How to take smart notes (Ahrens, 2017) - Less... about:reader?url=https://www.lesswrong.com/p...
lesswrong.com
How to take smart notes
(Ahrens, 2017) - LessWrong
2.0
11-14 minutes
This is my rephrasing of (Ahrens, 2017, How to Take
Smart Notes). I added some personal comments.
The amazing note-taking method of
Luhmann
To be more productive, it's necessary to have a good
system and workflow. The Getting Things Done
system (collect everything that needs to be taken
care of in one place and process it in a standardised
way) doesn't work well for academic thinking and
writing, because GTD requires clearly defined
objectives, whereas in doing science and creative
work, the objective is unclear until you've actually
got there. It'd be pretty hard to "innovate on
demand". Something that can be done on demand,
in a predetermined schedule, must be uncreative.
Enter Niklas Luhmann. He was an insanely
productive sociologist who did his work using the
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How to take smart notes (Ahrens, 2017) - Less... about:reader?url=https://www.lesswrong.com/p...
method of "slip-box" (in German, "Zettelkasten").
Making a slip-box is very simple, with many benefits.
The slip-box will become a research partner who
could "converse" with you, surprise you, lead you
down surprising lines of thoughts. It would nudge
you to (number in parenthesis denote the section in
the book that talks about the item):
Find dissenting views (10.2, 12.3)
Really understand what you learned (10.4, 11.2,
11.3, 12.6)
Think across contexts (12.5)
Remember what you learned (11.3, 12.4)
Be creative (12.5, 12.6, 12.7, 13.2)
Get the gist, not stuck on details (12.6)
Be motivated (13.3)
Implement short feedback loops, which allows rapid
improvements (12.6, 13.5)
Four kinds of notes
Fleeting notes
These are purely for remembering your thoughts.
They can be: fleeting ideas, notes you would have
written in the margin of a book, quotes you would
have underlined in a book.
They have no value except as stepping stones
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towards making literature and permanent notes.
They should be thrown away as soon as their
contents have been transferred to
literature/permanent notes (if worthy) or not (if
unworthy).
Examples:
Jellyfish might be ethically vegan, since they have
such a simple neural system, they probably can't
feel pain.
Ch. 9 How to attention attend:
1. One thing at a time. No multitasking
2. When writing, attend to idea flow. Meaning, not
wording. ...
Literature notes
These summarize the content of some text, and give
the citation.
Example:
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1973) shows that people
often do not take into account the prior when doing
a Bayesian probability problem. In particular, when
no evidence is given, the prior probabilities are
used; when worthless evidence is given, prior
probabilities are ignored.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “On the
Psychology of Prediction.” Psychological Review
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(1973)
Such notes could be made in Zotero, which is how I
do it. You might make them separately in some
other notebook software, or just in plain text files.
Permanent notes
Each permanent note contains one idea, explained
fully, in complete sentences, as if part of a published
paper.
There are many tools available for storing the
permanent notes, see Tools • Zettelkasten Method. I
personally recommend TiddlyWiki.
Project notes
These are notes made only for a project, such as a
note that collects all the notes that you'd want to
assemble into a paper. They can be thrown away
after the project is finished.
Four principles
Writing is the only thing that matters.
Don't just read. Make reading notes. Don't just learn.
Make blog posts or something to share what you
learned.
Also, hand-written notes has some advantage. In
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(Mueller & Oppenheimer, The Pen Is Mightier Than
the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop
Note Taking, 2014), it's shown that students who
take notes by laptop understood lectures less, due
to their tendency to transcribe verbatim without
understanding. From mouth to ears to fingers,
bypassing the brains completely.
The way I see it, this is not an argument against
using the computer, but an argument for repharsing
instead of copy-pasting/direct quoting/mere
transcribing.
Be simple
Don't underline, highlight, write in the margins, or
use several complicated systems for annotation. It'd
make it really hard for you to retrieve these
scattered ideas later. You would be forced to
remember with your biological brain to keep track of
what information is put where.
Put all these ideas in the same simple system of
your slip-box, and you will be set free to use your
biological brain to think about these ideas.
Your simple slip-box system would be like an
external brain that interfaces seamlessly with your
biological brain.
Papers are linear, but writing is nonlinear
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This is why advice on "how to write" in the form of a
list of "do this then that" is bound to do badly.
Instead, you should write a lot of permanent notes
in your slip-box. Then when the time comes for you
to write a paper, just select a linear path out of the
network of notes, then rephrase and polish that into
a paper.
Calculate productivity not by how many pages of
paper you've written, but by how many permanent
notes you've written per day. This is because some
pages of a paper can take months to write, others
can take hours. In contrast, each permanent note
takes roughly the same amount of time to write.
Short feedback loops
Feedback loops should be short. It makes you learn
fast, fail fast, succeed fast. According to (Kahneman
& Klein, Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure
to Disagree, 2009), this is how intuitive expertise is
made: a lot of practice in an environment with rapid
and unambiguous feedback.
