Ask HN: How to take notes and learn from them? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to take notes and learn from them?

7 pointsspacebuffer10 comments

So I've been trying to actually take notes with obsidian and I can't figure out how. let's say I am a newcomer to astronomy and I begin to look into the topic through popscience videos or short articles, every time I come across a new thing to learn I make a note as such:

    The zenith is the center of the night sky and it is used for orienting.. so on and so forth

Maybe even throw in a couple of links to other notes for good mesure.

As I assemble more and more info, what differentiates my vault from a local-copy of wikipedia? I mean sure it's not a word for word copy ( I always try to use my own words as much as possible) but is it any better?

And if being similar to wikipedia isn't a problem, then what constitutes as learning? having a copy of wikipedia on-hand definitely is not learning. so do I take a look at these notes every couple of days and call it a day, or take a test on the subject as if it was a college course?

This happens for me with other subjects too, for example a couple of weeks ago I wanted to get really knowledgable about greek mythology so I picked up mythos by Stephan Fry (great book btw) and again I was unsure about how to take notes on it.

my intuition said to briefly explain in the form of short bullet points the plot point of each sub story in the book as well as detailing the relationships between different gods mentioned in the book. I guess that's better that not taking notes at all, but is my written relationship guide really better then the 10s of graphical ones available online?

I used to know how to take notes for school because I got used to the structure of exams in different subjects thanks to the decade+ being a student but when it comes to free-form learning where there isn't a test or any tangible way to mesure progress I lose sight of how to take notes/learn

Copy/Paste like any other text won't make you magically "learn" it. Reading gives you some insight, but you having some thoughts, actions, questions or elaboration on that gets you forward.

Talk with yourself on it, relate that with other things you know, search or question some IA about the doubts you have, even do the effort of categorize correctly the information in Obsidian is doing some work around it.

And that on pure intellectual information, if you can put it in practice, do something based on that, test your own understanding, not what is literally written there, helps even more.

If you lookup some info on the Zettelkasten method, that is effectively what Obsidian is designed for when it comes to linking.

For me, Zettelkasten seems like way too much work, and the goals of it are not my goals. So while I do use Obsidian, I don’t use Zettelkasten, I never use the graph view, and I have very few links. For it to really pay off seems like you need to turn your notes into your digital garden. What’s really wild is the guy who came up with the system did it by hand with index cards, if I remember correctly.

Obsidian isn’t too opinionated, and there are a lot of plugins, so you can make it into whatever works for you. Zettelkasten disciples have some impressive looking graph views, but I do question how much of that is actually valuable vs procrastination.

The tool aside, I wouldn’t worry about there being something online that already exists or is better. The act of doing it yourself helps with the learning process. Any time I made a cheat sheet in college for a test they allowed it, I never needed it. The act of making it got me to learn it. I saw an interview with someone recently who said they still write book reports as an adult, like they did in grade school, because it helps them learn the lessons of the book and organize their thoughts around it. All of this takes a decent amount of discipline when there is no external force holding you accountable. If it’s worth it or not really depends on the person and topic.

Hear me out. Try the following techniques:

- note-taking by hand (including analog mind-mapping);

- rewriting/reorganizing your notes once or twice, again by hand;

- writing a succinct, ELI12 explanation of the subject, again by hand (a/k/a the Feynman method), then later trying to do it again from memory, and comparing the version from memory to the original to see what you forgot to include.

Sometimes making and reviewing voice recordings of you explaining everything aloud can work similarly, but there is something special about handwriting.

Once you've actually learned everything, you can put it into a spaced recall system like Anki to actively recall/review periodically to prevent forgetting, but at that point it should be pretty well internalized.

I find Obsidian and its ilk good to store, link, and share a "final product" of something you have already learned. That final product can also be original work based on something you already know and have internalized — but at that point you're an expert.

In my experience, trying to use Obsidian to do the learning and the memorization/internalization is barking up the wrong tree.

I'll second the third bullet point. If you really can explain something pedagogically you've learned it! Half-baked notes have very little value but doing the hard work to explain it well will teach you anything.

Taking notes from books is for the birds, you can always go back to the book. The counterexample to that is you might be writing some kind of critique or analysis and this is your first draft -- in this case you might want to record your emotional reactions or personal experiences relevant to the text, citations to other works that are related, the results you get "reading between the lines". etc.

Taking notes from lectures depends on the course. You can't go back to the lecture, plus you might believe it's a guide to what is on the text. It depends on how much is the whim of the teacher. In a lit class, take notes. If it is introductory chem you can probably get it all from the book and the problem sets. [1]

When you're doing original research though, it is all about the notes. I filled up about 30 notebooks in the process of getting my PhD, you really should document every little thing that you try.

People do it less but you should do the same if you are doing any kind of engineering. Not least if you want to file a patent you want your whole invention process documented so you can prove you invented it.

Even in programming you should keep a notebook of your thought process and debugging. Personally I find I write better quality code when I work with an LLM because it forces me to take better notes.

[1] I wound up taking intro chem when I was a senior and a better student and got the top score in the class even though I rarely attended it. It did get a tiny bit of help: the prof told us we could skip one quiz, I did, then went to the chem lab to ask the T.A. to skip the test, he said "Why not take it right here?" and he looked at it and handed it back to me and said "Are you sure about that?" I thought it through again and realized my mistake.

It's better because it's in your own words and hopefully, matching your own thought patterns, so it's easier to revisit later.

I read source material (dev docs, Wikipedia, whatever) and reformulate the concepts in my own words, adding my own analogies and elaborating where needed.

A lot of what you said sounds like you don't necessarily get value out of keeping notes for all these random topics.

Until you have a well-defined purpose for taking notes, consider not?

Record questions, not notes. https://foolsconfession.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-dubious-val...

Isn’t the secret sauce of notes to not read them at all? The act of writing is the precious thing.

In school, you can take notes and learn enough to pass pretend problems on next week’s test.

In the adult world it ain’t that way. There’s no test next week and knowledge is not applied to pretend problems. Often it is not relevant to any problem and when it is, the relevant knowledge is based on years of experience.

Maybe look at it this way, what kind of problem is solved by knowing what the zenith is and how do you wind up in a position where that problem is relevant, meaningful, and important to society except through years of training and work experience?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with edification. But adult standards for knowing things are often higher. Even one-eyed kings in lands of the blind are kings because they have useful knowledge. Trivia is just trivia.

Time is the price of adult knowledge. Synthesis is the value. Aging comes with “how the hell did I do that?” because that’s the nature of up-to-the-ass-in-alligators work. If you leave the swamp you can’t do swamp work.

So some advice: if you want to use what works in school, go back to school. If you want a lifetime of learning, pursue intellectual challenges that don’t have one right answer. Fortunately, that’s most things. Unfortunately, doing so won’t feel safe and comfortable. Good luck.

Try the SQ3R method, which has been around since 40's.

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