without notes, I guess that's possible but that's not what happens in my case. Maybe that just means brains are different.

I don’t know anything about zen.

I just observed myself cataloging facts and trivia … and I noticed the real insights came about spontaneously.

I decided that every minute spent note taking was better spent reading or re-reading or simply walking and thinking.

I agree with you that YMMV.

The point of taking notes is not to preserve the information (or at least not primarily) but to load it into the brain where the connections can magically be made, as you put it. Rich Hickey has a nice talk on this called "Hammock Driven Development".

I write alot of notes physically and within the margins. But after a few days, I will forget these notes

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