Organisations of thought

[maru]

I've been bouncing this back and forth with @watermoon as part of a sort of emergent manifesto[1] I've had vis-a-vis social thoughtspace — that is, do different patterns of discourse cultivate different patterns of thinking, even in our private lives?

Consequently, does that have a "moral" guideline? If we know something is "better for us," intellectually, are we then knowingly partaking in junk food at other times?

We talked about some related topics back in the IPB days like what our external brains are. I've been open to revisiting my approach, because I don't generally keep notes anywhere; I keep a journal that has high variance in terms of my capacity for self-insight, and it seems to be downstream of other life changes, as opposed to a consequence of keeping the damn thing. Like, maybe I do need this memex thing. Maybe I do need this Obsidian thing. Maybe I need to rethink just throwing essay outlines and book citations into a flat notebook. So, here's a thread asking for your general philosophy regarding how you organise your thoughts.

Two related thoughts:

- I remember around 2019, when I first started making any money at all, I felt like living my life with some clothes, a computer and an iPad made it so that my internal life stayed inside me. That I had no way of reifying what I thought. I had a friend that was fixated on enactivism and felt like I couldn't progress beyond these vague ideas if I didn't make what I thought real, if I didn't have totems of those periods of my life about me. If I didn't make myself external to me. Now it's 2024 and I own so much stuff and I can't tell if I was right.

- I have been traditionally averse to any of these topics — making a memex or whatever at all — because I was overdosed on well-to-do creative technologist Zettelkastens for years. People would make a notebook and throw it straight onto the web as their personal website. What I would find is that people would fetishise the tools, architect the aesthetics by which they might become a type of guy, and then never produce anything. This is the opposite of having higher cognition as a result of changing your patterns or environment; it's becoming the equivalent of thought slime. I felt like if you publish your notes, you're not publishing thoughts. It's like throwing ingredients on a plate as you find them, instead of cooking them into something selectively. Some guys can get away with this. Most of us are not Nietzsche.

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[1]: I feel like things that "feel true" to me, actual deeply held values, come as a result of vaguely intuiting my way towards the truth over a very long period of time. As I got more Christian I developed a very solid theory around avoiding the instrumentalisation of others. I saw technology as the method by which we abstract human lives into interfaces and information. I saw the manipulation of information streams through these interfaces — flattening something into a literal reality, intermediated by technology — as the anti-Christ we have, if compassion or charity is our highest calling in life (charity being the literalisation of emptying oneself for God, becoming the force of love itself).

My emergent belief now is basically applied McLuhan: if the patterns in the way we interact with technology and each other then structure our minds, then we have to embrace that any pattern is valid and take action, rewriting ourselves. We can create new patterns, new places, and stay there. I didn't used to understand why boomers stuck to IRC. I do now. It isn't that one is accustomed to a technology, or that one is nostalgic for an era; it's that the values of an era or of a culture beget their technologies and spaces, and structure the world outward from there. Every pattern is a tree branch in soil; and treating the network effects of the incumbent as some indication of futile effort is a matter of bad faith. If you want a world — even a world within yourself — to be born, make the seeds of that world. This is what I try to do (I guess I say this in my introduction post?). So, thank you for being here with me.

[nousnaut]

My thoughts, knowledge, and insights are mostly within my head; something like an overpopulated koi pond, with carp jumping around and sometimes flying out, never to be seen again. I've had dysgraphia/dyspraxia issues since childhood and apparently ADHD as well (that wasn't diagnosed until my early thirties). I tend to have thoughts that are more echoic and iconic than ordered as abstract symbols *and* have synesthesia, so I'm as likely to remember an idea for an essay or something by walking by the place where I first had it or playing the same piece of music as just randomly recalling it.

When I need to actually flesh something out, I usually just start something -- a section in a notebook, a folder on my computer, a mind-map -- and try to keep it within grabbing distance and mark it on a (physical) to-do list. I find having something I can touch and physically interact with allows me to focus better, especially if I can work while walking or something. Physical, single-purpose things are also much easier/quicker to use a lot of the time and don't have the temptations using a phone/tablet/computer does. I often spend several hours pacing or walking, letting things process subconsciously before going to work in earnest.

Lately, I've been thinking about what kind of things I want to archive/formalize -- recipes, SOPs for various things, etc -- and for that kind of stuff I've been trying out things like Joplin. I see knowledge management as a different thing entirely from thought management, though definitely related.

I guess you could call me something of an applied Daoist when it comes to thought organization: (unintentional) cultivation of a weird way of organizing my thoughts so they be recalled in a fluid form with gentle use of physical tools allows me to get to a place where effortless action can happen.

