#note #protocol #modular #knowledge #cultivation ![[Knowledge Cultivation via Protocolized Modular Note-Taking 2024-07-01 14.21.01.excalidraw.png]] %%[[Knowledge Cultivation via Protocolized Modular Note-Taking 2024-07-01 14.21.01.excalidraw.md|🖋 Edit in Excalidraw]]%% # Notes Are Meant to Be Used #capture #organize #synthesize %% - What are notes? - How are they made? - What do we use them for? - What are they meant to be used for? %% Notes are captures we make from observation and moments of reflection. They are the distilled product of our mental activity. Regardless of whether that activity is conscious or unconscious, notes happen to us and their articulation marks important moments of our intellectual rise. Notes are motivated by curiosity or the necessity to understand some object of experience, even if that happens to be our own thinking. Regardless of whether, writing is a thing for us, these moments of capture happens, and people with different backgrounds have different attitudes toward how to digest and process them. Most, might share them over ephemeral channels like, conversations, or even post them on social media to collaboratively elaborate on them. However, the few of us who enjoy writing, as it has been a reliable technology for recording and cultivating knowledge, we like to collect these notes, organize them and the synthesize more knowledge from them. For us, the point of taking notes is to use them later. The use may differ according to your interests and needs, however, capitalizing on those captured insights is the real goal. Piling up notes is like sitting on dead money; It is a waste. Money needs to flow and in doing so, it does all the good. Notes needs to be used, and "exchanged for" solutions. While a lot of people like to take notes, and even enjoy hours of organizing and adjusting their formats. Only few, find a real use to the notes they take and turn them into a tool for problem-solving and insight. It is very easy to get stuck at one creative moment or another. Yet, if we come up with an approach that helps us, #modularize our knowledge base and #protocolize our interaction with it. We can extract as much value as possible from every moment, no matter how trivial it is. # Good Notes are Modules, Self-Contained and Composable #modular #writing Every good note is about an idea. Its content formulates the reasoning behind it. Every note should be thought of as a module. The title being its interface and the content its internals. The idea or the insight behind the note should be clearly stated in the title of the note. The internals, or content, of the note have the sole responsibility of making the main point expressed in the title. If the note's main idea is not elementary then it breaks down into sub-notes. Ideas are then referenced across notes through links and transclusions. Every note comes within a context and so it must link to a note defining it. There should be no singleton notes as these do contribute to the cohesion of our body of knowledge. Changes in the "implementation", or content, of low-level primitive notes should not affect composite high-level notes. In fact, if a note is derived from another, via a "deformation" like metaphoric mapping, then the base idea can be swapped for the derived one without much loss of meaning. Composite notes should only depend on the interface "idea" of their composing "primitive" notes, not on how these notes are elaborated. The note abstracts the whole content in the title. However, no generic headlines. The title of the note should reflect as tightly as possible what is discussed in the content. # Note-taking Should be Protocolized via Creative Loops #creative #protocol #loop %% - What is the nature of ideas? - How can we enhance our efficiency working with them? - How would that flow of working look like? %% Based of my elaboration on the lifecycle of ideas in, [[Contaminated Consciousness, from Ideosis to Ideology]], ideas build connections with our most stable beliefs in order to persist. Thoughts, as they come, are fleeting. To sustain, they link with well-established ideas and survive on the attention they receive. If they persist long enough and depending on how useful they are to our understanding, they can become a more "permanent" part of our mindscape. For our note-taking enterprise to be successful, we need to establish a protocol that sets up a [[Protocols for Collaboration with our Future Selves|cooperative framework with our future selves]]. Such protocol, must account for our inner dynamic with ideas and externalize it so that we do not lose much in friction while trying to adjust to a foreign mode of operation. The ritual surrounding note-taking must be capable of feedback and signals between different versions of ourselves via [[Decision Cycles are Better than Decision Trees|decision cycles]] in a way that, minimizes the effort of maintenance of such activity. Just like thoughts, we start with fleeting notes. They are there to capture ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else. Fleeting notes, present an ephemeral form which is to be recast into a more stable shape before being discarded[^1]. [^1]:However, I find it much better to use journal notes as a repository for fleeting thoughts which serve as a starting point for more permanent notes. Fleeting notes, just as fleeting thoughts, want to evolve into permanents ones. Permanent notes contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. The process of maturation requires constant interactions with our repository which puts in motion various creative loops. These loops have both a balancing and a reinforcing effect. They converge fleeting notes to permanent ones and induce divergence through synthesis of new ideas. Each creative moment is the result of a realized insight. The captured insight is put down as the title of a fleeting note. The elaboration should hint at how this idea came to be and how can we construct it or reason it. Ideas seek to reach a stable form. And so, capture of fleeting ideas should move into an early stage of organization via links (positioning) and tagging (contextualization). Positioning and contextualization act as constraints on the convergence (through organization) path of the note. Captures come in two flavors, (A) ideas that are "just interesting" to consider and (B) ideas that "can be useful" pieces to our current understanding. Captures happen either through spontaneous ideation, or during exploration-driven conversations. We can also find these during a reading session in which case the captures is a highlight or annotation. They are all about trying and finding new permutations of thought that can make for a good insight. If a (*composite*) note is being broken down into constituting (*primitive*) ideas, each idea will be enunciated as a header with its related content below. The idea then should sit in its own note to be elaborated on later. In organizing content, we'd like to act as an agent of evolution by mapping our action to those condition necessary for emergence of a "stable" idea. Inspire by biological evolution, where genetic information mutates, natures selects and bloodlines stores stable powerful traits. We employ a similar progression of actions with the goal of keep only solid formulations and accumulate them into a stable expression, permanent note. Ideas with "compatible interfaces" (written in the same language) compose into higher level, more sophisticated, thought. Other ideas, seemingly unrelated would require the injection of an "adapter", metaphor to cast both thoughts in the same language. In the synthesizing content, we'd like to act as a catalyst of thought. We need our actions to enable sustainable exploration, given that is a race against entropy. While exploring, one elaborates on the situation at hand provides with descriptions and explanations. These then are assessed against the data of situation and reasonings are proposed to either back or contradict the elaboration, narrative. From here we adapt, by either formulating reconciling ideas to conflicting thoughts or further our elaboration to propose new hypothesis that could lead to unknown territory possibly holding deeper insight. %% #prompt both organization (convergence, fleeting into permanent notes) and synthesis (divergence, combine notes to produce new fleeting notes), should be detailed as a recursive process which fulfills the goal of that moment. %% %% #idea To create a new note, it has to come as an idea from another note then using note refactor. %%