Designing Tools for Scientific Thought
forester-notes.org
forester-notes.org
Maybe this says more about my relatively disorganized thinking patterns. For me, notes are typically thoughts about the current thing I'm processing and it's relation to something else, often in an imprecise way, to be explored further. Maybe the point is that wouldn't qualify yet as a note, and only when you refine the thought into something more concrete with direct reference to precisely the relevant notes on the related thing(s). But where do I start?! How do I make the first atomic note? It seems I wouldn't be able to reference a book. Maybe I could reference a section of a book, hoping it's self-contained. But even then, is have to resolve the references needed for that section into atomic notes themselves. When do you ever have time to actually think?
I hope enjoyed this unedited stream of consciousness that I should probably just delete.
It comes down to - what's the point of this? If it's to prove theorems to a computer then it's obviously the wrong approach. If it's to explain concepts to humans then it's _also_ the wrong approach. It's not true in any useful way that one can learn something by just starting at a random "node" and then "tree shaking" some big "knowledge graph" and just learning the specific edges that remain.
That said, no hate for this kind of tool! Interlinked knowledge is obviously great and useful, it's the emphasis on designing a rigid ontology that makes me raise an eyebrow.
The science of notetaking so far seems to have a lot of art and opinion, but little science
Doing topics is too hard initially and you end up hitting some point where you feel like you need to refactor. Doing "journal" dated entries mean you are allowed to copy the entire entry again and rewrite it without thinking about refactoring.
I would imagine that due to the way paper and pen work, in the old days things must have been a bit like this "no erase/no refactor" method.
This seems... reductive? At the very least, isn't data collection, storage and retrieval also essential to scientific thought? I really do not think those tools can fit into a "textual authoring and publishing tool"-shaped hole.
Pretty much the first thing the article does is define what it’s talking about. But you skip that, pull some other quote out of context, then attack that out of context quote.
And then you subtly change the topic, from “tools for scientific thought” to “[stuff that is] essential to scientific thought.” Are you hoping no one notices?
What do you get out of this?
Apparently, needlessly aggressive replies from strangers on the Internet. Let me smooth out my first comment. If your field of research is purely theoretical or can do without data you'll be fine with a network of notes, and it is actually really interesting to discuss the UX/UI of those!
But when it comes to the "definition" I am accused of skipping:
> A “tool for scientific thought” could be many things, but it must be a tool for the development and interlinking of scientific ideas in a way that facilitates authoring, publishing, teaching, learning, and the maintenance of evergreen notes.
I am very curious to understand how this lessens my point. It starts by saying "could be many things" (the opposite of a definition) and ends up talking about the bespoke concept of "evergreen notes".
It ends up talking about tools for scientific _authoring_ which in many cases is the iceberg tip of scientific _thought_. I stand by my point that the latter needs collecting, retrieving, relating, and interlinking experimental data at least as much as it needs to do the same with snippets of text.