Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. September 19, 2023

Will

Swimming with Ideas

Another installment of the What Are You Working On? thread.
Add to this thread by telling us what is happening in and around your ZK journey. Join the community and enlighten us about your knowledge path trajectory. I do this for selfish reasons. It helps me clarify my goals and visualize my thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks an idea worth exploring.

Ideas I'm thinking about:

• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity. Together, these ideas present the notion that language shapes experience. Maybe I have a warped understanding of this. This is obvious when considering self-talk. The language we use when we talk to ourselves dictates our moods, affect, actions, behaviors, and total experience. This is good news. Changing how we talk to ourselves and the stories we tell ourselves will change our experience—the role of methodeutic language or 'speculative rhetoric' as it steers cognitive understanding of the world.
• I'm a judgment machine. Comparisons and self-criticism are sneaky and ubiquitous. I'm not talking about "I'm a failure." I'm talking about "Shouldn't I spend more time exercising, in the outdoors, walking, zettelkasting?" and other subtle ways I self-evaluate and am critical of my behavior.
• Push above what I think is my "reading level" to achieve mastery by reading more books that present more profound ideas. If I want to understand bigger ideas, I must read books with greater ideas to grasp the deeper concepts essential for remarkable achievements. It's not enough to read a lot. To do extraordinary things, I must read books that stretch my mind.
• Muscle mass preservation during weight loss in a 66-year-old male.

Things I'm reading:

• Lispector, Clarice and Costa, Margaret Jull and Patterson, Robin and Valente, Paulo Gurgel. Too much of life: the complete crônicas. 2022.
• Siegel, Ronald. The extraordinary gift of being ordinary: finding happiness right where you are. 2022.
• Blum, Andrew. The weather machine: a journey inside the forecast. 2019.
• Davis, Lydia. Essays one. 2020.

Music I'm listening to:

• Hania Rani

★★★★★

The "My rolling ten-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.

My ten day zettel production

GeoEng51

Just finished preparing a 1-hour presentation / lecture for a group of Young Professional Engineers on "Avoiding Burnout by Intent, Resilience and Balance", to be delivered tomorrow via webinar. I relied heavily on my ZK in pulling out and connecting different ideas - what a great resource it has become after several years of steady building / feeding / nurturing.

Serendipitously, yesterday I listened to a Guardian Masterclass on "The Expectation Effect" by David Robson (2 hours long; took lots of notes, which I'll have to distill into my ZK). His presentation was interesting and inviting of more study.

Jackhansonc

Well, I'm new to Zettelkasten, and I barely begin to adopt this system.

Currently I have 100+ notes on my Apple notes and numerous tags.

I start to worry how exactly should I find a note under this circumstance.

Sascha

Ideas I'm thinking about:

• How to Design a Life-Long Fitness Program. Reading Peter Attia's Outlive made me re-thinking about an old idea of mine. I basically laid out my training for life when I was in my mid 20s. Now, in approaching 40 with the lighting speed that comes with age-related alteration of time perception, my thinking moves towards program design for my later years.
• What does it mean to learn from another religion? I am fascinated by how pagan practices seeped into Christianity. I try to think about it from the practical perspective. It's just a something that happens by idea osmosis or something like that. There are people like priests and pastors who engaged with other people and made that happen.

Things I'm reading:

• Peter Attia: Outlive
• Tiago Forte: The PARA Method

Music I'm listening to:

• Franzl Lang - Einen Jodler hör i gern (Hardstyle Buamz Remix) (His skill was by the way of the charts)
• The only Thing They Fear is You (The hardest hitting metal song ever created)

---

@Will

Muscle mass preservation during weight loss in a 66-year-old male.

Look up: Kneesovertoesguy. Muscle mass preservation is the by product of proper strength training.

Sascha

@Will The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity.

In my personal experience, the hypothesis is grounded in reality. The position is muddled with all kinds of strawmaning (like the impossibility of translation). That makes it annoying to read about it.

I think of each language as a flavor of thinking. Languages don't force us into a completely different way of thinking. But they provide little nudges. So, there are conservative languages that still make use of archaic categories of thinking (in turkish, people are named after concepts, animals and things like that for example - my wife is name roughly translated to queen of roses). Others are very permeable like English which might be due to the frequent conquests by the Romans, French and Vikings (and there infusion of their words).

Will

@Sascha, I'm thinking about 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity', not so much about trans-cultural languages but how this applies within a culture, but how the internal language I use shapes my experience. Can I use different words in my self-talk to elicit richer, more fulfilling experiences? Is the language I'm using to tell myself stories about my experience keeping me from connecting with what is real instead of what I think is real?

GeoEng51

@Will Your brain is a sophisticated, organic computer that takes input from various senses and simulates the world around you. The input isn't perfect and so neither is the brain's model. In fulfilling its purposes, it is also a prediction machine. So, what is "real"? As far as we know, it is the model in our brain. Change the model - change our reality

Will

@GeoEng51, I don't have a very sophisticated brain, and the analogy of comparing it to a computer doesn't resonate with me. Yes, I am a predictive machine, but that misses the point. The words I choose to use can either enhance or diminish the quality of my experiences. This is how I view 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity.'

