"Atomic Thoughts" by Matt Gemmell

ctietze

Matt Gemmell -- https://mattgemmell.scot/atomic-thoughts/

If you can’t hold an entire idea in your mind, crystal clear and ready for manipulation and expansion, then you haven’t broken it down far enough yet.

Matt summarizes "atomicity" beautifully in this essay.

GeoEng51

@ctietze said:
Matt summarizes "atomicity" beautifully in this essay.

Hmmm. I get what he is saying, but I don't think it's a universal truth or anything like that. It's an interesting idea that has application in some circumstances and not in others. We could all work on improving the atomicity of our zettels and Matt's comment could help us hone our skills. But I don't think all zettels, reduced to a level of atomicity that makes sense and still retains the coherence of a thought or idea, necessarily need to be held in one's brain all at once (especially not my 71-year old brain). Using Matt's definition, one could end up with a very choppy, dis-jointed ZK.

I think there is a zen of zettel-writing in which each person finds the correct level of atomicity for their zettels. That's not a cop-out on the discussion, it's a statement that everyone has to find their own acceptance on this, while still working to improve.

Nido

I did not coin the term 'atomic thought,' so what I am going to say is a bit presumptuous. But, I realized very early on as I was developing my own style of Zettelkasten that I wanted to combine notes--or atomic thoughts--into sequences that were logical arguments (with conclusions and reasons) or causal explanations (with effects and causes).

I investigated argument mapping and stumbled upon the work of Joseph Laronge. I read his public academic papers which are here: https://logicguaranteed.com/papers/

But his videos and presentations are more accessible. Here's an example: https://ecolloq.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/ecolloq-dcit-final_for-display.pdf

Following Laronge, I decided that an atomic thought is a declarative sentence written with the subject first followed by the predicate. It may or may not begin with a universal quantifier like "anyone who," or "anything that."

I can add whatever commentary I want, but if I can't state the thought clearly as a subject-predicate declarative sentence, then I need to do further work on clarifying my thinking.

The beauty of imposing this structure on the thoughts is that it makes it much easier to determine if thoughts can be connected meaningfully to other thoughts. If a part (subject or predicate) of one sentence is identical to a part (subject or predicate) of another sentence, they are good candidates for linking. If not, not.

This forces me to eliminate synonyms, which, in itself, is an excellent exercise for clarifying thinking.

Here is an example, from the thread on David Epstein's Range, on how this looks in practice:

• [[anyone who wants a knowledge-career they love should get broad training]]
  • why should they do that?
    • [[anyone who wants a knowledge-career they love will have to function well in a wicked world]]
    • [[anyone who will have to function well in a wicked world will have to solve novel problems]]
    • [[anyone who will have to solve novel problems will have to find the deep structure underlying one domain and apply it to a novel domain]]
    • [[anyone who will have to find the deep structure underlying one domain and apply it to a novel domain should get broad training]]

ZettelDistraction

Stylistically this can be limiting and make for tedious reading--but that's my opinion and as @chrisaldrich says elsewhere, "ignore the naysayers."

Nido

@ZettelDistraction said:
Stylistically this can be limiting and make for tedious reading--but that's my opinion and as @chrisaldrich says elsewhere, "ignore the naysayers."

I appreciate hearing from you and any other naysayers. I could be very misguided and it helps to hear others' reactions.

I agree that it is bady stylistically. This is back-end work to make sure my thoughts are clear. This is not what I would publish.

I agree that this is very tedious and hard to read. Again, this is back-end work to clarify my thinking.

Will

"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."
- 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal

Matt Gemmell should have taken Pascal's advice and spent more time on this.

The style of Gemmell's essay failed to promote his thesis. It was an artifact of note-taking that mixes up thoughts, ideas, irreducibility, redecorating the bedroom, many informational structures, wikis, monolithic manuscripts, and programming. You get the idea; Gemmell's essay is not a good example of his thesis about atomic thinking.

The part that confused me was the part where he says:

A thought has to be graspable in one brief session, otherwise it might as well not be there at all.

And the ending was also confusing.

If you can't hold an entire idea in your mind, crystal clear and ready for manipulation and expansion, then you haven't broken it down far enough yet.

In the end though, a powerful takeaway from Gemmell's essay is contained in the following:

Don't plan or summarise in prose. Don't write in monolithic manuscripts. Don't code in complex routines. Not only are these approaches unmaintainable, requiring a burdensome amount of contextual information and recall in order to even be usable, but they degrade your quality of thought. The wider the angle, the fuzzier the details, because there are more of them. Get closer, though, and the fine detail becomes clear.

Getting closer to an idea, cutting extraneous details, and quiet reflection sharpen one's vision. I see @ctietze's attraction as this line of thinking is a first principle in programming. It works so well in programming, the atomization of processes, that it must work well in other domains.

Amontillado

Outlining in bullet points works extremely well for me. If my outline turns into prose, executing the story in detail instead of providing anchor points, my story will die. The compartmentalization of the outline will make the telling a stilted thing.

His other advice on outlining, breaking topics into subtopics, doesn't work well for my creative writing efforts. Coding, sure. Factor your needs into small, independently testable pieces.

For me - and possibly revealing some of my weaknesses as a writer - an outline of a creative work should be in narrative order, not in a taxonomy of topics. One level for the subdivisions of the narrative, a lower level for the steps along the journey, and probably no further depth works best for me.