The traditional way of writing a paper takes months
before you get a feedback in the form of reviewers'
comments. Instead, you should make notes, which
you could make several per day, allowing fast
feedback loops. If you really understood something,
you'd see it in the form of a well-written note. If not,
then you know you haven't really understood it. You
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How to take smart notes (Ahrens, 2017) - Less... about:reader?url=https://www.lesswrong.com/p...
can experiment with other ways to make the notes
and you will see immediately what works and what
doesn't.
Six methods
How to pay attention
Don't multitask. Pay attention to one task at a time.
When writing, pay attention to the idea flow, what
you want the words to mean. Don't pay attention to
what the words actually mean.
When proofreading, pay attention to what the words
are saying, and not what you think they mean.
Pay attention only to what you must and don't pay
attention to anything else, because attention is very
precious.
Routinize things that can be routinized, such as
food, water, clothes... Wear only one outfit ever, like
Steve Jobs. Eat only one meal plan, buy exactly the
same kind of groceries, or better, always eat the
first vegan meal plan at the canteen.
Use the Zeigarnik effect to your advantage. If you
want something to stop intruding your mind, write it
down and promise yourself that you'll "deal with it
later". If you want to keep pondering something
(perhaps a problem you want to solve), don't write it
down, and go for a walk with that problem on your
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mind.
How to make literature notes
As mentioned before, each literature note contains
exactly two parts: the content of a text, and the
bibliographical location of the text. If you do the
note in a bibliography software like Zotero, you can
attach the note directly to the text, and there's no
need for the bibliography information.
The most important thing is to capture your
understanding of the text, so don't quote. Quoting
can easily lead to out-of-context quoting. Preseve
the context as much as possible by paraphrasing.
Prepare the literature notes so that when you make
permanent notes, you can elaborate on the texts,
that is, describe the context, find connections and
contrasts and contradictions with other texts.
How to make permanent notes
Recontexutalize ideas in your thought. Write down
why you would care about an idea. For example
(from section 11.2), if the idea is an observation
from (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013, Scarcity: Why
having too little means so much):
people with almost no time or money sometimes do
things that don’t seem to make any sense... People
facing deadlines sometimes switch frantically
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between all kinds of tasks. People with little money
sometimes spend it on seeming luxuries like take-
away food.
Then
As someone with a sociological perspective on
political questions and an interest in the project of a
theory of society, my first note reads plainly:
Any comprehensive analysis of social inequality
must include the cognitive effects of scarcity. Cf.
Mullainathan and Shafir 2013.
How to link between notes
There are three kinds of links between notes:
Index -> Entry point note
Note -> Note
Note <-> Note
At the top level, there is one note called "Index".
The index note is just a list of tags/keywords with
links. Each tag/keyword is a topic that you care
about, and is linked to a few notes (Luhmann limited
himself to at most 2) that serve as "entry points" to
the topic.
The entry points are often notes that give overviews
to the topic. Luhmann would make these notes to be
an annotated list of notes that cover various aspects
of the topic. His entry-point notes would have list
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length up to 25.
Between notes, there are two kinds of links:
sequential and horizontal. In fact, sequential links
are really just horizontal links that you annotate as
"sequential".
For example, consider this note:
Following: [link 1] [link 2]...
Content content [link 3] content content [link 4]...
Followed by: [link 5] [link 6] ...
After reading this note, you can go along the
sequence and read "Followed by" notes, or take a
sideways stride and follow the horizontal link [link
3].
The advantage of marking some links as sequential
is that you get clear sequences of thought that you
can easily follow, but they are by no means
essential. You could just make horizontal links.
Ideally, you should make the network of slip-box
notes to be like a small-world network, with a few
notes having many connections, and some notes
having "weak ties" to far-away notes (Granovetter,
Mark S, 1977 The Strength of Weak Ties).
How to write a paper
Don't brainstorm, since brainstormed ideas are
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what's easily available, instead of innovative or
actually relevant. Especially don't group-brainstorm,
which tend to become even less innovative due to
groupthink effects (Mullen, Brian, Craig Johnson, and
Eduardo Salas, 1991, Productivity Loss in
Brainstorming Groups: A Meta-Analytic Integration).
Instead, do a walk through the slip-box and select a
linear path. That gives you a draft from which you
can polish into a paper.
Work on several papers simultaneously, switch if
bored. This is a kind of "slow multitasking", which is
good multitasking. Luhmann said
When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do
something else... I always work on different
manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to
work on different things simultaneously, I never
encounter any mental blockages.
When you need to cut out something that you really
like, but just doesn't belong to the paper (such as
something that is not relevant to the argument), you
can make a file named "maybe later.txt" and dump
all the things that you promise to add back later
(but never actually do). This is a psychological trick
that works.
How to start the habit of using slip-boxes
Old habits die hard. The best way to break an old
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habit is to make a new habit that can hopefully
replace the old habit.
For getting into the habit of using slip-boxes, you
can start by making literature notes. Once you have
that habit, making permanent notes would be a
natural next habit to take on.
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