Recursive note-taking

Akrasia
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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.

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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?

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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.

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Undoubtedly, coffee gives energy, wakes you up and makes you better at thinking, more productive. Or so we’re told.

But most writers of popular books about coffee don’t seem particularly accomplished in other fields.

This implies that coffee isn’t all it’s made out to be.

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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.)

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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.

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