The difference between note-taking and note-making
nesslabs.com
nesslabs.com
The best learning experiences I've ever made were with the "digital gardening" method explained in the article. Especially the process of writing down what I'm trying to understand and putting it in my own words is hugely beneficial. That old trick of Feynman's where you take a topic you don't understand and explain it to someone – be it a person, your personal wiki or just a text note – really works wonders. And revisiting a note and changing it a bit also seems to reflect how we remember things: Not regurgitating them, but reliving them.
Apart from that I found the process of creating my own personal wiki highly rewarding and can only recommend it to others (if you have the time). It's an absolute joy to use something you've made and explain the creation of it to yourself using it.
In my case I've also made the wiki in such a way that I can add exercises to notes and then do spaced repetition on those (which was also a blast to implement). The exercises themselves can be functions so that things get mixed up from time to time. I don't often do the exercises, but the process of creating them adds another layer of understanding from my experience.
Edit: Continuation...
But this is just me getting excited over the personalized wiki I've created.
The article importantly mentions that "there is no one-size-fits-all app" to best understand something, so it takes some time and experimenting to figure out what works best for you (heck, I think I went through at least 5 iterations of note-making systems before I settled on this one for about two years now). And since we're on HN, I think everybody here has the skills to make their own.
I really wish schools would add a dedicated, mandatory subject about learning to learn. It would have saved me a lot of time I wasted back in Uni and afterwards just trying to figure out how to quell this urge to retain information.
Logseq (open source): https://logseq.com/
Roam Research: https://roamresearch.com/
At the moment everything gets hosted locally unfortunately. I was planning on polishing it so that it's easier to setup. Then I can put it on a Show HN in the future as a kind of "how this was built" :) and give some inspiration to other people who thought of building their own.
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
“Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, ‘I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.’ But a few days later he came to me and said: ‘You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.’“
His book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! also has a couple of anecdotes where he solves people's problems by asking them questions and trying to understand them. Unfortunately I read this some time back and the exact page numbers escape me.
Generally, if you search for Feynman Technique you'll find anything in the direction of "explain it to someone to understand", but I think there is a lot of misattribution going on here. Like Einstein, people love to stick his name on things.
And finally, an indirect, but in my opinion well-summarized reference to the way Feynman learned, was in the Richard Feynman section of Lex Friedman's 118th podcast [1].
[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Quotes
[1] https://youtu.be/U_6AYX42gkU?t=452 (with exact starting time)
Naturally, this only works on knowledge-base exams, not skill-based exams (e.g. math). This also shows up in the results: math exams generally seem to have worse grades than other exams, and math exams seem to have lower thresholds to pass (e.g. 25 % vs. 60 %).
It's not perfect for every type of information, and there are some aspects of memory (most notably contextual memory) which can make it less effective than one might like. But it definitely is more useful than just for exam cramming...
I'm also not sure where you're getting "math exams generally seem to have worse grades than other exams" and "lower thresholds to pass" from.
At university I specifically remember some of my friends not understanding the calculus they were doing _at all_, yet they could still answer questions because they rote learned the technique.
I think of Spaced Repetition more generally. A paper based Zettelkasten system can be enhanced with a paper based review scheduling system; say 43 folders as described by David Allen in Getting Things Done with a simple SuperMemo algorithm for interval spacing.
When we gain good recall of Zettelkasten structure/content I suspect that we inadvertently mimic Spaced Repetition. I can be convinced otherwise.
I'm all for the zettelkasten method, for good notetaking habits...however there's also a tendency of many notetakers, or productivity porn on notetaking, to waste so much time 'notetaking' and 'organising' that they never _act_. (I've been very guilty of this in the past).
Recall isn't bad. It's essential. It is, however, not the _only_ thing to use. You want to use spaced repetition for the most important, most used information. Stuff that's a bit more niche, rarely used, yeah just search that.
But, yeah. I rake notes to remember things I need to do, to capture some key points, or to be able to "play back" a meeting/talk/etc. to others in either verbal or written form. This is one reason I usually type notes for anything that I'll want to play back in any detail; it's faster and easier to capture more or less verbatim than writing notes by hand. To the degree that recall is helped, I find it's mostly by "processing" the notes in some form.
