Trying to understand how to convert "Facts"/"Concepts" into "Thoughts"/"Ideas"

altidiya

Hello!

I started my first Zettelkasten this weekend by the advice of a friend after me commenting my incapacity to be constant with Obsidian. For now I feel I'm good but one of my friends has tell me I'm making the mistake of making "Literature/Source Notes" and I can see it, I just feel I can't enter in the state of mind for Thoughts/Ideas Zettel Notes.

My objective with this Zettelkasten has been mostly as a support for my studies in international politics, and help me to organize my TTRPG campaign (2 Ars Magica and 1 Wildsea campaign).

The problem is that I tend to focus my writting in how I teach and explain things to people, and so I end with notes like this:

Title: The Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel
Tags: International-Politics, Treaty, Holy See, Israel
This [[treaty]] was approved on December 1993 between the [[Holy See]] and the [[State of Israel]] as a demonstration of the growing interest in the coexistence between catholics and jews.
The treaty has 15 Articles:
1. The Holy See and the State of Israel agree that...

And from there I start to basically rewrite/explain to myself what each article in my own words. You can see I also have a note on [[treaty]] that basically explains what is a treaty in the same expositive tone, "treaties are a agreement between two or more [[subjects of the international law]]..."

Is very "informative" [following the difference between Knowledge and Information], and I don't know how to convert it into thought/idea. Mostly a personal wikipedia than what Zettelkasten are supposed to be.

When explained to me, the answer was among the lines of "you should write about what questions inspire it, or what ideas it inspire" but I... don't get it? This text doesn't inspire me a lot outside of getting a curiosity of "how was the relationship before this?" and if I investigate it I will end writting a note that is "relationships between catholics and jews before the Fundamental Agreement" with maybe references to notes of specific incidents. That, if I understood correctly, still bad because they still being simply source notes.

So I'm here because I want to get the most out of my Zettelkasten, and I feel I'm failing at it because I don't get to that state of writing "ideas", that is starting to creep on me under the idea that I can't have ideas.

Looking for any advice and comment, and thanks for reading.

Andy

Hello @altidiya, and welcome! I am not an educator, and I don't know anything about using a Zettelkasten for school studies, if that is the context of your "studies in international politics", so I will let the experts comment about using a Zettelkasten (or not) in a school context.

I am inspired to say one thing in response to this:

@altidiya said:

I feel I'm failing at it because I don't get to that state of writing "ideas", that is starting to creep on me under the idea that I can't have ideas.

Do not rush to attribute your poor performance in any task (such as the task of "having ideas") to your supposed innate inability. This is a big mistake when learning any skill.

I am doubtful that "having ideas" is even an appropriate measure of performance in studying international politics, but I don't know. I would be focused more on the level of complexity of my understanding of the topic, as measured by the SOLO taxonomy, for example. The key question is not "Am I having ideas?" but instead "How well do I understand the structures of the political world?" But even this measure could be a mistake if it does not align with what your school teachers expect of you, if the context of your Zettelkasten is your school studies. I would focus not on generic Zettelkasten conventions but on the expected outcomes of your studies.

altidiya

Thanks @Andy !

I'm not a native speaker (spanish is my first language, the note is also translated in that sense), so maybe I have used the word "studies" badly. In this context is an personal desire to expand my knowledge about International Politics as it is becoming relevant to my career as a sociologist.

I'm not under any school in that sense, and more with a desire to be at the level of understanding of International Politics that a diplomatic agent could have.

In that sense my own judge and the one that puts expected outcomes is myself. And the anxiety is more about failing at managing a Zettelkasten than at failing at understanding International Politics.

Thanks for your words/answer in any case! Is always good to have a reminder that poor performance isn't directly related to innate inability.

Andy

Your English is clear, and you used the word "studies" correctly, but it could refer to "formal studies" (in school) or "informal studies" (out of school), so I didn't know whether you are in school or not!

As your anxiety is only about whether you are managing your Zettelkasten badly for your own personal purposes, I will add that I don't see anything bad in your practices that you described. Just think about what consistent rules you could create that would help you do what you want to do. The generic Zettelkasten conventions are just a starting point; most of us develop our own personal rules for organizing the Zettelkasten for our own purposes.

ChrisJoh

@altidiya
There's nothing wrong with recording facts in a card index! The question of 'own ideas' only arises from the foundation of these facts.
'Ideas' in this case would be, for example, the analysis of how these 'facts' are presented by the media and politicians (i.e., analyzing whether it is propaganda and what purposes this propaganda serves). I can also imagine that one can come up with one's own ideas by investigating whether what is presented as fact (and where this happens — in the media, in historical scholarship, etc.) corresponds to reality. Finding out what turns out to be reality among all the mountains of propaganda garbage is a Herculean task. In my opinion, assessing politics is always about identifying the respective interests and what the various interest groups claim to be facts.
In short: I think starting by systematizing facts in a Zettelkasten in the field of political science is very helpful and provides the basis for any resulting analysis. The way you started makes a lot of sense.

