Aug 17, 2023
Cards I have yet to install in my Zettlekasten
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Cards I have yet to install in my Zettlekasten
Review of Scott P. Scheper's "Antinet Zettelkasten" book
With regards to recent events surrounding Scott P. Scheper's controversial handling of the mistake in his print book and his excited emails, I thought now would be the time to publish my review of said book.
For context, I purchased the book and the four bonus products in about November 2022 and got the book myself in December 2022. I thought they were alright; spending the extra premium is an investment in my own attention, too. After reading the book and aligning it with my own principles surrounding the Zettelkasten method, I began work on my hybrid (paper and computer) slipbox, Hemera. This slipbox is particularly significant because it is focused on my education major: cognitive science.
Unfortunately, in February 2023 this year...
Apparently, Scheper, rather than simply sending a note to those who purchased his book, and clarifying the error, has decided to use the opportunity to promote not only a second edition of his book, but also a tangentially-related $40/mo. marketing newsletter. // Actual Email 59 here: https://scottscheper.com/letter/59/
...and the subsequent "apology" in Email 60...
...and the final Email 61 finally clearing up the deal with the erratum.
Ay yai yai. What a whirlwind! It was too much -- and I had thought Scott was becoming more reasonable up to and after his interviews with Nick Milo @ Linking Your Thinking and Bob Doto @ The High Pony. So I've decided to pull away from the community. I suppose my final contribution to the Antinet community rests under the next line; but for this year, I am done.
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Begin review. Four stars out of five.
My one tip: Treat it like a textbook!
Drawing from experience in marketing, copywriting, and managing a cryptocurrency business, Scott P. Scheper's first book makes a splash onto the niche Zettelkasten scene -- and himself.
This book is something of an inverse to Sonke Ahrens' "How to Take Smart Notes", which has been the unofficial canon text of digital Zettelkasten since it's English translation in 2017. That book is concise, specific, and spirals inward to the impersonal problem of taking better notes.
Meanwhile, late 2022's "Antinet Zettelkasten" is long, tangential, and spirals outward from the method to also reveal Scheper's deeper thoughts, judgements, and experiences. Even the first few introductory chapters are about him and his journey across personal knowledge management scene. It becomes clear early on, and through his tapestry of meandering trails of thought, that Scheper is trying to find his voice. And it's not just a game anymore. His audience now are people who may have not fallen to PKM's wayside, watched his videos, or read a single newsletter; and stretches across a timespan of a fringe note-taking culture (Zettelkastens in general) that could pop at any time.
So I'm not being cheeky when I say to treat it like a reference textbook. If you're after the impersonal task of developing knowledge and pumping out publications, by all means, eat this book through and throw the bones over! Each section is somewhat self-contained and you can skip sections or jump back and forth between them. Your only barrier might be the lack of an index, which I think is a hilariously ironic for a book whose method involve -- and validates -- indexing by hand. Whether this was an actual choice or an accident to be remedied in the 2nd edition, I don't know. Still: hilarious and frustrating.
But if you have the time and the care to connect with another person developing their mind, read the book all the way through. The book is it's own work of art. Is it any surprise that personal nonfiction, the nonfiction that plays with narratives and experience, resonates with us more than non-narrative nonfiction? Probably not.
End review.
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If you would like a copy of the e-book, please DM me and I will send you a link.
Thoughts on the Antinet's manual search
Nicolas Gatien: @ArchLeucoryx Any thoughts? Based on your twitter posts, I believe you are working with Logseq and Obsidian?
First--thank you for taking the time to write the thread. Scott discussed this in one of his videos but finding specific info is a bit harder ;) I think plenty of people are worried about "blinding" themselves to their notes without full-text search.
I use Logseq and Obsidian casually, among other applications like Dendron on VSCode, FSNotes, and even Twitter. Currently, I'm on a "null theory" of PKM, and I'm investigating the ways we represent our knowledge--literature, journaling, commonplacing, note-taking, oratory, communication, etc. I don't think there are any rules to knowledge! All representations are mutable and interchangeable; your notes are not your knowledge; the map is not the territory. But that doesn't mean we can't be open to better maps that give us new perspectives on the old.
(Note: I don't have an Antinet myself, but I think I have a good picture of it. I tried making an alt-Zettelkasten in TiddlyWiki that used sequences of sequences rather than trees of trees, and timestamping instead of alphanumeric IDs.)
