Відео

It sounds like you're onboard with the basic philosophy and are just getting hung-up on the actual *implementation* of that philosophy into your life. IMO this basically characterizes the plight of life in general - are you wasting time doing things you don't really need to be doing? Learning things you don't need to learn? Spending too much time on particular information when moving on faster would give you a *good enough* understanding of something? The philosophy suggests (and this is expanded upon in my video on How to Do Things you Don't Know How to Do) that we want to learn the minimum required to achieve our goals - that the goal in life is not to *know* the most, but to *do* the most. If you find that you're achieving all of your goals, and you don't find it to be particularly difficult, then you *could* be aiming too low, but you could also be perfectly content with these goals and you can live a happy live engaging in this activity that you're good at. Or this could be a side-gig and not worthy of more challenging goals. Or you could see that you're achieving everything you want to do, believe that you could do more, and then recalibrate your goals. One thing that works for me is to sit down every week and answer the simple question "what did you get done this week?" If I have a lot of good answers and these accomplishments are putting me on a good timeline towards achieving my goal, then it was a productive week and nothing much needs to be changed. But if in my honest assessment I think "man, for the amount of work put in, I'm surprised at how little I got done." That's a sign that you're optimizing, and you can be less thorough and potentially achieve *more*. The philosophy - this video - is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out practical ways to implement this in your life. I've developed these tricks that I mentioned to help me, but everyone will have different systems that allow them to make improvements to their life. Figuring out how to better achieve what you want to with your life is *the whole challenge* with life, balancing all your obligations. This is basically the biggest problem each of us will ever face in our lives, and it will never be solved - all we can do is highlight where we're *aiming* (optimization!) and then constantly reevaluate how we might better tilt our trajectory in that direction. The key is to just try things, and believe that this problem is solvable - whether its routines/habits, or being accountable to other people, or more frequent review cycles, or monetary investment which raises the stakes on getting things done, there are lots of practical ways we can improve this. Hopefully this gives a little more nuance to the problem, and I'd love to hear how things are going for you after you've tried a few different things! I'm sure others would appreciate the ideas as well.

I agree, creating your own personal wiki about factual or well-documented knowledge seems more like unnecessary busywork. Rather than collating "many into one" as with regular notes, in Obsidian, Logseq, etc you're going from "one to many" or "many to many". If you need linked knowledge, use the internet. I can guarantee you can't get the ease of getting what you need down in an educational setting that regular notes offers with these programs; So much wasted on thinking about how things link and navigating there. For creative writing, maybe it's useful. But for practical purposes, I'm not sure I understand the utility over traditional notes.

I think you're basically correct: the goal isn't to make a personal encyclopedia - the primary utility of the program/paradigm of conceptual note taking comes from suggesting the user merely *think* about things in a more conceptualized way so that their understanding is more durable/generalizable as compared to rigidly and inextensibly memorizing a particular sequence of information ("one to many" vs "one to one"). If someone could do this without recording any information then this would definitely be more efficient, but I think the practical utility of the mantra "know something well enough to teach it to someone else" explains why recording this information is an important step for most people: it's *proof* that information is known to the extent that it can be articulated/taught, thus leaving the user nowhere hide in "claiming" or "convincing themself" they understand something since the act of articulation brings directly to light areas where the explanation is inadequate. I think that basically comprises the bulk of the utility that comes from recording the information, which validates both of your points @MuffFlux and @FoodUser. The only edge-case worth mentioning is that I do think some knowledge/explanations are obscure enough/esoteric enough to someone that having a *personal* record of how they initially figured it out that they can go back to if they one day forget it might be faster than re-doing that process of parsing the info in the internet in a way that makes sense. But - like you guys argued - this doesn't apply for the vast majority of information and actually represents an administrative liability in terms of maintenance and upkeep. Curious if both of you agree/think there's detail missing from this explanation.

