Chris Aldrich

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Two things are worth noting here: the nests and the non-linearity. The different layers are nested in structure. Hunches come together to form ideas which come together to form stories. But sequence only becomes critical in the top layers: stories, arguments, chapters. The different between the two stages is like the difference between the pushpin evidence board from The Wire — a scattered network of clues and potential connections—and a prosecutor’s closing statement in a criminal trial.¹

tags: #examples

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broader terms (BT): analogies tools for thought
narrower terms (NT): non-linear writing
related terms (RT): Anacapa charts
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MOC:

Why Writing Books Is More Than Processing Words | syndication link | syndication link ↩︎

February 20, 2022 null

For most note taking tools with links versus tags in terms of functionality this is the general rule of thumb I’ve taken:

Links are for expressing relationships and tags are for expressing membership.

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#SMD The Zettelkasten that I talked abut in today’s session is Soren Bjornstad’s Zettelkasten. It is a very good example of a Zettelkasten - with two key points that I was trying to make:

Use links to express relationships

Use tags to express membership

Some warnings:

Soren speak very fast

The YT video is long

If you are not familiar with Tiddlywikis, I would recommend watching only the first 15 minutes, which is about Zettelkastens.

The discussion of linking is at 8:12 and the discussion of tagging starts at 9:40. If anyone has questions about, or is interested in Tiddlywikis, just ask. ¹

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broader terms (BT): links tags taxonomies
narrower terms (NT):
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used for (UF) or aliases:

connected ideas: links vs tags

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Dan Allosso’s book club on How to Take Smart Notes - One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking — for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers | syndication link ↩︎

February 20, 2022 null

Good tools for thought encourage or allow me to:

Capture interesting ideas and their original or related contexts so I can artificially remember more of what I’ve seen, read, and thought.

Links these ideas to related and non-related ideas and contexts

Dramatically accelerates the creation of new ideas with respect to combinatorial creativity and ideas have sex.

Have a greater ability to focus on bigger ideas by letting me forget some less familiar minutiae. I can think more by remembering less though repeated good ideas filter up to the top and through repeated linking and use are more easily remembered.

Source

Prompted by

Elevator pitch for Tools for Thought

How would you explain Tools for a Thought (TfT) to your friends and family in the most concise way possible?#TfT

P.S. Even with a good explanation, do you find they are interested? pic.twitter.com/0BApmIYgfK
— TfT Hacker - Exploring Tools for Thought and PKM (@TfTHacker) January 3, 2022

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links: [[tools for thought]]

broader terms (BT): [[forgetting machines]]
narrower terms (NT): [[combinatorial creativity]] [[ideas have sex]] [[contextualization]] [[links]]
related terms (RT):
used for (UF) or aliases:

connected ideas:

MOC: syndication link

Elevator pitch for Tools for Thought

How would you explain Tools for a Thought (TfT) to your friends and family in the most concise way possible?#TfT

P.S. Even with a good explanation, do you find they are interested? pic.twitter.com/0BApmIYgfK
— TfT Hacker - Exploring Tools for Thought and PKM (@TfTHacker) January 3, 2022
↩︎

January 3, 2022 null

Big History and The Dawn of Everything

What is the relationship between the two?

2021-12-13 [Dan Allosso] Since Big History generally includes events that took place well before the existence of Homo sapiens, I would argue that while similar in its intention to expand our thinking beyond the topics and sources of typical histories, Dawn is not a Big History.

2021-12-13 #ChrisAldrich: I’ll generally agree with #DCA that The Dawn of Everything is not a stand-alone Big History text writ large as many of these types of texts cover the full 13.9 billion years of the existence of time.

I do suspect that it will cover a tremendously large swath of the existence of Homo sapiens (and potentially their earlier animal ancestors) in comparison to most history texts which focus on a single person, event, or short time period spanning a day to several hundreds of years. Some Big History texts break the timeline of the Universe into eight thresholds, and this one portends to cover parts of thresholds 5 and 8 with the bulk of the material centered on thresholds 6 and 7.

One of the other hallmarks of the subject of big history is that it covers material in a highly multi-disciplinary way often using ideas from physics, chemistry, biology, archaeology, anthropology, etc. to make arguments about the shape of history and potential predictions about where we’re going.

From this perspective, in terms of coverage of both time and multi-disciplinarity, I would preliminarily argue that this work fits into the pantheon of the Big History space along with titles like Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.

Follow up:

Another hallmark of the Big History perspective is that of complexity theory and emergent properties and behaviors, which I think is a piece of what I expect we’ll see in this book, though perhaps not framed from the rigorous perspective of mathematicians and physicists. For most of Occidental civilization, we’ve largely followed in the Aristotelian tradition which has resulted in a viewpoint dominated by the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being which has placed a definite hierarchy on modern life that we seem to be struggling to free ourselves from. (Somehow we’ve overthrown the Ptolemaic model of the universe, but not the rest.) Many indigenous cultures haven’t labored under this burden, but instead have had a much more integrative and holistic view of life which also subsequently may have allowed many of them to live successfully, peacefully, and with greater levels of equality. Given the starting conditions of the scala naturae and capitalism what human behaviors emerge? What if we can re-run this human experiment with different starting conditions? (With anthropology and other societies we can take a look at some results.) Now combine other starting conditions with the luck/fortune of the West from a geographical point of view as described in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fate of Human Societies and how might things have played out differently?

Source

2021-12-13 : Copied from the book club Obsidian space for The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity

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links: big history The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity

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December 13, 2021 null

Physical slip to digital zettelkasten

Since I can post to my website by pen and paper with OCR’d photos, I realize I should use a similar workflow to post handwritten zettels to my Obsidian-based zettelkasten/commonplace book too!