A Book Club Reading of A System for Writing by Bob Doto
Dan Allosso’s (Obsidisan) Book Club will be reading Bob Doto‘s book A System for Writing (2024) as their next selection. Discussion meetings are via Zoom for 2 hours on Saturdays starting on 2024-10-19 to 11-02 from 8:00 AM – 10:00 AM Pacific. New comers and veterans are all welcome to attend.
The book is broken up into 3 parts (approximately 50-75 pages each) and we’ll discuss each on succeeding weeks. The group has several inveterate note takers who are well-acquainted with Zettelkasten methods.
If you’d like access to the Obsidian vault, please email danallosso at icloud dot com with your preferred email address to connect to the Dropbox repository.
DM either Dan or myself for the Zoom link for the video meetings.
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No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. —Umberto Eco
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Wow this sounds interesting, unfortunately I am at work by that time.
@Jvet, if you or others want to keep up remotely, Dan records the sessions and posts them to https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/. You can comment/participate in the comments there if you like.
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Thank you Chris, I'll threw an eye or two ^^
This Saturday. I am interested.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Thank you for your invitation. I've already started to connect Doto's book with my Zettelkasten. Here is my train of thought:
Doto helped me to get a better view of the existing elements to structure a Zettelkasten. But it's not the final version:
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
@Edmund said:
I would replace idea compass with the name of the kind that it exemplifies: "Checklists & templates" or something like that. The idea compass is essentially just a checklist of groups of questions. There are other such checklists that I use.
I would also add link types as a structural element. I recently mentioned link types as an alternative to Folgezettel numbering for local order.
And more generally there are schemas or ontologies that one would use to specify note types, link types, folder types, tag types, and structure-note types. These are not structural elements per se, but are systematic specifications of structural elements.
@Edmund, paper-based slip boxes do/can have the equivalent of folders. Because of their physical geometry they often go under other names, though they serve the same function. Some have called them departments or even compartments while others (usually with smaller collections) call them drawers or sections. You can see this sort of separation in Lumann's practice in which he dedicated one or more sections of drawers to his bibliographic files, one or more to his index section, and much of the balance to what many would call "main notes". I think there's a 1-to-1 mapping of these organizational elements to your digital "folders" particularly in looking at practices from many individuals. This separation is also seen in how you admonish that they're for "high level organization" and to "use them sparingly".
Because of how they're implemented in card-based collections they may be harder to see/name, but they definitely exist all the same.
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Thank you for this hint. It helps me to understand the two systems better. When I've read a post about Zettelkasten, I've learned that some statements are based on the methodology, others on the system the authors use.
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
Folders could also be physical dividers :
I use some in my own analog slip box. The alphabetical index is convenient.
From what I know, maybe because Zettelkasten is not an objectical thing that would exist with its cannon and rules outside of individual uses. It's not a sport, for example like tennis, where the size of the ball, its material, the racket, the field, rules and so on are strictly regulated. Change only the ball itself, and you are not playing tennis anymore, but an other sport with rules that you have to establish.
Things like cannon usages, regulated uses and material don't exist for ZK. The only thing that it exists are customs that we share, or not. Nothing outside individual practices and conventions exists from a collegial point of view. Some things work more than others, and we choose to share it. We don't have an academical authority that tell us that "this things is calls like this and this thing is forbidden".
And that's ok. Because learning is an individual path we take together.
Your sports metaphor helped me to get a better view on this subject. Thank you.
And it’s not much easier than playing tennis. ;-)
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
Héhé, you are right.
And my pleasure. Glad to help!
The Zoom talk and the reading led me to write a partial response to the first part of Bob Doto's A System for Writing, which, as @chrisaldrich points out, responds to How to Take Smart Notes by Ahrens. I also wanted to respond indirectly to Dan Allosso's remarks on Bob Doto's skepticism toward the term "personal knowledge management."
This draft was initially from a "how to set up a digital Zettelkasten" guide, for which there is still some need. It ballooned somewhat. My references are inline; I need to add the publication year to some citations and the complete references at the end.