The lack of direct search is definitely not a bug. The Antinet still uses a hand-curated index, so you're not lost every time you open your drawer. The manual search is really just something you do, right? It's practical usage. At the very least, the process of re-reading is an aid to memory; recall in of itself makes memories stronger.
I'm reminded of this other application, ThreadHelper...it was a sidebar extension to Twitter designed to be a serendipity engine. Every time you wrote in your compose box, the sidebar would bring up related tweets from your account and your bookmarks (you had to import your Twitter data locally, I think). And one of the developers, exGenesis, explains that "[your] body of work should be a living system but water is drying up nearly as soon as it's posted". I can't help but think that the process of re-reading your notes is like "watering" them again, digital or no. You're coming back to your past self and following up with their thinking. This way, your thinking literally compounds over time.
Meanwhile, the Zettelkasten falters a bit at explicit recall, at least later on. An Antinet small enough that you can keep it's contents in your head and reliably put in and take out the exact card is an archive. And explicit recall does make sense! Sometimes you need the full fidelity of either your own or someone else's writing. But it's kind of interesting that we haven't really investigated the shift from explicit recall to associative recall in the slipbox, as the slipbox grows.
Further, the key to associativity seems to be surprise and discovery. Eva Thomas writes in her article that Luhmann described the "surprises we encounter while interacting with the slip-box [...] as a process of finding something you were not looking for, but something that you can still use". (Unfortunately I don't know what quote that is in his actual paper, Communication with Slipboxes.) Is a mature Antinet a discovery engine just by reading through the notes and walking down the associative trails to find what you need? That seems too good to be true. But it also makes a lot of sense. What happens when the user of the Zettelkasten begins to forget what they have written? Well, the more the user forgets, the more surprised they are when re-reading their writing. Forgetting is integral to serendipity; a creative partner. At this stage, you put a note in there to "lose control of it, not to gain control over it".
To be surprised, we must be unaware.
To be surprised of known information, we must make it unknown. Defamiliarize; misplace; forget. It is only when we know we have lost something that we wish to get it back, to reclaim it more tightly.
erosion of structure
This was a reddit draft that I've since cleaned up into a blogpost.
Using the basic metaphor of: Placement in forest < Specific Tree < Branching structure. You could completely reinvent the specifics to suit whatever knowledge structure you want. Nothing is actually holding us to use Luhman's system... I mean, the sky's the limit when you think about it.
Sure. But that hubris is also the problem with digital Zettelkastens. Once you replace the starting structure with something else, say from an upside-down tree to a temporal sequence, you must be diligent about exploiting that starting structure and eroding it over time. To do this you need a very deep understanding of the structure's strengths and weaknesses, and how to best adapt it to your needs and goals.
The most baffling thing about the digital Zettelkasten when I first heard about it was how the timestamps-as-IDs were used in such a spatial way. If your organizing method uses/encodes with time, it makes so much more sense to treat the entire set of notes like a timeline and "reply" to older notes (to follow up thinking, update information, track the evolution of ideas, etc.). Nonlinearity does not always mean defaulting to a highly spatial web; it could just be as simple as abstracting above the linearity. But they weren't doing that. They kept fighting the temporal IDs without trying to see if they could erode it, naturally, as the needs of their digital slipbox changed.
As I think about it now, if I wanted an inherently spatial structure, I would probably use an RGB-like coordinate system, loosely divide the R, G, and B axis on different topics, and then constrain the max number of notes per axis (like 255, if we're really inspiring from RGB). The main limit would be filling up each individual axis from #1 to #225, which therefore gives us 765 topical notes (255 + 255 + 255). 765 topical notes is actually pretty good.
But if I need more notes, or I wanted to start seeing recording about topics between/intersecting these topics, I can exploit the structure by rising to a higher abstraction and codifying a note in multiple values. A note about Occam's razor would be 2-132-7 rather than just R2, or B132, or G7. And the note capacity suddenly blows up 65025 times for a max encoding of over 16.5 million notes. Suddenly the notes feel less like hard coordinates, less like a tangible space, and more like musical chords where colors can stack and fade against each other.