For instance, how can you be sure at the outset that you have designed a good prompt [1] that will enable recall versus recognition?
And even once you have designed a good prompt, that brings up the question of epistemology: how can you be sure at the outset that the "information" you wish to ingest is factual and that it will be useful to you later on? It's easy to imagine memorizing a compelling aphorism like:
> The German word for "passion", which literally translates to "enjoyable suffering". Because if you think you’re passionate about something, you must be willing to ask yourself if you’re willing to suffer for it. If you are, that means you are passionate. Otherwise, it’s just a hobby. [2]
But, while beautiful and compelling, it turns out that this definition/translation of the word "Leidenschaft" is misleading: "Leiden" means "suffering" and "schaft" simply means "-ship". This is very similar to the word _passio_ which is the Latin root of the English word (and whose meaning shines through in "The Passion of Christ", for instance).
When using spaced repetition systems you must be extraordinarily careful around vetting the content that you are putting into them, and most of the time, you would be better simply "coming back to the same reading" on a given topic (thereby effectively building your own ad-hoc SRS process).
The brain exists in order to recognize patterns, but it also likes to over-fit!
[1] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
[2] Keller, T., Heller, S., Ruhlman, M. and Jones, D., 1999. The French Laundry Cookbook. New York: Artisan.
The link to Matuschak that you supply explicitly argues that you need to go back and revise prompts based on developments in your knowledge and new connections found. This includes eliminating prompts that are too easy, reformulating them for greater personal import and adding new ones to shore up areas of weakness.
It is difficult.
> Wikipedia, also, is not a web of thoughts, because you can only link to articles and sections within them, but not to individual thoughts inside the text. None of the addresses matches with any thought. Wikipedia is not meant to be such a thing. Rather, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with each article containing information on a topic. Wikipedia is not a thinking tool but a tool for information retrieval.
Wiki, in my mind, is more suitable for somewhat long and detailed notes about concepts. Random titles from my notes: conspiracy theories, neoliberalism, borders, norms, monopolies, habits, addiction, time management...
Zettelkasten is kind of the opposite of that. It's more about making connections between concepts than thoroughly researching certain concepts. Random titles from my notes: news kills creativity, inequality generates status anxiety which generates ecological damage, relationship between paywalls and echo-chambers...
These connections made in zettelkastens have no place in a wiki page because the point of wiki pages is to have a somewhat detailed explanation of concepts. Zettelkastens are much shorter (usually between 5-10 sentences and 1-3 sources).
Another way to look at it: zettelkasten is for stuff that you write once and rarely have a reason to expand upon (other than to create a new link to something similar), while wiki is for stuff that you know you're gonna have to return to with the goal of adding more stuff.
It seems to me the difference lies more in the wiki software. I was asking the initial question because there are wiki engines with a lot of features, and what you are doing for Zettelkasten can be done in them as well: take for example tiddlywiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/) which organizes nodes in "tiddlers" instead of full-blown articles or pages. You can link to another "tiddler", or you can even include it so its content can be reused elsewhere without having to "click". So it seems to me those new systems are more revealing of todays' wiki engines' limitations than completely new paradigms.
Another difference I just realized: wikis are expected to be read and modified by multiple people, while Roam and Zettelkasten systems are expected to be used by one person only. While not written in stone, I feel like this has an impact on the way content is structured.
Full disclosure; I created it for the purpose.
I'd argue that a good note-taker will be doing the latter automatically.
I also disagree with the claim that note taking doesn't enhance learning. It forces one to pay attention rather than daydream and ignore the content entirely. It would be less tiresome, of course, to just pay attention and not take notes, but it does serve that purpose.
Another purpose for note taking is to pass the notes on to someone not present during the class/lecture/talk. For example: I was paid to take notes for others in college.
Another use for notes is to look back on the notes and verify that you have effectively absorbed the material; studying portions that you don't understand fully.
The article is far too dismissive on the value of plain note taking.