> But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the challenges of their work, but the advice was developed in a context disconnected from those external realities.
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzX...
Essentially, be wary of taking advice about reading, research, writing, or anything else from people whose primary contribution to the world is telling people how to read, research, and write. Instead, listen to people who have used these techniques to make a substantial contribution to a field of knowledge.
The problem is that those people are far more interested in doing research and writing than teaching other people how to do it.
https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
Edwards is an academic historian of science who write incredibly long and dense books drawing on hundreds of sources. If anyone knows how to read, its him, and his advice was truly useful for my own reading.
This person, however, seems worthy of consideration.
Indeed many a bookshelf is littered with such babble, but to group Nobel laureate, Danny Khaneman[1] into that group would be a gross overestimation.
Even though all real learning is at least 80% internal and must be owned-and-operated by the student... maybe there's a role for spoonfed knowledge. Certainly there's a role for teachers (disagreeing with "good students learn alone"), even if morale-management and goal-setting is a surprisingly large fraction of it. But even spoonfed knowledge is helpful. For example, as far as I can tell, most good mathematicians have a lot of spoonfed knowledge as part of their learning history (but they also have even more self-guided exploration, and even the spoonfed stuff you gotta chew on it and digest it).
Agreed, though, that a lot of articles like this are clickbaity and, like sugar, give you a sensation of learning rather than what you really need. This particular article, I think, contains a mish-mash of good advice and, uh, pureed pap. It's certainly not worst-of-breed.
I'm guilty of this myself. My interests and struggle become topic of suggestions to others even though it's half good ideas half fluff.
This is a wonderfully honest observation.
I suspect we all have this experience; I certainly do. Of course the suggestions come from an honest place, but often the verbalized outputs do not live up to the epistemic standards we would like to hold ourselves to.
I think perhaps I should less say "do this" and instead more say "here is my experience, and my current theory about that experience, and what I'm trying to do to improve". Or perhaps even "I wonder if...".
It turns out that I had to re-write this comment to follow my own advice, and I think in this case it was in fact helpful, at least for me. That's pleasing.
As someone who has many opportunities to give advice to people 20 years younger than me, I'm doing a lot of "well, I used to think X, and now I don't, so a similar evolution may happen to you". Maybe that's also relevant. Maybe it's just a bad old-man habit.
Indeed that's what I did for a few years. My ideas have shifted now, I stopped discussing much (life is short) instead you do stuff. And suddenly mediocre companies feel a lot more valuable because instead of talking theories they do stuff.
I guess I'm just rediscovering life... know how to gather a bunch of people and make something useful and enjoyable for many.
Looking at the more substantial link that you provided now, thanks for sharing!
The intersection of "great at X" and "great at explaining" is often very small. In practice, you end up having to make trade-offs like wading through poor exposition because the author is the real deal. Another common failure mode is what we see here: People that are so good at explaining, hustling, and branding, that they become popular despite likely having very little expertise at X.
His method may work for him but it doesn't mean he has a complete understanding of how to learn it general. He can learn, but he may not know how he does it or how others should do it.
basically go back and forth between trying to ELI5 the thing, and reading source material.
But he's a great demonstration of Matuschak's point. Luhmnam wrote dozens of books about a wide range of topics, enabled by Zettelkasten, and then wrote a couple of essays towards the end of his career about how he did it.
Did he? I though we have his archive and we know how he used it (from some interview, I think). Didn't thought he wrote about it directly in his system. Do you have source on that?
Almost by definition, truly top athletes are unlikely to be able to have coaches more accomplished than them, especially when you consider the overall trend-line in sports performance is upward. So clearly "more accomplished than you" is not a strict requirement. But it might still be the optimum for everyone else.