Admittedly this is a bit of an insane organizational method. And for notes, no less! But that's what you have to do when you build structures, when you start with structure. Are you arranging by space, or time, or both, or something different? How do you exploit it? That's the hard problem of personal knowledge management: how do we best work within and beyond the constraints of structuring out knowledge? Most people just want to be free of constraints without realizing that some constraint is inevitable. Even our nonverbal thoughts are bound by the forward progression of time, and for us to revisit our past thoughts diminishes present (newer) thinking. The tricky part is accepting that these constraints are not automatically bad, and that we can still achieve monumental progress by working within them in novel ways.
antinet PROLOGUES
This is the episode notes post for the three PROLOGUES episodes at the bottom of the feed.
first post
best post
Nicolas Gatien made an excellent instructional video on creating your own "antinet" or analog zettelkasten. (Follow his channel, too. He's aiming for 1000 & currently has just 26 to go!) Awesome learning tool/note taking system. I kinda like this better than the commonplace book strategy. Well, I guess this is like a commonplace book, but unbound & sortable.
on mini cogsci
sick and halfway miserable with the runny congested nose and cough so i'm doing a stream of consciousness minimally edited post
so. mini cogsci did not work.* or at the very least it didn't develop the way i wanted it to and therefore scale. the problem -- and this is a perennial problem -- is that i still don't know how to use other people's words and therefore their ideas, even though i could null theory past the duality of words/ideas and focus only on the ideas.
the subproblem with this is that i still remember quotes, words, bits of things, verbatim. idk why my mind does that it just does i'm not digging into my psychology. but if you really pressed me i would lean on my other idea that language serves a kind of connective tissue between different kinds of memory, like visual memory and procedural memory and semantic memory. it's an abstraction, and a functional defragmenter
the subsolution then would be a centralized reference manager where i could reference the shit out of everything i read. but my theory of mind is shot, my contacts list is barely fleshed out, and i still don't know if referencing people is the right ethical move. also, referencing "people" is fanciful. what about textbooks and governments? how do you reference those? probably just textbooks and governments
but even revisions to the note folder volume do not have a chance of working either. i recently got Scott P. Scheper's book, Antinet Zettelkasten, and it's a great resource for anyone who wants to start an analog slipbox. but i've been in PKM long enough to have grokked the fundamentals, peered past the matrix, cursed the matrix, removed myself from the matrix...again, it also seems like Luhmann's slipbox was also an microcosm, proof of concept, and sandbox of his own autopoietic social systems theory. his slipbox was a publication machine and a surprise generator but it was still a communication partner, and a sealed one, a sealed communication partner, inexplicable, translucent to opaque
for me to develop my cognitive science slipbox would be to impart a sense of sentience, a kind of cognition to it -- of which, i frankly understand very little of. it's akin to asking the mathematics of index cards, taking them into computation. opaque sentience, then. cognition is not just communication. cognition is cognition. it is processing. it is mechanical.
of course i could be stymying myself before i even begin. just as the classic slipbox or the modern Antinet erodes top-level categories with internal branching and remote links, over time, the sentience, the cognition of my notes could emerge gradually over time and erode all structures i began with. is there anything more human than that? i don't know
i used to have this wonderful fanciful idea of being able to see myself in my notes like i see myself in a mirror. today i know that mirrors are limited not just in physics but also in phenomenon. they are flat, and their subjects remain the same size regardless of viewing distance. remain the same size. so too my mind would remain the same. same. same size? same structure? same
this is also not mentioning the PKM insights i've accrued. i've forgotten some of them but they're still in my notes and i can rebuild everything if i really really needed to. i cannot waste these insights; i know they're cognitive in form, i know it. so i need to fuse the Antinet method and my unfinished skeletal theory of intutive note-taking, or syncretize them. i have to take the structure, the ruggedness of the Antinet's tree, and bind it to the nimbleness of my own mind and the flexibility of the topics i'm taking notes and writing about. is cognition open or closed? it has to be closed. that's why we have the mind-body problem. mind masqeruades as, or is, closed. blackbox. sealed, with it's own inner components and structures. phenomenology: the "study of the structures of consciousness" as experienced by the subject, inherently subjective in form, as distant from Western philosophy as cephalopods are from humans; and yet, both intelligent; and yet, both at the apex of their niches, or the current niche
fluidity and floridity. "My hand's inflamed in the floral," as Leucoryx would say. well he wouldn't say inflamed. but hand and floral go together as he's said. my headache's clearing a bit. nose still stuffy. publish!
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\* mini cogsci is/was an Obsidian vault folder and is/was an attempt at learning cognitive science from first principles. and so i would use an obsidian base with some tags and some links and try and recursively synthesize a bunch of specific distributed notes. compared to the other approach of cogsci from first principles (specialized fields converging, finding novel connections) this would be more appropriate for my skill knowledge level; i am not an expert in much of anything, yet