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If blogging is like a webpage, then a Zettelkasten is like a Wikipedia for your brains.

Inspired by a thread on HN ~2 years ago, I’ve now written 1,075 interconnected notes, and no longer feel that I forget 80% of any non-fiction book I read.

Linking is key; it allows you to connect any new insight to your existing externalized knowledge base, resulting in deeper understanding and retention.

It also creates the space to connect thoughts across disparate domains, which spawns novel ideas at an even greater rate. For example, I might link an idea about neuroscience to my chess writings that links to a note about workout methods which links to a piano technique note. Now I suddenly see a new connection about applying a piano practice technique to leveling up my chess score.

It has changed the way I read, or consume information generally.

A great book that got me started is Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes

So do you take notes as you read? How do you handle charts?

Yes indeed, anytime anything is worth remembering (or connecting with other notes) I write it down. It interrupts reading, so I don’t churn through as many books.

I used to set goals like x books per year, but now I realize it’s a vanity metric and instead read for insights.

I use Obsidian for note taking, which supports images too.

Ok, I’m confused. Do you take notes in Obsidian or in Zettelkasten? Or both?

Zettelkasten is a methodology, Obsidian is an app

Thank you.

Did you use any particular book or blog post when mapping the method to the app? I've found one book, but not sure if good https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Obsidian-ebook/d...

Pondering about trying out Zettelkasten, I'm thinking whether it would make sense to take notes in a sequential log ... like one file per day/week/month/year ... and then regularly, like daily or weekly sort things in to the zettelkasten structure.

Anybody tried that?

AFAIK, this is how many data(base)-systems do to make writing more efficient: Write down into a write-cache of some sort, and then do batch-wise indexing as a separate process.

Thoughts?

When writing you have to actual flesh out the details and figure out what to include and what to omit. It is so easy to skip that in day dreaming.

Thinking is like drawing a bridge on paper. Writing is to actual construct the bridge and test it.

What looks like the strongest bridge (built of paper) is not always the strongest one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtMx7FZUC6A

“It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.” ― Philip Glass

I think this level of kindness makes it easy for people to feel okay expressing themselves. Thank you for this beautiful message.

> If you want to be a thinker, you have to write

It's what was done at school, since primary...

But it was "at school", because the learner is to be guided with critical thinking and ability of assessment, over his own or anybody else's production.

Simon Willson explanation is actually really good. Thank you for sharing this!

What Simon said! I've found that blogging hugely helps me clarify my own thinking on a topic, and flush out areas of ignorance.

Another excellent option for making getting going with blogging simple is Docusaurus - makes it very easy to get up and running!

https://docusaurus.io

Yes, great choice :)

Declare your interest Sebastien ;-)

I migrated my own blog to Docusaurus from Blogger about a year and a half ago. I became very enamoured (and still am) with the idea of writing blog posts as markdown, storing them as code and publishing them as a website.

I was delighted at how much Docusaurus aligned with that. So much so that I wrote a guide to help others migrate:

https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/definitive-guide-to-migrating-...

My own blog is on bearblog.dev. There's also nicheless.blog if you want a shorter length as a constraint – and excuse ;). I've tried setting a static generator and even wrote my own, but I spent more time fiddling with them than writing. Now I just write. Pretty much raw thoughts like how I would speak with a friend. Doing more structured writing takes all the joy about it for me.

>Start a blog!

but do not expect someone to read it! because with GTP-3 automated content creation I'm increasingly less interested in everything which will be or is already heavily affected by it i.e. News articles, blogs and new books...

The goal isn't for someone to read it. We just covered that. The goal is more writing, less reading.

> It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing. And I think that's an understated point.

I got some excellent feedback from my manager’s manager early in my career and it was, paraphrasing, “keep reading, but write more about what you read.”

Publishing doesn’t have to be public either. At a large organization internal communications are plenty sufficient.