I think my personal model is this: First of all, the most-important asset for a coach is that they have a correct model of improvement in the field. That doesn't strictly require them to be any good at all. However, they're much more likely to develop a correct model if they put a bunch of time into trying to be good. And also, if they were never good, they're much more in danger of having a subtly-totally-wrong model of how improvement would work. So although it's not strictly necessary that they be any good at the activity itself, it markedly improves both upside risk and downside risk.
The best way to read this, or most of the internet really, in my opinion, is as if he were a friend, a colleague, family or an acquaintance, not as an authority; you listen politely, nod and smile, and reflect/research on your own on what it seems useful.
At the end of the day, the web enabled anyone to write, and this guy should not self censor just because that advice could be given elsewhere by a more authoritative role. It is his personal blog that we are visiting! If you were talking to a friend over coffee/beer about an idea that seems important to you that he hears, wouldn’t you be energetic, perhaps taking an “authoritative” tone? Not far-fetched!
This is the world we live in now. Self-promotion and public relations are the controlling factors in most large decisions I see in my profession (higher education) that it's just, well, sickening.
It seems like, across most fields, public relations and how we are perceived is far more important than the work actually getting done.
If you can wrap up a shit sandwich in a pretty bow and sell it, why worry about the quality of what you're selling?
It's depressing. Honestly, it drags me down on a daily basis to see people who plainly have no function except to be self-promoting and who can play the PR game get ahead consistently.
And the best part is, it's an impotent rage. What is there even to do about this? I have no idea.
My intention was to become create a system for myself, and I decided to share that on my personal blog with friends and people who know me. So the original intention was to share something that I'm using myself, and something that I've spent 10+ hours researching.
Would love to hear your opinion
(Kidding, not kidding... I'm more annoyed by "founder" specialness/pithy comments on Twitter than productivity hacks, though, I haven't seen a Roam submission in a few days; And yes, I know where I am).
So, yeah, I wish people applied some self-restraint when posting these things. As much as we can develop a bullshit detector, there is only so much time we can spend calling out BS vendors in our lives.
It's the people that got some kind of success in one field (whether by luck, talent, hard work or a combination of it) and start thinking that they have authority to talk about anything else. The bad part is when the masses start actually giving credit to them without any further scrutiny.
Actors/celebrities and their fan bases are the best example of this effect.
I cannot take such people very seriously either and feel all these "life coaching 101" courses/events are no different to new programmers getting stuck in a never ending spiral of tutorials. You're constantly reminded how everything is _just_ out of reach although another course will help get there...
90% of her content is about ARM exploitation (which I'm personally not interested in). However, she has a couple of posts on how she learns and works, that are believable to me thanks to the rest of her content.
She's also not selling coaching, she's selling her technical skills.
The entire idea of “optimizing” the way you read or take notes is itself a farce built on the same desperate need for easy life hacks over just doing the damn work. If you enjoy reading, it won’t feel like work either!
I can't count how many "techniques" I came up with myself over the years. Enthusiastic, convinced and most importantly, of course, not successful. Motivated, getting-things-done people don't have some secret methodology, they have enough dopamine to take a risk in energy expenditure. You know which totally secret behavior will increase productivity? Taking a pill of amphetamine every morning.
Not saying y'all got ADHD, but there is a spectrum and it's not bullshit. If you constantly feel the need to explode tasks and compulsively need to get to the "root" of the problem, thoroughly prepare each new project, but got a hard time actually starting (or finishing) anything... Another guide is not your solution.
You need to learn to endure the unfair pain of extra boredom and the feeling (self)stimulatory deprivation; help your brain to dopamine with diet, with timing sugar and frequently exercise. Or get ADHD diagnostic, if things were like this since childhood and you always struggled. <3
> help your brain to dopamine with diet, with timing sugar
Could you expand?
I have been on a strict diet the past few weeks and exercising every day, I do think it's helped but I am still stuck.
There are a ton of other things, which overlap with ADHD symptoms. Bipolar PD, depression, hidden sleep problems (like apnea), anxiety, nutritional deficiencies, ... . Many of these things also come comorbid, unfortunately. Either way it's not an easy diagnosis and takes time to untangle.