[watermoon]

- I have been traditionally averse to any of these topics — making a memex or whatever at all — because I was overdosed on well-to-do creative technologist Zettelkastens for years. People would make a notebook and throw it straight onto the web as their personal website. What I would find is that people would fetishise the tools, architect the aesthetics by which they might become a type of guy, and then never produce anything. This is the opposite of having higher cognition as a result of changing your patterns or environment; it's becoming the equivalent of thought slime. I felt like if you publish your notes, you're not publishing thoughts. It's like throwing ingredients on a plate as you find them, instead of cooking them into something selectively. Some guys can get away with this. Most of us are not Nietzsche.

there's a maxim that i remember hearing a lot in the indie gamedev sphere: make games, not engines. because it's so tempting to just work on the engine for the sake of working on it, adding features that you might need one day, optimizing sections that aren't where the bottlenecks would actually be in practice, all without a clear vision guiding these changes. at best you end up with an engine that you feel compelled to use every feature of, whether or not it's sensible for your game. at worst you just never get around to making the game at all.

i can't help but feel a parallel notion with what you're describing here, and i've seen more than a few examples of what you're talking about as well. and maybe that reflects in the end product: something that is often technically impressive and impeccably linked, but is also hollow and speaks only of its own creation.⁰

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as for me, my story is one of downloading evernote in 2011 and becoming something of a compulsive notetaker, accumulating over 9000 notes across the years.¹ random thoughts and ideas, fragments of essays, diary entries and confessions, thoughts about the media i watched or listened to – they all landed in there, sorted into folders that varied in descriptiveness. for my actual creative projects, i usually just used a central note (or cluster of notes) that contained links to other parts of the projects as well as a sprawling set of commentary stuffed into the same note. i also relied on how evernote by default places recently edited notes at the top of the note list to jog my memory on what i was most recently working on (you can call this the "noguchi filing system" if you want to sound like an asshole).

for a time, this worked okay, though the discontent of mizuki watermoon inevitably kicked in and i started wondering how i could turn that unlinked, untagged corpus into something more useful. like, there has to be a lot of good stuff in there, right? so how do i make sure that i can find and remember what's worth remembering?

the solution i came to for bringing structure into it has been abusing the hell out of dataview, which lets you treat the whole notebook as a database and run sql-ish queries on it. there's definitely a learning curve and it's kinda jank in some ways, but it makes it easy to chop up the load by date, tag, any custom property, etc. and work with it from there. then i can just make a page that functions as the entry point for each thing i care about, and follow the branches until i come across the section that i want, and if it doesn't exist then i can spend a few minutes adapting a query that i've previously written elsewhere to make it exist. that has worked really well for the library-ish side of the memex,² and the way it's come together makes me happy.

i still haven't found an approach for creative works that differs substantially from starting with a central note that i stuff text into and only start breaking up once it gets unwieldy. but being able to view backlinks helps, since i tend to randomly bring up projects i'm thinking about in other notes. and i've been trying to link to what i'm referencing more often, perhaps to increase the likelihood of both the linker and the linkee being remembered later on.

but that's about all the features i use. i rarely use the local graph, and the full graph view seems to be there more to flex than to be useful in any way. i also tend to not be very good at atomic notetaking – it just seems like a hassle, and if there's a section of a note that i want to reference in another then i'll just link to the heading that goes to that section.

eventually, if you read enough websites about notetaking methods, you start to see the same patterns repeating themselves over and over again and you start to think that maybe these are all saying the same thing: create central hubs that connect to all your notes on a particular topic,³ and take time to refine your more fleeting thoughts and impressions into a more coherent form.⁴ reflect on what you've learned or experienced, think about how they connect to the topics you care about, and then write that shit down. that's pretty much it, and any tool you can use to do that – whether digital or physical – will work. all of the various notetaking methods will get the job done too, and their differences are a matter of nuance, but if you can think of an extra twist to add to the formula then you too can make tens of thousands giving seminars to the sorts of people who make engines instead of games.


⁰ that said, i have been kicking around the idea of hosting select parts from my memex online: mostly the stories, some diary entries, some essays written to nobody… i don't think i could ever bring myself to host the full thing though, since a lot of it is rather boring and some parts of it are extremely personal
¹ a 2000s-era forum deserves a few 2000s-era jokes
² it's maybe because of this that i feel comfortable now calling it a memex instead of just a notebook…
³ what zettelkasten calls hub notes, what LYT calls MOCs, what japanese websites call matome
⁴ what zettelkasten calls permanent notes, what ethnography calls analytical memos

[maru]

Your use of the memex to make a table of music reviews makes me feel really intrigued. I don't really approach media journaling like this, "just for my own eyes" and all — it's nearly entirely online, because I get a lot out of the social aspects. Anilist. Backloggd. Letterboxd. rym. The only thing I don't journal online anymore is my reading, because people seem to index and monitor what you read more than what you watch or listen to.[1] [2]

And even then — if it's local, everything you've displayed here can be done in a music library itself, which is already a SQLite database as it is.