I think we can agree that, aspirationally, it would be nice if we only had to record the information once - that is, if we could sit in class/wherever, apprehend the information, somewhat split it into concepts, and then have it recorded in some way. At least, this is the aspiration since it would take the least amount of time/effort. But you bring up a good point that that might not always be feasible, and there's an advantage to memory from revisiting these concepts, so perhaps the true optimal path lies somewhere in between, depending on the person, or even the topic. Personally, I find that a lot of times when people present things, especially after I got further into this conceptualization project with Obsidian, a lot of the information presented is a *repeat* of what I already knew/took notes on, so it's simply not worth writing down - this gives time to more closely attend to what *is* new and think about *how* it's new and how it should fit in with what you already know. But I also definitely do go back and redo my notes after thinking about them more later on - I think that's kinda the nature of truly coming to grips with a concept is the constant revision of it in your mind/in Obsidian, and this act itself is a kind of spaced repetition. It also depends on how much you care about apprehending *every* piece of information presented to you. Towards its end, I tended to start losing interest in college, and so wasn't really that motivated to take down *everything* these people were saying, but rather sit back and think about things not particularly worrying about losing a few details here or there. As mentioned, it's highly dependent on the topic, the particular lecture, the professor, the individual, and what the individual's goals with this information are. I think the approach you suggested has obvious benefits among all the possible strategies with their own advantages. Honestly whatever works for each individual - that's all I care about ;)

I really do believe in the advice I gave at the end of the video: *just get started*. It's tempting to want to have planned out exactly how it's going to go ahead of time so that there's no messiness, no wasted time, nothing disorganized, and thus no headaches. But just as it would be foolish (though equally as tempting...) to adopt that mantra for job interviews, or dating, or mountain biking, so too is the draw towards perfectionism in planning the ultimate trap. While most of society clearly outlines the danger of not thinking about what you do before you do it, comparatively few people talk about the opposite risk: spending your entire life *thinking* about living as opposed to *actually living*, or failing that, being stifled from change in the fear that it hasn't been thought-out well enough beforehand. That might sound overly philosophical, but clearly we all have a limited ability to *model* the world in our heads, so whatever we *assume* will work well in our model will eventually deviate from the actually correct behavior to take in the real world. The goal should be to become as comfortable as possible messing around with things in *both realms* (including making mistakes in the real world) and striking the balance between them that is as optimal as possible. I think engineerguy's definition of *engineering* is highly relevant here: *the process of solving problems using rules of thumb that cause the best change in a poorly understood situation using available resources*. We don't perfectly understand how to get this knowledge in our head, but we're gonna take our best rules of thumb (which I hope I conveyed well in the video) and engineer the best note taking system possible. To this end, 1. start splitting the things you are taught into concepts. You'll probably at first be bad at figuring out what level of atomization is too much or too little, but eventually, you'll start to see what's *actually useful*. 2. wikipedia already exists: you should aim to record the *minimum* amount of information that is useful for whatever you want to do. Lacking a discrete goal (like in uni), record the minimum info required to gain an understanding of something well enough to pass the tests. 3. example: some of my heat transfer notes would have been things like heat, conduction, convection, radiation, convection coefficient, fourier's law, thermal conductivity - in each of these notes, I link these concepts to their parents (i.e. "fourier's law is the physical law which quantifies [[conduction]] - it's equation is this:..." and the note on conduction would be something like "Conduction is a form of [[heat]] interaction that operates through direct contact of two materials" and the note on heat would be something like "Heat is a spontaneous transfer of [[energy]] that involves the equilibration of two systems at different [[temperature]]s" and on and on, linking note to note. In this process, you'll gain a better mapping of how all these things relate together) 4. do practice problems/homework and have your notes open while doing it. Reference equations and concepts, and use this opportunity to better structure the information in your notes to fit the problems. Often I would realize my notes were wrong/confusing/missing information when doing the homework, so then I'd go back in the book and straighten it out. This feedback loop of shaping your notes in a way that makes sense to your brain in the context of solving problems is *critical* to making the connections in your mind that make knowing this stuff seamless, rather than - as I said in the video - assuming the way the professor presented the information is the best way for you to understand it. Hopefully that provides a little more concrete guidance, but in general, don't take what I say as a strict requirement - everyone is unique and will figure out their own best system. All I ask is that people *try* new methods, because they might just discover (as I did) that rethinking how you take notes can cut your school effort in *half* while delivering a *better* understanding. After a while - come back and let me know what worked and what didn't - I'd *love* to hear about it!