Wish you all the best <3
It's like I could have a hobby now that wasn't an addiction, that I can enjoy an activity that isn't a compulsion.
Anyhow, thanks for your help.
I still have a long way to go to learn time management and be better self directed, but this time I feel like I have a chance.
I do want a sincere diagnosis but I am worried I won't be able to make progress if the doc is only with me for 15 minutes, as it has been in the past. Maybe that's just the medical culture in America.
The ADHD symptoms speak strongly to me, especially about focus and motivation. Anyhow I read all your replies, will give it a shot. Much appreciated.
Think Facebook notifications. The excitement is not knowing what the notification is telling you about.
Dopamine manages how long you can do a task before you evaluate its success; the risk of energy expenditure. Think of how long a path finding algorithm goes into one direction before aborting; with the evolutionary twist of a survival restraints on overall energy expenditure, which means there is a feedback loop modifying the risk capacity on success or failure.
Normal people start with more and overfill with completed tasks (if rewarding), so they got more for the next plan. That is, you got a bit of dopamine for putting on your pants in the morning. In ADHD you _constantly fight the lack of (non-abstract) motivation for such simple things, because you got a chronic deficit. Daily life already costs you a lot of "will power".
Yo. And check out /r/adhd! You won't learn how to cope there, since everybody just shares their "successful" techniques that they got going for a week ;) But it's super helpful to see how other people are like you, that it's actually not your fucking fault (pretty much saved my life...), that you're not lazy, and so on. ADHD also comes with a burden on your social life, from coming late, being impulsive and too easily aborting friendships (the radicalism on alleged principles, which I mentioned at the learning part) and so on, so it's good to untangle all that in the stories of others. Also that sub doesn't try to sell you ADHD as a blessing, which is good. You may "benefit" from divergent thinking and creativity at times, which come with the loose and jumpy focus, but ultimately it's a heavy burden, which has a toll on your life and health.
Daily exercise lifts your dopamine "base level".
However, if you really got ADHD you wanna try Ritalin, or Vyvanse. These stimulants work differently in ADHD brains than normal ones. To give you an idea: Some people take a small dose Ritalin right before bed, to calm their thoughts. I was skeptical about meds, but then I read in ADHD these stimulants actually "normalize" the brain as a long term "side effect". How often do you read that about psycho-pharmaca? They come at cost tho, of course, first medication I got with "sudden death" as a side effect... I also have trouble holding my weight (going too low), which started to scare me a little.
People who talk as experts about areas their experience and accomplishments haven't aligned with always raise this. In this case, don't tell me how to learn when I question how much learning you've done.
The opposite of this is Adrian Colyer's the morning paper [1], where I'd love to learn Adrian's process of ingesting so much technical information.
As an aside, there are folks with expertise in certain areas that dip into a wide ranging set of topic. I try to remind myself of their expertise and discount heavily their opinion on other things:
Elon Musk talking about anything not related to launching a car or space company. Elon's opinions about Covid-19 testing the latest example.
Sam Atman talking about anything not related to VC investing.
Just another blog post telling people how to live by a person whose whole existence revolves around that process.
And yet, inexplicably, this drivel is somehow popular. I guess clueless people feel like they could learn something while not realizing that author himself doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's fascinating to me as a Briton because we don't have such a culture.
I was always surprised in lectures watching people divide their attention between actually listening and trying to write structured notes. Most of the time there's a book which was structured by a pro. Rather than re-reading your own notes which reify misunderstandings from the 1st encounter.
Meanwhile, sites like Paul's Math Notes and Khan academy are easier to digest, clearer explained, and much more available.
It would be great if you add your feedback and ideas about the topic. I'd be happy to learn from you on how you read books and what works.
Have a great day.
The top comment at the link above says it all.
Organization and motivation are important, though.