I guess I could imagine a world where there isn't an arbitrage for standing up item-oriented Postgres instances and doing views on different columns on it per medium. I could imagine a world that is a neighbourhood of person-oriented databases, an infinite number of views on different topics across all media, and custody of all one's personal data. As though all these dataviews were themselves fuzzy cached together... I need to build out this idea a bit. I just feel like people try this kind of thing and there's always problems. I just wonder if it could be more of an ... emergent thing. Like a protocol where you stand up a personal data store with a layer of permissioning over it, and there's a layer client-side for doing joins and views on all synchronised stores.

[1]: Bad experiences.
[2]: That's just a pile of spreadsheets. I don't even know if I like doing it this way, but I do it this way.

[maru]

I've been trying migrating spreadsheets to Obsidian and this has been super interesting to play with.

Screenshot 2024-07-30 at 3.07.00 AM.png (264.13 KiB) Viewed 4240 times

I think I might be better served by making myself write a little blurb after I finish a book so as to help retain it better. That and the highlights I made when I was reading it...

[watermoon]

i guess you could call what is in there media reviews, though there is a continuum on how review-y they are. like, the only place i've posted reviews to was on rym, but those ended up taking on a public-facing tone, because i felt compelled to consider my writing in terms of the audience which may see them. i start caring about brevity, and clarity of message, and my contribution relative to all the other reviews, and all that, and it takes a lot for me to get into that mode.
there were places on there where i let myself be more lax about these concerns, like in my list about rym's top 100 albums, but i feel like i kinda paid for it (i genuinely love how most of the comments on that one are some variation of "your taste is trash but at least you're funny"). so even that as a venue isn't fully "safe…"

i personally see them more as logs, chronicling my relationship with the work over time. sometimes they start out fully fleshed-out and don't change much after that. sometimes i only make a few notes the first time and then they grow on me. sometimes i only make a few notes and it stays that way. sometimes i haaaate them at the start but over time they grow on me. sometimes i love them from the start and the more times i experience them the more thoughts i have. sometimes i have an emotional breakdown partway through. sometimes i decide to try out a new writing technique just to see how it feels to read.

and it's liberating, honestly! i can be personal, i can be idiosyncratic, i can use a rating system that's derived from the positive rating model without getting the same amount of backlash that using a positive rating system in public tends to receive. i can draw connections to works and ideas and life experiences that would take a lot of bootstrapping to get a random person onboard with, like writing for an audience necessitates. and when the connection is a bit disparate or relies on one side that's unfamiliar to most people, i don't have to worry about one hiccup in the chain of association throwing people off and looking like an ass in public (again).

i've dropped a couple examples here, found by mashing the random note button until something interesting came up. the first (soothing sounds for baby) shows how my preferences and tastes have changed a bit, but also uses the album as a springboard for thinking about what role music should play in early childhood development. if i actually wanted to make a worthwhile statement on this idea i'd likely feel compelled to bring in a lot more comparisons and sort through this idea more – as it stands, this note is just one ingredient to be used in some recipe down the line, maybe.

the second is about a film that's the conclusion to a series i'd only watched a few episodes of prior. in structure it looks more like a review, except it's not very comprehensive, and instead i sliced out a character dynamic in it that i found especially interesting. and while i think that what i have to say here would be a valuable contribution, if it were destined for public consumption there'd also be this compulsion to add more, right?
it also ends with a couple examples of how this dynamic has arisen in my own life, including one that goes in a bit of a spicy direction – for paraloguers' eyes only…

(also the metadata in the headings is automatically pulled with the Media DB plugin, which you may or may not find useful)

[maru]

You log your very first listen! I find that so strange, too. Sorry, I ended up getting entranced by how you experience media.

I just keep a list of stuff I want to check out, then when I feel like I can, I put some new stuff on — and if a song happens to stick to me, I replay it a lot, play the songs around it, until it becomes something I get really into. This year I felt that way about Fagen and Steely Dan, felt that way about Lightbulb Sun. Sometimes nothing really sticks and I feel sorta whatever and don't listen to it again. Felt that way about a lot of stuff this year, too.

After a long time I can assess how much I love something — from "I get into moods where I like this" to "I think this resonates with something deep inside me, something core into whatever it is that I am, and therefore is irreplaceable". From a more formalist, aesthetics-based appreciation to hermeneutics of one's essence or something.

[watermoon]

After a long time I can assess how much I love something — from "I get into moods where I like this" to "I think this resonates with something deep inside me, something core into whatever it is that I am, and therefore is irreplaceable". From a more formalist, aesthetics-based appreciation to hermeneutics of one's essence or something.

ok so take this process, flip it on its head (if in intent), and then you have my compulsion. my mission has been one of mowing through thousands of albums to figure out what sticks with me – and from those, to understand who i am and how i work. it was presumed that i operate through a consistent set of logics that determine what i find meaningful, and i wanted to figure out what exactly those fundamental patterns were. i am a scientist i seek to understand me etc.

(i think i saw something rimbaudian in my mission back then, though as i've gotten older i realize that sentimentally i'm more of a verlaine, which sucks)