Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. June 1, 2024

Will

Swimming with Ideas

This is yet another opportunity to share with your friends what you are working on. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps me and, hopefully, you, too. It helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼

Thank you for allowing me to share with you what I've been working on. Sharing stimulates me to recommit.

Ideas I'm exploring with my ZK and why I'm here:

1. I'm exploring reading about reading or meta-reading.

• How to Read as a Writer [[202405220536]]

  • Annotating and critiquing transforms passive consumption into dynamic interaction, capturing your observations, creating a dialogue, and deepening understanding and retention.

• You Are What You Read [[202405230517]]

  • Reading has the profound ability to alter our intellectual and biological selves, offering access to myriad realities that shape our perceptions and identities.

2. I am seriously questioning the value of the time spent creating and maintaining structured notes, as it creates unnecessary cognitive overhead while taking and formatting notes. What are the practical uses of a structure note?
3. I'm considering following @ZettelDistraction and reformatting my link structure, as well as beautifying and simplifying my note list. I'm not sure I see the value of having the UUID in the note list, and I don't see the value in using my time to go through the rigamarole to make the change. I wish I had started with a different linking strategy.
4. The main focus of my studies and note-taking is to develop and clarify my thinking.
5. Herzensbildung - Jamil Zaki on X: "My new favorite "German has a word for everything" word. Herzensbildung: training one's heart to see the humanity of another.

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Sertillanges, A. G. and Ryan, Mary. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. 1987. PDF [[202402140719]]
• Hill, D. W. (2013). Applebutter Hill. Smashwords Edition. https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/DonnaWHill #YAL_Research
• Siegel, Ronald. The extraordinary gift of being ordinary: finding happiness right where you are. 2022. Everand AudioBook
• Brooks, David. How To Know A Person [[202405260654]]: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. First edition, Random House, 2023.
• Curtis, M. L. (2015). The one thing [[202405141950]](First edition). Hyperion. #YAL_Research
• Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. 1st ed, Little, Brown & Co, 2000. Libby Audiobook

Ear Candy - Music I'm listening to:

• Saah
• Biała flaga](https://open.spotify.com/album/5pba4FjOiX0lPgJfthxBiC?si=0TRE1aPqRiqoVZ9LcXPePw
• Expressions du désir

★★★★★

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

Let me know if you would like to see, discuss, or critique any of these notes.

My ten-day zettel production

CPMoellering

I'm continuing to work through reading and capture notes on The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers.

Also started working through some stacks of index card notes for various projects and getting them into my Obsidian.

yadirm

I am drafting the structure and address system I want for my first ever Zettelkasten (analog) using Gingko Writer which I find is PERFECT for this because it works along the same principles of nested cards / tree structure.

ZettelDistraction

@Will said:

You Are What You Read [[202405230517]]
Reading has the profound ability to alter our intellectual and biological selves, offering access to myriad realities that shape our perceptions and identities.

Interesting. I don't believe in free will--I'm a hard incompatibilist, which doesn't exclude change--new information can change behavior. Once informed, the rest depends on biology, the environment, the parents we chose before birth, our socioeconomic status growing up, and other influences over which we had no say.

2. I am seriously questioning the value of the time spent creating and maintaining structured notes, as it creates unnecessary cognitive overhead while taking and formatting notes. What are the practical uses of a structure note?

These arise for me bottom up, though I have yet to use them as much as I might. If working for the man (a grand waste of time) weren't a distraction, I'd get an overview of what I was doing and write outlines to complete later. Or not.

3. I'm considering following @ZettelDistraction and reformatting my link structure, as well as beautifying and simplifying my note list. I'm not sure I see the value of having the UUID in the note list, and I don't see the value in using my time to go through the rigamarole to make the change. I wish I had started with a different linking strategy.

My digital ears are burning. I have a backward-compatible ID regex due to the ID and format changes. And when I say backward, I mean backward:

((\w{1,5}\d{13,})|((\w{1,5}\.)(\w{1,4}\.)+\w{4}))

The first alternative is the new ID format, consisting of a one-to-five-letter keyword followed by a timestamp. The minimum length is 14 characters. The second is the Keyword+Folgezettel+Timestamp ID. It became too much work. However, by repeatedly changing my mind about IDs, as if that mattered, the Zettelkasten has become even worse than the TROLL system I described earlier.