ZettelDistraction

1. I've been working on a NumPy library to compute simplicial operations for a mathematics project. ChatGPT-4 is my assistant in this, although it has difficulty with logic. It doesn't know that if A equals B, B also equals A unless it was trained on both assertions. This is a fundamental limitation of large language models.
2. Some notes on my check-washed August rent check. I found out on September 1st that I owed two months' rent. This was a surprise since I saw the check amount clear. When I checked the photocopy, it turned out that the rent check was washed and deposited by mobile phone to the SoFI account of an unknown individual. I had to close my checking account and open a new one.
3. Labor Day was observed on Monday, September 4th. My credit union didn't receive the ACH instructions to apply direct deposits to the new account despite being informed on Friday, September 1st, and Tuesday, September 5th. My payroll check was returned on Tuesday, September 5th.
4. The scammer used my checking account number to make a bogus payment to AT&T, a service I never had. I have never used my checking account to pay an AT&T bill. The point of all of this is to keep records of the timeline. Whether this counts as knowledge worthy of a Zettelkasten is debatable--too late, it is now.
5. More notes on bogus studentaid.gov emails from the US Department of Education to my Gmail account, addressed to an individual named "Oscar," informing them that their loan servicer is "NELNET." My name isn't Oscar, and NELNET never was my loan servicer. The emails were concerning since they indicated possible identity theft. I had to open a studentaid.gov account with the Department of Education to ensure that no one else was using my social security number and email address since these can only be used for exactly one account. I did not want an individual named "Oscar" to assume my identity. The Social Security Administration verifies your identity for the Department of Education. I then submitted complaints about the bogus emails to the Department of Education and the Inspector General. I do not have any outstanding student loans--mine were paid off. When the account was verified, the balance on student loans was $0, as expected.
6. Fraud alerts and credit freezes at the three leading US credit reporting agencies Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion received notes in my Zettelkasten, as did the police report I needed to file to recover the funds from the washed rent check.
7. Various work-related programming notes ended up in my ZK.

r1tger

Ideas I'm thinking about:

• Just finished processing The Emotional Craft of Fiction into notes, which has some really cool insight into writing emotionally engaging characters and stories. Mainly notable since I've used ChatGPT for the first time to create a list of titles for possible notes based on the book. Not entirely fool-proof, as some of the note titles don't match up with the contents of the book. As with most stuff produced by ChatGPT, checking and double-checking is really not optional. Guess I won't be getting rid of my Zettelkasten in the near future ...
• Trying to figure out if I want a bigger writing project for fun. I seem to be gravitating to reading more books on writing (Maass, de Silva), but without a clear goal for now. I'm already using some of the notes to improve my technical writing for work, but that's work. Feels like I'm learning new stuff in preparation for something, but I don't know what yet.

Things I'm reading:

• The Dark Tower by Stephen King;
• Currently in-between non-fiction books. I tend to read two books at the same time, but I have to find a new non-fiction book since finishing The Emotional Craft of Fiction.

Music I'm listening to:

• Puscifer
• Metal/Rock Mix on Spotify, which leans heavily on Iron Maiden and 70s/80s classic rock

learning_ran

1. I want to look deeper into the Embedded Model, essentially to build
   my own more advanced searching engine with the help of OpenAI.

2. ‍Currently, what I found is that searching the content using the
   keywords to search the title. That is the most frequently, ‍‍95% of
   time is done in that way. What I found that the‍‍ searching the in
   entire database using regular expression is not that frequently.

   ‍‍It's only when I intend to do that. ‍‍Most of the time is that I am
   frustrated to find a certain thing that I am pretty sure is somewhere
   in the database. But I found this sort of things happen less and
   less. So if I have‍‍ this sort of system that cannot understand my
   literary meaning, ‍‍but I can understand the context that I have no key
   words in my mind. ‍‍That's probably can help to build a better search
   engine.

   ‍‍Also have do some minimum tasks and find that the basic principle is
   quite‍‍ easy to understand. But the things that is rather hard is how I
   kind of forcing myself to building a structure‍‍ that can works when I
   am writing the context. ‍‍The second thing is, when the searching
   happened, ‍‍it definitely requires a similar asynchronous mode to show‍‍
   the more things I use, which is the key keywords in the search map
   of‍‍ keyword matching. But at the same time, it can display‍‍ the least
   more advanced results. I'm also thinking about A computation that can
   also display the compositional result interact to chatgpt. Because I
   frequently not frequent, because II found that I‍‍ II I'd like to
   search a open conversation about a particular things, ‍‍sometimes but
   enhance to continue the conversation or sometimes to just remind the
   context‍‍ I was talking about. ‍

3. Also find some time to fine-tune my interact with the OpenAI API to
   do things more more things, I mean the revision, paragraphing,
   checking error, all those very basic things within the Emacs.

Sascha

@Will said:
@Sascha, I'm thinking about 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity', not so much about trans-cultural languages but how this applies within a culture, but how the internal language I use shapes my experience. Can I use different words in my self-talk to elicit richer, more fulfilling experiences? Is the language I'm using to tell myself stories about my experience keeping me from connecting with what is real instead of what I think is real?

Perhaps, I communicate just half of my point. My personal interest is in personal application, exclusively.

Examples:

• The concept of Bodhicitta connects the will to enlightenment (of the soul) and the intention to strive for it for the sake of others. A totally different concept from enlightenment in the west, which is more connected to personal benefits.
• Enlightenment in English is used for two words in German ("Aufklärung" and "Erleuchtung"). In my experience, English is weak in its differentiation between the power of the mind (rationality) and the power of the soul (wisdom).

I think the base premise needs to be that language has roots in reality. Linguistic relativity is not relevant to concepts of basic things like "table" or "cat". A healthy person is grounded in reality and the physical world, almost like having an unfiltered connection to the animalistic side of us.

The more you leave this immediate world, the more relative language becomes. It is almost a relativity of relativity (Luhmann would be proud of this word salad).

So, using the SWH as a thinking tool has three layers to it:

1. Never lose the grounding.
2. Observing concepts in context (textual, cultural)
3. Using the part-whole-concept to analyse and synthesise to create lines of thinking.