Fortnightly Issue #1
Taking notes, making decisions, and more
Hey, hey, hey!
Welcome to Unstable Orbits’ fortnightly issues!
I’m really glad to have an opportunity to share my insights with you. This time, I’ve made a collage from almost a month of my notes, right from the moment I learned that graph note-taking tools exist. So, naturally, the first topic is…
Taking notes
It all started a month ago with Roam Research. The app was a game-changer for me, and in a mere month, the magical world of note-taking absorbed me entirely.
For me, note-taking serves 3 main purposes:
gain a better understanding of familiar things by condensing and looking at them from different perspectives;
get new insights by linking known stuff in unthought-of ways;
store knowledge in a format that eases the process of remembering for me.
Another important implication is that with graph notes you can forget about most of the gradual bottom-up studying, and get straight to on-demand learning. When you discover new topics, you can leave a trail of notes about high-level concepts. Later, you can return and study them recursively in-depth.
Writing
Needless to say, graph notes are an immeasurably handy tool for writing. I’ve started to write a lot. It is now an issue of what to remove rather than what to add to a text.
I already created several essay drafts, and I'm writing them in what I call the background mode. That is, each time you have a thought or a discussion about something you have a draft for, you mention that thought in your daily note and link the draft page. After some time (depending on the frequency of such mentions) you will have enough material for a publication.
Systems
Of course, there are well-established systems for note-taking. The most known are Zettelkasten created by Niklas Luhmann, and Second Brain by Tiago Forte.
I haven't dug deep into either of them but I guess that naturally, graph apps are quite close to Zettelkasten. I intentionally avoid using any ID formats and simply have a unique human-readable name for every page. For some categories of pages, like meeting notes, I have specified formats that I enforce without additional tools or plugins. The specifications are simply a note of their own.
Roam vs. Obsidian
Yesterday, I abandoned my comfy Roam graph and migrated to Obsidian. Below is the list of differences I think are the most important.
Obsidian works simply over a directory of Markdown files while Roam hosts your notes on their servers. Aside from privacy issues, a remote service may be unstable, or even outright inaccessible.
Obsidian supports a plugin ecosystem (it’s beta as of the moment of writing this), and such plugins are easier to develop than browser extensions — which is the means of customizing your experience with Roam.
Obsidian has a free plan while Roam costs $15 a month (or about $8 if you are ready to pay $500 in advance for 5 years).
That’s about all I have now on note-taking, but there’s one more little thing. If you haven’t tried to take notes in a graph note-taking app, try it. Thousands of articles won’t describe the effect it will have on your thinking.
Two types of decisions
Jeff Bezos distinguishes 2 types of decisions: reversible and irreversible. He says you should make reversible ones quickly and without much consideration. Even if they often lead to failures, those failures yield valuable experience.
For example, starting to publish extracts from your notes is a reversible decision. You may stop whenever you want but, all in all, it is a worthy experience even if you end up creating only a few posts.
Ah… a bit short for a major section? Alas, Jeff’s wisdom’s too concise!
Stray insights
This section is likely to appear in most of my fortnightly issues and is dedicated to various interesting stuff I encounter. Also, it may seem erratic. You’ve been warned!
Symmetry Theory of Valence
I glimpsed a tweet about Symmetry Theory of Valence recently, and it's certainly worth mentioning even though I have a fairly vague understanding of it. Maybe it’s you who will make more sense out of it!
From what I understood, if we assume that things that a mind can experience can be sorted from bad to good and that every such thing can be represented as a mathematical function, then, under the assumptions of this theory, the good ones are those that feature the property of symmetry.
I’m intentionally withdrawing from making any further assumptions here. From now on, it’s all up to you.
Minerals
Minerals are alive! Not literally (at least, not as if they were carbon-based) but they are ongoing chemical processes, even though belonging to an immensely huge time frame of thousands and thousands of years. Just think of it!
Parrot names
I’ve learned that parrots have signature contact calls or, simply put, names. That means that in the wild, they acquire more or less unique names from their parents.
Here’s a nice video on how that was discovered.
The name of this phenomenon reminded me of Greg Egan’s Diaspora or more exactly, of the Tags that were used as unique identifiers for some of the characters.
It seems dolphins have signature contact calls, too! They use whistles for the purpose. I bet some other species too, can give names to their kin.
Interesting links
I didn't know about Google Takeout, neither may you. Hope it’s useful.
Consider reading How to take meeting notes by Vasili Shynkarenka.
A printed collection of essays by the LessWrong community may become a perfect gift for Christmas!
Alright, it’s time to call it a day! Remember — I’m always excited to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you have something in mind. Have a nice day!