@@Peepnbrick Thank you so much for the response and im sorry for my late reply UA-cam didn't notify me.

@@Peepnbrick Hey so update I did what you recommended and just dove in and i have a few notes created. I would really love to send you if you have a discord or anything like that

discord.gg/NKeEgVWhpz general server I just made for this (long overdue). Could also do DM

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@@Peepnbrick tysm, however it renderes very differntly compared to the video. Can i ask what theme you are using?

"Things" by Colin Eckert or "Cybertron" by Nick Milo

I'll be the first to admit, it's certainly quite a mindset to be jumping back and forth between these concepts. I don't know about you, but this certainly wasn't the way my schooling taught me to process information - even after 4 years of using Obsidian in this way, I feel like I'm only *just now* coming to grips with what taking conceptual notes is like. As unintuitive as it may be, though, when I think about it, this is really what my brain is doing *subconsciously* anyway to things that I've learned. After initially taking notes on something sequentially, my brain subconsciously splits it into the constituent concepts such that later on, the exact *sequence* the notes were taken in is all but gone, leaving only a hierarchy of concepts associated through their connections/relations. This is kinda what I meant in the video by the phrase "stories are fleeting, concepts are what stick" - it seems that while stories are great and are fantastic for transmitting information, when it really comes to understanding something, my brain drives to the *gist* , not the *sequence* . At least, when it *is* able to do that, my understanding becomes so much more expansive because no longer are those concepts locked away to that *particular* story/scenario, but I can actually look at the *general utility* or *moral* that the story gets across and how it can apply to all sorts of situations in my life. I'm not sure how coherent what I'm about to say will be, but in my estimation, a concept is *defined* by how it interacts with other things. That's what makes it, *it* - a chair is something that goes in living rooms, and is a thing people sit on. Notice that to define a chair, I just talked about how it interacted with *other* concepts, like living rooms or people. Living rooms, in turn, are where TV is watched, chairs reside, and families gather before bedtime. In my view, to understand things by jumping back and forth between them is to have a clear understanding of all of those connections that define things. To write your notes sequentially, on the other hand, is to hide those connections and only understand each concept in the context in which the information was originally presented to you - which harshly limits its utility, and discourages you from thinking of *new* ways of understanding things. Regarding your other questions, I only take notes on things I'm interested in, and because time is short, that's typically further refined to what's *consequential* in my life. I mentioned it in the video: Obsidian is not a project. It's a *tool* , and notes should only be taken if they will offer some sort of *utility* in your life. I made two other videos which might shed more light on *what's useful* for you, but I feel quite strongly that the goal in life is not to *know* as much as possible - the goal is to *do* as much as possible. As I said, I certainly haven't stopped thinking about this in the past 3 years since making this video, so there are certainly more videos on learning in the pipeline - I wouldn't want to take them out of the oven before they're ready, though!

Please show us the whole process

r/datahoarder would differ

i basically spend an unreasonably long time thinking about things in way too much depth, conceptualize the information in the way described in my Obsidian video, and spend a long time writing the script agonizing over the best way to convey this information to other people. Then I record myself reading the script all the way through, split it up into chunks and remove some pauses/breaths in Premiere Pro, and then spend like 2 days making drawings in Inkscape and Paint.Net and adding them into a series of text and shapes that I animate in Premiere Pro in sync with the narration I previously split up. And then it's all ready for your viewing pleasure! Appreciate your kind words!