Don’t get too excited about that title, sickos. [1] This is posing a questions from @aad in the Discord about Andy Matuschak’s thesis that popular writers about note-taking systems mostly don’t accomplish much beyond… writing about note-taking:
@narthur suggested Cal Newport (full-time computer science professor) as an exception. But then @aad suggested that as Newport gained fame for his writing about note-taking and productivity, his scholarly work dropped.
So… is this depressing? Do we have other counterexamples?
[1] I’m making a joke about the concept of productivity porn. I’m imagining connoisseurs of the genre seeing “recursive note-taking” as irresistible clickbait, only to discover it’s more of a pejorative. I realize jokes don’t work when prefaced with “I’m making a joke” but I’m out of time to workshop it any further! Beemergencies be bearing down.
This question still feels weird to me, like asking for an example of a professional football coach who is also a successful player. Isn’t there always a tradeoff between being a successful participant in a field and being widely successful in teaching others how to be successful in the field?
I’m somewhat inclined to agree with Nathan here. I mean, even if there wasn’t a tradeoff, it’s not like there are 100s of famous writers about note-taking systems. I mean, can we even name more than a few?
I forget anything at all about Cal but indeed you would expect the time spent on his books and podcast to take away from his CS work. Nonetheless, one presumes that the systems he describes now are in fact still an extension of those he used before. But also I’m not in his field so I would not feel qualified to judge that.
Would it feel less weird if we drop the requirement that the advice-giver (coach) and the performer are the same person?
Replacing “who is also” as: “who is, or has guided others in becoming, a successful player" seems relevant to me if we’re talking about a tennis coach. (AFAIK soccer/football coaching is mainly coaching a team, so perhaps better to use an individual sport like tennis.)
But we’re not participating in National Note-Taking League.
Note taking has a supportive role of thinking, productivity, creative process, and it’s not even a most important role. Yet still it can be easily productised and is widely understood, is easy to start. This led to creation of many techniques, zettelkasten, mind maps, special notebooks - all of that is productivity porn. What is the cost of abandoning the zettelkasten? What other pieces of my world would crumble? Would I be 99 percent ok with plain simple notes?
There are two super specific cases where I am wrong.
I wonder if there are people who tried uploading their properly curated zettelkasteln to LLM and see it making useful connections and new ideas. In other words, who can prove value of their system beyond improved personal experience (my system outgrew me). This is where it gets interesting - in my opinion this is possible, but it’s a very narrow case. Most of us have no patience to do it, no time or we don’t need it to achieve our goals.
Argument number 2 is that we confuse 90th 99th and 99.9th percentiles of achievers. Probably other factors influence your achievement more than your personal regime. This is why we haven’t seen a Nobel prize winner using beeminder. But we can confirm it helps us get things done. Similarly a good notebook might help me pass my high school exam. This is not going to be featured in your biography, or you will not have one written down.
Brutal! But with the coaching analogy, it does seem like the superstar coaches, as @aad said, at least for individual sports, tend to be former superstar players.
There are some insanely impressive people who use Beeminder; I won’t be totally shocked to see a Nobel laureate credit Beeminder some day. We see it with published books and PhD theses and landing fancy jobs often enough.
Also, “recursive note-taking” is how I file new notes in Obsidian, with MOCs of MOCs. It’s my first mention of it here because I generally try to get things done besides note-taking.
I like how simple this is and I’ve been chewing on it. Curious to get your take on the following.
It’s unknown whether regularly preparing coffee with a rigid and tiresome routine (a) improves the well-known physiological effects of coffee by a significant amount and (b) whether this translates to real-world improvements in people’s [cognitive/work/physical] performance.
There are many books published, blogs written, content produced that claims that it, indeed, does.
In an attempt to evaluate whether these claims have merit. We need to define a criteria which helps us locate and evaluate evidence.
What must that criteria be?
(My motivation: Clarifying what I’m aiming at. I’m less aiming at “making notes with an engaged mind is useful.” I take that for granted. But the form of the claims in the “note taking industry” seems a bit different to me… I don’t think I’m strawmanning, but happy to hear otherwise.)
I’m not actually making a claim about to what extent or in what circumstances note-taking is useful. My point is that expecting those who write about it, popularize it, etc, to also be exceptionally accomplished in other domains is rather missing the point. If you want to know how much coffee helps with productivity, then looking at the other accomplishments of specifically those who write books or blog posts on the subject of coffee does not seem to be the best way to judge it, or indeed even a remotely reasonable way to judge it.
Asking if there are any exceptionally accomplished coffee drinkers is one thing, and is very reasonable to ask as a first pass at determining if coffee boosts productivity. But for what reason would you want to run that check specifically on coffee writers?
Agreed, this doesn’t hold water: “Popularizers of a-thing must be accomplished at a random b-thing, otherwise that’s evidence against [the effectiveness of] what they’re popularizing.”
It does change when popularizers are (implicitly or explicitly) making the stronger move: “Here’s this cool a-thing that helped me achieve b-thing, therefore a-thing will help you achieve b-thing.”
In that case, their testimonial is part of the evidence, so I want to see confirmation of the b-thing. The original post is a warning: if their main ‘achievement’ is producing content about a-thing, that’s not the b-thing they’re implicitly promising.
I’m not comfortable painting a whole industry with that brush, but it matches a lot of what I’ve seen. (I’ll dare say the most successful examples in this industry anyway.)
To be concrete: many note-taking writers market with a clear structure: “I’ve spent years practicing the method, it transformed my creative work, it can transform yours too.” But when the main evidence of transformation is the content about the method itself, the testimonial is circular. I’m sure some people genuinely benefit, but the success stories I see are often “I now have a better note-taking system” rather than external achievements.
To be clear: I’m not treating this as negative evidence against note-taking methods. I’ve simply discarded the self-promotion and testimonials as uninformative and I’m looking for better evidence.
(In that journey, I’m trying to be credible with Sturgeon’s law in mind. So I started looking for the 10% of this industry, with the hope that they’d have what I’m looking for. Help in finding the 10% is what I meant to ask help with in the first place.)
Agreed, yes, though it depends on how much success they are claiming at b-thing.
If their claim is that it made them better at note-taking, then that isn’t actually a claim about being better at some b-thing, but rather at the a-thing, note-taking.
Makes sense. I’m not exactly trying to defend the self-promotion and testimonials.
But the original question was:
Looking for internet-public figures that are exceptions to this rule.
Why? Why are you looking for internet-public figures who both write about or promote note-taking and are particularly accomplished? Why not look for people who are particularly accomplished and are note-takers, regardless of if they, in addition, write about or promote note-taking?
Like, as Andy Matuschak mentions, the one example he finds is John Locke, who was:
a prolific note-taker
very accomplished
an author of a book about note-taking
If from that you want to take away evidence in favor of note-taking, that evidence comes from 1+2, not 2+3. That he also published a book on his method of note-taking isn’t part of the evidence, one way or another, except to the extent that it reveals to us his interest in and use of note-taking.
Do you know some great examples of note taking systems or devices? Or products of these systems? Have you seen some notes and murmured “wow I wish they were mine”?
We see it with published books and PhD theses and landing fancy jobs often enough.
