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Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we've done comparative work between paper writing and writing in something like Obsidian for not retaining the full work but effective downstream use?

What I mean:

When I write something I remember all of it, ironclad, written on my soul levels of remembrance. When I type something, I don't get that, but I get something akin to a pointer. I don't remember the content but I know it's stored in Obsidian/Docs and I can just go look it up.

What's more effective for day to day life? I don't know. I imagine people have a larger bandwidth for the latter, but is it better to keep all the details on hand, in buffer?

Who knows? But I'd like to see some work done on it to compare.

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Agreed. I take notes for my university classes either by using my tablet to type in a markdown file (the content of which I then transfer to Obsidian) or by writing by hand in a small notebook (and then adding the most important things to Obsidian). In both cases, what comes to my memory when thinking about my note-taking is how it's organized in Obsidian and in what part of my file.

One of the biggest advantages of taking notes digitally (or, at least, transforming hand-written content into digital content), which the article fails to mention, is the fact that you can easily CTRL+F to find the information you are looking for. This has helped me so many times during my studies. This is impossible to do with hand-written notes.

To add to what you said regarding a comparative work between paper writing and digital writing, I'd also like to see other ways of remembering content being taken into account. Writing by hand may "still [be] the best way to retain information", but the article seems to miss that writing is only one way of remembering things.

Let's say person A is taking notes by hand and doing nothing else, and person B is taking notes digitally and then using spaced repetition to remember what they have written. We can easily say that person B will retain much more information than person A. I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if they both used spaced repetition. I doubt there would be much difference in the end. What matters is the way information is encoded in one's long-term memory, not the way is it collected.

The interesting part is, should we combine notes and SBS? in my condition, I write note for fetch information in future, redo this part again to add them into my Anki become a repetitive work.

how can you organise both side together?

This is strictly specific to my workflow, but:

- My notes contain all the knowledge I have accumulated.

- I extract new knowledge that is worth being remembered from my notes into my SR system so as to add it to my long-term memory (there is some knowledge that is good keeping in a file but that doesn't necessarily need to be learnt by heart).

- After a few months, I remove that knowledge from my SR system because I consider it has been imprinted into my memory.

I must say that the last step is necessary in my case, because otherwise I would have too many recalls to deal with each day and that would ruin all the fun.

If, after having removed the knowledge from my SR system, I still remember it, good! Otherwise, I consider that, if I wasn't able to retain it, it means it has no use in my immediate environment and/or in my daily/weekly tasks.

So, to summarize quickly: SR is awesome, but in my workflow, not everything needs to be memorized, hence my using SR + notes.

wow, thank you for your so detailed reply! extracting needed knowledge sounds very useful.

IIRC doing just the latter messes up your brain. If you're interested in retaining your cognitive function long-term and avoiding early onset dementia, maybe do both. Write things down when you hear them, then copy the important bits over to Obsidian at the end of the day.

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