Why create a Zettelkasten?
Zettelkasten and you
According to Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes, 2nd Ed, the Zettelkasten promises to spare the writer the existential horror of the blank page and a blank mind to accompany it (Ahrens 2022, pp. 2-3). Ahrens is critical of standard educational approaches to academic writing and proposes the Zettelkasten as an alternative (ibid., pp. 44-46). While Ahrens critiques ineffective study methods and the lack of integration between note-taking, thinking, and writing in traditional education, he wants to cultivate intellectuals who follow ideas wherever they lead. He claims that the Zettelkasten is suited to exploratory reading and writing in preparation for projects that interest the writer. By contrast, the usual methods prepare students for employment as mental technicians who must write about topics of interest to their employers. I owe the distinction between intellectuals, who follow ideas wherever they may lead, and mental technicians, who direct their attention to external, non-epistemic ends, to Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. This distinction, which does not appear in Ahrens, informs my interpretation of Ahrens' critique. (There is no definite boundary between intellectuals and mental technicians.)
Ahrens could have been more specific about implementing a Zettelkasten. His note classification includes permanent notes—which subsume literature notes— and permanent, non-literature notes, which are the main notes of a Zettelkasten. In the second edition of How to Take Smart Notes, Ahrens uses the term "main notes" in exactly one place (Ahrens, p. 44). Bob Doto wisely uses the term "main note" in A System for Writing (Doto 2024, p. 15). Dan Allosso helpfully refers to Point Notes and Source Notes in How to Make Notes and Write (Allosso, pp. 14-15). Both authors aim to minimize the number of note types; the consensus is that less is more where implementing and maintaining a Zettelkasten is concerned. Still, there is a need for a How to install and configure a digital Zettelkasten guide, at least for one working example on one operating system.
Even if Ahrens were more specific on implementation details and his terminology was more straightforward, I wonder to what extent the educational system, subject to non-epistemic, economic, and political pressure, would adopt his intellectual approach. My interest, and perhaps yours, is in following ideas wherever they may lead, and to that end, I find the Zettelkasten helps. (I agree with the philosopher Rachel Fraser that there are no intellectual virtues; the Zettelkasten cannot help with nonexistent virtues.)
With its protean capacity to co-opt anything for profit, the market tells another story. Cultivating a Zettelkasten does not an intellectual make; thus, we see the Zettelkasten marketed to the mental technician as a "personal knowledge management" (PKM) system. The term "personal knowledge management" is non-neutral, given its marketing toward professionals seeking to enhance productivity, efficiency, and practical outcomes. However, the software guide makes no distinction between intellectuals and mental technicians, which I mention to account for some of the appeal of the Zettekasten lost to marketing and for what I take to be Sönke Ahrens', Dan Allosso's, and Bob Doto's interest; Bob Doto uses his Zettelkasten to support his spiritual practice and provides illustrations in A System for Writing.
The siren song of brain prosthetics
In my case, the Zettelkasten was the system of last resort to support writing and research projects. I've tried index cards, blogs, Kanban boards, journals, mind maps, structured procrastination, spaced-repetition algorithms for long-term memory, dual-N-back for short-term memory, transcranial direct-current stimulation, URL bookmarking sites, flashcards, incremental reading in SuperMemo, Microsoft One Note, Scrivener, emails to myself, wikis, and straw grasping. Wikis were the most effective of these until they ran out of gas. Still, the siren song of brain prosthetics, ringing like the tinnitus in my ears, led me to the Zettelkasten, the only system I've tried with any staying power besides writing on blank sheets of paper.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction A side note on your reference to "Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" - I serendipitously read this quote from Isaac Asimov the other day: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
I have no idea if this has any relevance to your discussion. His entire essay, full of other pithy sarcasm, can be found here:
https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf
This was not considered one of Asimov's best efforts. Nevertheless, I wonder what he would write today, when we are all inundated with false news and "true lies", and struggle to find anything out amidst the overwhelming stream of nonsense on most social media.