Outlines that allow filtering by tags are pretty cool for that. If you have three threads in a story, it's nice to see just one thread at a time. That way you can see if each thread independently tells a valid story.

And Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever you celebrate, to all!

Will

Thanks for commenting @Amontillado.

I have the same experience with outlines; they feel like they are going somewhere when they are in the outline form. And I have a hard time using them to write the intended narrative. Organizing the action and scenes and taking our outline and using it to create an essay is where, like you, the storyline feels fragmented because of compartmentalization.

I'm exposing my weakness as a writer. I've been working on my transitions—scene to scene and paragraph to paragraph. Using an outline, the last bullet point in a scene could be ∙Transition.

Interesting. Do I understand this correctly? You describe a taxonomy of a narrative outline as:

• Narration
  • First layer as narrative position or order
  • Second layer as steps in the journey
  • No more layer

We might need to work on our outlining skills—both the input and output phases.

Thanks again for sharing. We are trying to slay the same dragon who wears the name tag "Be a Better Writer."

ZettelDistraction

@Nido said:

@ZettelDistraction said:
Stylistically this can be limiting and make for tedious reading--but that's my opinion and as @chrisaldrich says elsewhere, "ignore the naysayers."

I appreciate hearing from you and any other naysayers. I could be very misguided and it helps to hear others' reactions.

You're supposed to ignore the naysayers! I don't think it's misguided. Incidentally, not all logically correct sentences have a subject-predicate form--perhaps so-called atomic sentences have this (A equals B, A is a B etc. Compound sentences built up from atomic sentences with logical operations and quantifiers won't have the subject-predicate form, for example, "If A and B and C then either D or E." The disjunction in the consequent was deliberate, since the example fails to be a horn sentence.

I agree that this is very tedious and hard to read. Again, this is back-end work to clarify my thinking.

Well then it works. Happy Holidays.

Nido

@ZettelDistraction said:
. . . Incidentally, not all logically correct sentences have a subject-predicate form--perhaps so-called atomic sentences have this (A equals B, A is a B etc. Compound sentences built up from atomic sentences with logical operations and quantifiers won't have the subject-predicate form, for example, "If A and B and C then either D or E." The disjunction in the consequent was deliberate, since the example fails to be a horn sentence.

I agree. For example, the sentential calculus says nothing about subjects or predicates. p and q represent sentences with no regard to their internal structure.

What is a 'logically correct sentence' depends on the logic one uses. And there are many different logics. (And, of course, one must distinguish logical from psychological principles.)

I do not formally structure everything that I put into my Zettelkasten. But what I do formally structure uses the subject-predicate form.

Joel Chan has a concept of 'incremental formalization.' I don't adhere to his method but I find the idea useful.

I can have ideas aplenty. Writing them down almost always changes them because there is a formal structure even to ungrammatical written sentences. So the very process of writing down my ideas is an incipient kind of formalization.

Once those ideas are written, those I deem of higher value may undergo more rigorous processes of formalization into declarative subject-predicate sentences. Again, I do this to clarify those ideas.

And the highest stage of formalization consists of putting sequences of formalized sentences into well-formed arguments or explanations.

Much of what I read is not worth the effort of formalizing very deeply.

But I find that I get much more value from the good stuff when I go the extra step of trying to formalize it.

And it's a great filter to separate my coherent ideas from the chaff.

Thank you for your thoughtful insights and well wishes!

Amontillado

I can absolutely guarantee I need to work on my outlining skills!

My thinking, at least as of recent times, is that the outline should be a short form draft zero in the sense it's a list of what happens in the order they are presented.

For me to avoid stifled creativity, the outline needs to state ideas very briefly.

Regarding tiers and levels in an outline, I try to avoid those for creative writing because a story generally doesn't stair-step down into details.

There was a time I would write outlines that ran a half dozen levels deep. I felt like I was getting good ideas down, but the stories didn't turn out so well.

There are also many paths to enlightenment. Hopefully, one of these days I'll stumble on to one.

@Will said:
Thanks for commenting @Amontillado.

I have the same experience with outlines; they feel like they are going somewhere when they are in the outline form. And I have a hard time using them to write the intended narrative. Organizing the action and scenes and taking our outline and using it to create an essay is where, like you, the storyline feels fragmented because of compartmentalization.

I'm exposing my weakness as a writer. I've been working on my transitions—scene to scene and paragraph to paragraph. Using an outline, the last bullet point in a scene could be ∙Transition.

Interesting. Do I understand this correctly? You describe a taxonomy of a narrative outline as:

• Narration
  • First layer as narrative position or order
  • Second layer as steps in the journey
  • No more layer

We might need to work on our outlining skills—both the input and output phases.

Thanks again for sharing. We are trying to slay the same dragon who wears the name tag "Be a Better Writer."

Sascha

I outlined a response article.

At this moment, I think there is a valid throughline for all positive and negative feedbacks which is: Yes, it is useful but it doesn't paint the whole picture.

This might be the centrale quote for the crack in the picture:

There’s a physical sensation like the unclenching of a fist which comes from atomic thought. Relational thinking brings perspective, true context, and high-quality insight. It’s a lesson which first-year programmers are taught, and it applies to virtually everything else too.

Yes, relational thinking brings perspective and context. But in this article just one side of relational thinking, the formal-analytical side, seems to be presented.

There is a practical example that almost anybody has experienced: If you right freely about something or just talk to somebody you've attained a deeper understanding, too, even though you violate this advice:

Don't plan or summarise in prose.