JasperMcFly

Think conceptually. [Concepts of Disciplinary Thinking] https://tinyurl.com/484ebzcb

c4lvorias

I don't really know about politics but here is my brainstorming:

1. You can create an advanced indexing system. It seems like you are already doing that. Linking treaties, locations and states, you can find all entities you want when you search for it in backlinks.
2. Treat ideas as something you can elaborate on.

Let's say you collect historical events. Create timelines (either in Canvas or Obsidian has a timeline plugin.) Separate the historical event into a cause-and-effect relationship. Create notes for the reasons, the event itself and its consequences but do not keep it as "Consequences of the Fundamental Agreement between..." Just say "Growing interest in the coexistence between catholics and jews." Then you have something that you can elaborate on. You can link the consequence as a reason for another event. You can divide it further or link with other historical events that share relevance to the aforementioned growing interests.

See Zettels as building blocks and you can reverse-engineer your desired output. When creating, aim to divide and after a session of division and Zettling you can see how different atomic notes can be combined into something bigger. (E.g. Catholic and jews coexistence is/leads to/creates/prevents ...")

Here's a link to my very very basic ChatGPT query for other thinking tools than cause-and-effect relationships: https://chatgpt.com/c/67ebeb5e-2974-800e-88b6-91c755a2fcfe

Edit. You don't have to do the atomization step at the very beginning. Write your source note in the way you want and then either select Object of Attention you want or summarize a bit of your writing. By the latter, I mean something similar to dividing the long text into headings. Then think about the connections between these atomic notes.

Whenever you struggle, ask LLMs and let LLMs do their magic, after a while you will get used to the process.

gescho

There isn't as much of a seperation between "facts" and "ideas" in practice than many people think - a definition is in the end also only an idea that has been "institutionalized".

I've found, as a first order of business, a Zettelkasten as a Personal Wiki that lists facts, figures, maths, etc with their sources already useful. Even if you subscripe to a "own-idea centric" Zettelkasten, your own ideas need points to be "hung off from" to anker them in reality/scientific consensus or discussion.

The same goes for the "atomicity" of any idea. It is not literally "one idea - one Zettel". The orginial German is "Gedankengang", literally "walk of a thought", correctly in English "chain of thought". I've seen many a ZK Zettels, and too many Zettels of my own, that are incomprehensible because they're too small. As a newbie, I'd recommend to start with "wikipedia style" Zettels with a bit of length that you can then easily split parts off from.

To write and recognize text that tick off the vibe check of "This is a text that encompasses one chain of thought, stands on its own and is comprehensible even 5 years down the line" is a metacognitive skill you'll build with time.

andang76

I think this is a pretty common issue at the beginning of our Zettelkasten, when there are too few notes to glimpse a potential for thought.

You can store a note containing a fact into your Zettelkasten, and using as a pivot for your thoughts development.

Reflecting about a single fact, you can move in many directions that can generate thoughts from that pivot:

• try to apply the Compass Idea Model (I think you can find something in the forum, I can provide you some reference otherwise). Given an event, for example, you may ask yourself its causes (norths), its implications (souths), finding similarities or contrast (east/west) and so on.
• another typical north direction that I frequently use is abstraction / conceptualization/ decontextualization. Given a fact, what model/ratio/principle/moral/teaching/rule/pattern and so on can I derive from it?
• another north direction is recognizing the fact as a part of a "bigger picture" and starting to develop that picture (or integrate if already exists) into zettelkasten

• once I've abstracted something from a fact, I often realize that other facts can be linked to the same abstraction. In your case, for example, two different international crisis events could share some dynamics. Once you have realized this, you can write about the abstraction (developing your thoughts about every dynamic), and you can compare the events each other, developing your thoughts about similarities and differences. In this process you obtain
  many more ideas you can develop than you think today, it's an exponential process

• you can find different opinions about the same event (and in your specific use case, as @ChrisJoh has explained, you can go further analyzing the positions of the parties). You link these positions to the event, and again develop your reflections about similarities, differences, and again you can find abstractions. And when you find an opinion or theory, you can always ask yourself do I agree, do I disagree, do I need to find the right scope of this opinion? They are other three kinds of thoughts you can develop. And as Chrisjoh stated, you can ask yourself if there is a propaganda part.

• you can submit your network of facts and already taken related thoughts against a question. Question from yourself or others. Trying to answer to the question make you develop a reflection that is not a fact, but is developed from the network itselft. As example, I'm answering for you to the question "how to build thoughts using facts?". And after I've written this post, I could develop further each point emerged in it. Starting from this post, I could integrate my zettelkasten with my reflections about "facts and zettelkasten".

They are only few of many possible dynamics of reflection from a fact. I'm sure that you obtain almost one thought from these using this process. And that developed thought will be the input for the same process, again and again.
It's exponential once you've learned the game, you soon obtain many more ideas than you can write down and develop concretely in the Zettelkasten. And the zettelkasten that grows its mass does a significant part of the work, once you reach the critical mass.

Will

@Andy and @ChrisJoh provide a valuable perspective on transforming facts into ideas. It can take months or years to grasp and interconnect the facts. You’ll spend much time collecting, revising, and connecting long before anything original surfaces. You can't skip that foundation. However, believing you can generate novel ideas without first developing the background is a significant mistake.