If we frame the broad spectrum of zettelkasten-like structures and methods as ball-based sports, many of them have lots of commonalities, such that if you can play one sport, you'll likely to be able to play many with only a few slight differences. (Example: basketball, football (soccer), lacrosse, hockey, field hockey, rugby, American football, etc. all entail one team getting a ball into a goal or endzone of some sort and the other defending it.) This easily applies to alternate methods like the card system, commonplace books, florilegia, et al. which are zettelkasten-like in form, function, and output.
This being said, if you're a tennis fan, then you'll appreciate that 1908 Olympic Silver medalist in real tennis Eustace Hamilton Miles (22 September 1868 – 20 December 1948) very naturally wrote a book about writing and composition that entailed a card index system very similar to the zettelkasten method. In it, he makes several analogies to learning tennis. @Sascha is sure to appreciate that he also wrote about quite a bit about diet, health, and exercise as well.
Miles, Eustace Hamilton. How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press. London: Rivingtons, 1905. http://archive.org/details/howtoprepareessa00mileuoft.
It may be a day or two yet before Archive.org is back up, so if you need a digital copy immediately, I can upload or email one to anyone who needs it.
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If only there were a "cult of ignorance," but Azimov's editor probably chose that title. Even if no one believed that "the business of America is business," as Hofstadter quotes Calvin Coolidge, some other justification for despising the intellect would take its place. To some extent, remaining ignorant about some things can be rational.
Azimov is concerned with the prospect of a functioning democracy in the face of wilful ignorance and deliberate misinformation, at least as much from corporate interests (it can be costly to say to) as from the government. Complaining or moralizing about it hasn't been effective. I'll quote a historical figure in logic who attributes this pervasive problem to "the structure of belief of large groups."
Incidentally, that quote is the Zettelkasten in action for the benefit of doubters, naysayers, malcontents, and crybabies out there.
As you know, it's clearly worse, amplified by AI. When I was a boy, I was in awe of Isaac Azimov. I read his Second Foundation before any other book of the Foundation series.
As far as Zettelkasten is concerned, an enterprising developer could devise a graphical user interface for Obsidian or some other system to illustrate a conspiracy theorist's note graph with wool strings tied between notes pinned to a digital corkboard background.
We have veered off topic, so whatever Chris Aldrich said.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Thank you very much. I would be happy to receive a copy! And here is an update for my concept map about "Organizing and Structuring Zettelkasten":
I although found it useful to visualize the emerging network structures established by these different concepts:
Yes, it has elements of a checklist:
And in the second step we can focus on creating network structures.
What I learnt from this drawing exercise: We have an amazing list of ways to add structure to our Zettelkasten.
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
Part 1 of "A System for Writing" by Bob Doto as a visual literature note:
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
In my skull I misattributed to Dan Allosso a comment of @chrisaldrich on Bob Doto's remarks on PKM in A System for Writing. https://hyp.is/j050VIv_Ee-nlrdVECJvmg The link is inaccessible unless you're logged into hypothes.is, but the comment concerned this passage.
I took Bob Doto to mean that PKM is a marketing buzzword. I agree. The "Knowledge" in "Personal Knowledge Management" is aspirational, to put it charitably. Most notes don't contain knowledge--information is more accurate, as Bob suggests. Because "Knowledge" overstates what note-taking systems generally contain, and because of its marketing connotation, I prefer not to use the term PKM.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Oooh, a can of worms! -- I could write an essay about the topic and I bet @Sascha has half of a book or two on the topic in his Zettelkasten
I can't lay out everything that leads to the following conclusion in a forum post here, but let me start with the conclusion itself: if you don't produce knowledge, that can be a very normal failure of performance. (We could argue about whether failure or success is more common
)
But: If you don't even try to produce knowledge, you're playing the wrong game.
It proves somewhat useful to put "information" closer to the stimulus in the world, as something's standing-out to you, and then use "knowledge" to talk about the change that information-intake made for you.
An 'everything bucket' like classic Evernote usage is an information-management system. So is a Rolodex. Collector's Fallacy is compatible with mere information management.