I am still plugging along in my mathematical adventures.

I might add a boring dream about donning a ridiculous fishbowl helmet, getting into the cramped capsule of an oversized Estes hobby rocket, and taking off into low orbit.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was last week on this forum. Instead of first taking notes with pen and paper, I have been typing notes directly into my Zettelkasten. I write on the back of junk mail instead of the notebooks I purchased. I remember nothing further. I am sorry for these and all my sins.

KillerWhale

The "Roam-esque" workflow for daily notes in Obsidian has proved unwieldy as designed. The "capture" section of daily notes is filled with stuff that's hard to process, and important things that have to be dealt with quickly are lost in life observations that can wait.

It's not all bad though. It's showed me that there definitely is value in having daily notes / journaling from which to extract Zettels.

So I am now:

• back to using Drafts as a capture method,
• but journal more often in Obsidian, from which I extract Zettels on the spot.

These Zettels don't have to be all written if I don't have the time – I link to them from the journal entry which contains the idea, allowing me to fill them later but still capture most of the idea.

Finally, Folgezettel works amazingly well. I know all the arguments against it and I know it's not needed in a digital system, but it forces me to link stuff in a way that I am just not doing in a regular UID 202406051009 type of system.

Will

@ZettelDistraction said:
... I don't believe in free will--I'm a hard incompatibilist, which doesn't exclude change--new information can change behavior. Once informed, the rest depends on biology, the environment, the parents we chose before birth, our socioeconomic status growing up, and other influences over which we had no say.

Hey, just like you, I didn't get to choose my parents or the environment I grew up in. We didn't exactly get to interview our parents before birth. I read the next book because of a chain of causes and conditions I didn't choose, like some cosmic literary collision. My reading choices are a complete mystery to my conscious self—I might as well be throwing darts in the library.

Sure, I can give reasons for my book choices, but I can't explain why those reasons matter more than others. Why I do stuff is ultimately unknown to me, an enigma steered by my biases. I'm the last to know what goes on in my head. Free will? Total myth.

Even though we may not know why we choose one book over another, our choices are the result of the causes and conditions of life. I don't know about you, but I'm trying to relax and enjoy the ride, hoping I don't accidentally end up reading some Cobol programming book.

jregan

@Will said:

I don't accidentally end up reading some Cobol programming book.

Yea, those periods will get you every time!

jregan

• I am reading "Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death by Laura Cumming (2023).

• Still clucking away in the Archive in support of my photography practice.

ZettelDistraction

@Will said:

@ZettelDistraction said:

Hey, just like you, I didn't get to choose my parents or the environment I grew up in. We didn't exactly get to interview our parents before birth.

I'm sorry to hear that. Forces beyond my control cause me to want to keep an open mind and not presume that others on this forum were robbed of the choice of their parents and had no say in the evolution of life before they were born or their environment. But the case against free will is overwhelming.

I read the next book because of a chain of causes and conditions I didn't choose, like some cosmic literary collision. My reading choices are a complete mystery to my conscious self—I might as well be throwing darts in the library.

Likewise, at some point, there were collisions--more than collisions: explosions and many of them. Most, certainly not all, occurred before I happened upon the books I found myself reading--cataclysmic events such as the First and Second World Wars, without which my parents would never have met. !

Free will? Total myth.

A fundamental self-attribution error. Phenomenology is notoriously unreliable.

GeoEng51

@Will @ZettelDistraction This is an interesting conversation about free will. I don't subscribe to your thesis, but that doesn't matter I still appreciate hearing the arguments for and against.

Massimo_Curatella

Hello Friends,
how have you been?
I always find Will's prompt heartwarming and stimulating.
I am the "CREAZEE" guy, somebody always struggling with his creative habit forming challenge.
This time I embarked myself into a Twitter Daily Post Challenge.
Each time I do it, I must confess, I immediately after regret it. All of my thoughts seems to be so... obvious.
But I insist and I try to connect my several hundreds of notes into my Zettelkasten to the spur of the moment.
The topic I chose is "My Interests". I have such a long draft into my notes and I thought it would have been perfect to be used as the motivation to write for this challenge.
If you're curious about it it starts here: https://x.com/maxcuratella/status/1798392638741393765