Yes, for me reading can be replaced and optimized by listening text to speech at speeds at faster than my typical reading. Writing still essentialto retain and formalize ideas. Listening doesn't fully replace reading, still need to go back to text to revist ideas when writing, but listening, at least for me, incentivizes approaching new content in first place.

Thanks for the inspiration. I've tried starting this in various forms over the years and failed over and over. I guess I haven't fully committed to using my real name as a public persona for authorship. These are the reasons I think I've failed to blog:

Reasons: 1) Indecision - Wordpress has dependency issues that need to be kept up with, as I understand, and there's so many scripts targeting vulnerable packages...so it made sense to use a tech stack like Hugo, except...

2) Tech fatigue - I'm not a programmer, so I've ended up, more than five times, starting test sites with Gatsby or Hugo and gotten frustrated due to my limited JS knowledge, not having a mentor or being in a class (maybe I should revisit the programming class idea). I've been stuck in "dependency hell" and countless "PATH://" problems that resulted in me sudo'ing random commands from StackOverflow posts in the hope to brute force my way out of such problems, not fully cognizant of the risks associated with those issues. And then thinking back, "damn that Hugo site was quite nice, I'd like to revisit it", and when I do, feel completely lost and have to start from scratch again. The result is spending hours a day trying to get some minute design/CSS feature to work with constant tinkering, and that could have been actual writing time! Maybe ADHD is to blame...

3) Fear (of success) - I'm afraid that if I really dig deep into something I'm passionate about that is also controversial, and end up lucky enough to get some attention, that there will be people who will want to target me (i.e. writing letters to my company about how I'm a dangerous conspiracy theorist, etc.) Is this a legitimate fear or just paranoia?

4) Abuse - I'm concerned that if I spill out my soul, my hard work will be ingested by AI-driven tools such as GPT-3 - that the work will somehow lose value if it's published. But by not publishing, there's no exposure to these ideas, and it's basically pointless to not publish, because then no one can read your work and send you email about it.

Honestly, PG's site is design perfection in my view. Are those endnotes he uses doable in the Wordpress environment? Upon writing this, I realize it might be best to bite the bullet and go for a Wordpress.com type of site, seated on a custom domain. I don't know how to make it air-tight from a security perspective though, but maybe that's not as important as I'm thinking it is.

> If you want to be a thinker, you have to write.

> Start a blog!

Posting to HN counts as writing, too.

posting to hn has its disadvantages

most of the interactions you get are people trying to prove you wrong

this is great when it's with evidence, but half the time instead they accuse you of lying, argue from their own authority, or insult you

the options for including equations, data tables, and diagrams are very limited, and these are important when what you're thinking about is objectively falsifiable propositions

the options for structuring your writing into sections with titles with a table of contents, so readers can navigate an argument that takes more than two minutes to read, are similarly weak

nobody reads what you write after a week, and it's hard for you to even find it yourself

worst of all, if you discover that you were wrong two weeks or more after your initial comment, there's no way to append a correction

... all of which seem like motivation for writing better. Keep on posting!

doubt i will

posting here makes my life worse

You are already so prolific outside HN, have you considered collecting your HN comments in your own space?

Once I started doing this I found HN comments would grow off HN. Now there are a few subjects where I can just point people at a link the next time a subject comes up. And the link has often grown out of repeated iterations of debate on HN and elsewhere.

It doesn't bother me that people forget HN comments. I don't forget them, and that seems the important thing.

You _are_ right that one needs to keep HN at arms length. Over the years I try not to engage in repeated back and forth. I'm not writing primarily for whoever I'm arguing with. I'm writing for the silent readers.

oh thanks

i did edit some hn comments into dercuano, derctuo, and dernocua

which comments of mine here do you think would be worth saving

After many years I recently have a way to follow people on HN once again (https://www.hnfollow.com). Since I started following you, I've favorited a couple in particular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33641298#33644090

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679360#33684545

But I think there are others. Your view of your own darlings will be different from others. It might be worth downloading the archive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389843, just because it's recent and so going to be up to date.

thank you!

I had no idea there were follow-ups to Dercuano. Good to know!