This is a butchered-short summary of a slice of a system of concepts to think with.
Being able to replace 2 terms ("knowledge" with "information" here) without talking about something else in the process is a hint that the concepts associated with the terms are rather anemic†, lifeless, and that there may not be a cohesive system of thinking backing this.
So @ZettelDistraction I believe you don't actually want to remove "knowledge" from your life and wade through mere information, unprocessed as it is
(This is not saying anything about Bob Doto's book, because I haven't read it; this is merely based on poor ZD's willingness to abhor knowledge in favor of data)
†: Riffing on the notion of an "anemic domain model" from software design practice.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
You're right: I don't. I suggest the term "PKM" is a misnomer because many of the notes, at least in my ZK, contain information but not necessarily what I would call knowledge--more "know how" and "know what" than "know why," on further reflection. Philosophers have been debating definitions of knowledge for centuries. "Personal Know-How Management" is closer to the truth, but I wouldn't use that awkward term either. This is far from hating knowledge in favor of data. It was motivated by the facile slogan from "Getting Things Done" that "the mind is for having ideas, not holding them."
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Because critical matters such as presenting the final form of doggerel depend on users refreshing their browser cache, which isn't likely, I am moving the verse and the ChatGPT-generated illustration from the previous comment to this comment. It was partly motivated by the slogan from "Getting Things Done" that "the mind is for having ideas, not holding them," which works for trivial matters of "productivity" that one intends to forget; it also concerns recent administrative actions taken against classical language requirements, among other actions (though don't take my word for it).
Getting Things Donne
The Greco-Roman Testiclies forget
Old Cephalus to Sophocles ignore
They join the coalition of the dead
Engage with nothing on that littered shore
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
I would connect this discussion between @ZettelDistraction & @ctietze criticizing the term "personal knowledge management" with a previous discussion that criticized the term "personal knowledge graph".
You may also be interested in this article, which is an interesting perspective but not comprehensive: William Jones (2010), "No knowledge but through information", First Monday, 15(9).
@ZettelDistraction said:
I read that article by Rachel Fraser, and I think her portrayal of intellectual virtues in general, and intellectual humility in particular, is a bit of a straw man. For sure, she knocks down some bad conceptions of them, but the classical Aristotelian conception (which she barely mentions) of virtue as a mean that's relative to circumstances emerges unscathed from her critique, in my view. Intellectual humility (or epistemic humility) to me is a mean between asserting something as knowledge and doubting it, between acquiring knowledge and acquiring doubts. Said more crudely, it is knowing that you don't know to some degree. And this is the quality that you demonstrate when you can conclude that "Most notes don't contain knowledge" as you said above. If your notes don't contain knowledge, you would want to know it; knowing it and admitting it is intellectual humility. Of course, you can call it something else if you don't like the term "humility" and find the term "moralistic" like Fraser does. The concept itself (as I just described it) isn't very moralistic. However, I agree with Fraser that this virtue doesn't tell us much about the nature of knowledge; as she put it, "We have reason, then, to be sceptical of the ambitious virtue epistemologist's claim that we understand what knowledge is via our grasp of the intellectual virtues." You have to have an understanding of knowledge before you can demonstrate this virtue; understanding the virtue isn't tantamount to understanding knowledge.
I'd like to add that the second section of A System for Writing introduced me to Bob Doto's writing process, which was helpful. Bob uses the Daily Note feature of Obsidian and keeps the items he's working on in reverse chronological order so that the top item is the current item or the last item he worked on. He also has what he calls CLOGs for creative logs, which are logs for writing projects. These are analogous to an engineer's lab notebook. Finally, he gives the most compelling reason for maintaining structure notes I've seen so far: to collect notes into outlines for writing.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Dang. I just need to put aside all the good fiction that I'm reading and get past p. 5 or so of Doto's book
@ZettelDistraction said:
This, of course, has been discussed a million times on zettelkasten.de. Bob would have been very remiss if he had not included it in a Zettelkasten-based system for writing.
