Feynmans Darlings -- Or: How Anyone Can Become Brilliant

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Feynmans Darlings -- Or: How Anyone Can Become Brilliant

A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing that creates an interconnected web of thought. Its emphasis is on connection and not mere collection of ideas.

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chrisaldrich

The so-called Feynman Technique is apparently a myth: https://hypothes.is/a/v8slNHsVEe2jo6fXxuB62A

chrisaldrich

Sascha, it's not completely clear to me how you're defining and using the idea of anastrophes here. You're not using it in the direct rhetorical sense of word ordering as you've linked it, but are using it instead to suggest different, potentially random, re-orderings of ideas and thoughts toward a specific set of potential purposes?

I am a fan of the broader idea of 12 problems which I've also seen in related instantiations including what I would consider "directed" combinatorial creativity, Marshall Kirkpatrick's framing of "triangle thinking" (taking three random notes and seeing how they may interrelate to generate useful insights), Einstein's "combinatorial play", Raymond Llull's combinatorial arts which was done using memory rather than writing, and there's something similar brewing under the surface of the monastic practice of Lectio Divina from the 6th century, though this is more meditative and not as directed (except for as it relates to God).

Prior to this one can see some of these ideas in classic rhetoric when Seneca the Younger wrote in Epistulae morales:

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

This same sentiment was echoed in ~430 CE, by Macrobius in Saturnalia where he repeated the same idea and even used the bee analogy (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):

"You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."