I am ashamed to admit that I have missed this. Do you have the million or so odd links handy, @Andy?
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
I missed this comment.
In this case, my intellectual humility was helpful (unless most of my notes are far better than they seem). My trouble is interpreting intellectual humility as an intellectual virtue understood as a character trait of excellence one cultivates for the good of humanity. Some philosophers (and others) hold the virtues to be the highest and most excellent goods for humanity.
But for me, this is the operative quote:
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction said:
There's no shame in ZettelDistraction's game! A million is an exaggeration, of course, but an early post is @ctietze's "How I use Outlines to Write Any Text" (May 2014): "There are two possible ways to assemble a draft with the help of notes from the archive: 1. Copy and paste everything into a single document and rewrite later... 2. Reference notes instead of pasting their content..." In the next paragraph he links to @Sascha's "How to Write a Book – Without Even Trying (so hard)" (November 2014), which says, "The 'secret ingredient' here is to attach the ID to an outline.... As I progress through the research I can see the outline growing and changing."
More recently there's Sascha's "The Zettelkasten Method for Fiction IV – Creating Stories" (January 2022): "Writing books with the Zettelkasten is not that difficult: 1. Create a structure note that governs the outline of your book. Either create a preliminary outline up front, or create the outline bottom-up while you incorporate new notes. 2. I recommend double-entry bookkeeping: Incorporate each note into the note specific to the book, and into a note that deals with the topic in a systematic way instead of sticking to the original didactic or rhetorical form of the book. 3. Whenever you create a note that can be part of the book, incorporate it into the outline for the book and into the systematic part of your Zettelkasten."
The first forum discussion about it that I remember participating in was "How close to a final product you get in the Zettelkasten?" (March 2022), where I said that I don't organize (i.e. outline) publications in my note system, which is why I'm very conscious of how often it has been mentioned here, because it's different from what I do.
In a forum discussion started by @Will, "Using your ZK to write" (also March 2022), he said: "Creating a structure note outlining a publishable paper is not considered muddling."
That's enough links for now.
This is the straw man: "The search for intellectual virtues is the search for a rulebook or a recipe: a way to guarantee that we will find ourselves on the right side of truth." Virtue as a mean is not a recipe or a guarantee—instead, more like a heuristic.
If "intellectual humility" has a context-dependent interpretation, suggesting an attitude of certainty, skepticism, or something in between depending on circumstances, it is too vague to serve as a guide to conduct and is prescriptively empty. I don't think there is a knowledge-free, subject-free, temperament-free heuristic to guide epistemic attitudes. If one says, retrospectively, "I was right to be skeptical," one might as well read the horoscope to decide one's epistemic attitude that day. At best, if whatever you took to be the mean happened to be the epistemic attitude aligned with the truth, you're left with a post-hoc rationalization.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction said:
Yeah, it's definitely not "knowledge-free, subject-free, temperament-free". Perhaps heuristic wasn't the right word. As I said before, it presupposes epistemological understanding. And I don't see it as prescriptive: I would never say to someone, "Be intellectually humble!"—because if they weren't already being intellectually humble, I would need to teach them everything they would need to know to be intellectually humble (which is not "a rulebook or a recipe"), and I couldn't do that, although perhaps a skilled educator could. But the concept of intellectual humility is descriptive; psychologists have developed measures of it, and it's easy enough to summarize. Is the result of a psychological test, for example, a "post-hoc rationalization"? Perhaps so, but it's still worth thinking about, in my view.
Sharon Ryan's Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on wisdom covers several different kinds of theories of wisdom, one of which is "wisdom as epistemic humility" (others are "(2) wisdom as epistemic accuracy, (3) wisdom as knowledge, (4) a hybrid theory of wisdom, and (5) wisdom as rationality"). Above I said that "understanding the virtue [of epistemic humility] isn't tantamount to understanding knowledge", and Ryan says the same in relation to wisdom:
I'll repeat what I said above:
But that doesn't mean that talk of intellectual virtue is meaningless and that intellectual humility isn't a virtue.