The Zettelkasten Method for Hindu Philosophy • Zettelkasten Method
The Zettelkasten Method for Hindu Philosophy • Zettelkasten Method
A video recording where I coach using the Zettelkasten Method to study Hindu Philosophy, a topic where you can easily go in depth and need to break up notes as they grow.
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Thanks for sharing the video. I watched the session with interest, curious about how to approach suggesting process improvements when the topic is poorly understood and inherently complex.
@Sascha cross-posted this in the subreddit r/Zettelkasten with the title "Studying Hindu Philosophy With Your Zettelkasten", and there is some feisty discussion there about whether Sascha is really using the Zettelkasten Method. It's quite entertaining. (I don't have a Reddit account, but I read the subreddit on rare occasions. I won't link directly to the discussion because Reddit's official website is a monstrosity, but you can find it via your favorite alternative front end.)
Haha. I was expecting some outrage because the notes are almost all work-in-progress and obviously not atomic.
I am a Zettler
It might be worth to read the comments. Here is the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ll382l/studying_hindu_philosophy_with_your_zettelkasten/
I think I will use this blog post to write an expanding blog post on the concept of atomicity. The irony is that u/Past-Freedom6225 is arguing on behalf of atomicity against its major online evangelist.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha said:
Yes, that is one part of why I found the discussion so entertaining. Another part is that the opening salvo, "Please don't get me wrong, but this is not a Zettelkasten", is a classic newbie mistake. Anyone who has been following these discussions for some time knows the futility of being so dogmatic about "what a Zettelkasten is". And you can see how much of a newbie the complainant is in a couple of previous comments made about 17 days before in their comment history (emphasis added):
And:
The Zettelkasten community never fails to deliver the lolz!
It is for sure a classic newbie mistake (I think here Dunning-Kruger is the right card to play). However, we are confronted with a serious problem. There is something, I call it the Zettelkasten Method for its spirit and as token of respect to its godfather the Big L, that is a different approach. I spare the typical dichotomies like active/passive, categorised/connected for the sake of brevity. But the development and the inquiry on how to make good use of it, is so rushed and therefore not methodological (this is directed at the so-called influencers).
This problem is exemplified by the resistance (inability, unwillingness or whatever) to develop (and give this development time) a proper relationship to the difference between principle and technique. In the beginning, you are forced to stick strictly to technical instructions. Slowly, you will understand the principles behind the technique and let yourself be informed more and more by the principle instead of the exact technical incarnation.
Beginners identify the method by the exact technical implementation of a principle. But even advanced practitioners suffer from similar problems: Instead of realising a principle informed by a comprehensive cost to benefit analysis of each technical implementation, some just pick a thing that looks nice and say "Yeah, but this works, too." (Having no ZK works, too, why not just do whatever?) (and promote this)
What bugs me a bit is that I didn't manage to communicate this properly yet.
I am a Zettler
How can you make people understand this properly?
P.S. I don't know how much I understand what you're saying about Zettelkasten, but reading your articles and playing Zettelkasten myself helped me break away from the superficial things that many influencers say.
Good points, @Sascha! @iylock asked:
In general, the answer is basically what Sascha just said: "a comprehensive cost to benefit analysis of each technical implementation", that is, by showing the costs and benefits of different alternative implementations of a principle. Sascha did such a comparison for the principles of hierarchy and hypertext implemented as either Folgezettel or structure notes in his post "Understanding Hierarchy by Translating Folgezettel and Structure Zettel" (April 2020), where he made the same distinction of principle vs. technique, as above:
In a discussion started by @amahabal, "How I use Folgezettel in unison with timestamps" (October 2024), I pointed out that one can also create hierarchy using typed links. The Breadcrumbs plugin facilitates this in Obsidian, for example. So we could show how Folgezettel, structure notes, and typed links are all techniques for implementing hierarchy, and we could show the costs and benefits of each technique and of different variants of each technique.1 It is even possible to programmatically convert one implementation to another due to the shared principle: the Breadcrumbs plugin that I just mentioned can convert between hierarchical typed links and a hierarchical structure note.
But if we did such a comprehensive comparison for all important principles and techniques, we would have a long technical report like: Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, & Roger King (2005), Building the memex sixty years later: trends and directions in personal knowledge bases, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. ↩︎
I started with paper Zettelkasten, so I am very aware of the shortcomings of Folgezettel. I thought Folgezettel would automatically create knowledge, but in the end I had to work with the principles. That is why I moved to digital.
I am not sure if I understood you correctly, but if so, when I experienced firsthand how much Folgezettel costs to implement the principles and how much it costs to implement the principles with hyperlinks, I moved to digital without hesitation.
But, is it true that you have to experience these things yourself to feel them for sure? Is it true that you can't know these things unless you try them yourself?
However is it really that hard to convey the principle as it is? If it were easy, people would understand it and this debate wouldn't continue? Or is it that people are disappointed because it's so obvious and simple, and tend to be drawn to things that seem more complicated and flashy? Or is our way of expressing it too difficult for the public? Or is the barrier to entry too high?
And I'm curious to know what kind of examples, other than Folgezettel, there are for this aspect that Sascha was talking about.
@iylock asked:
@Sascha may have his own answer. What comes to mind for me is three aspects of personal knowledge base software examined by Davies et al. (2005) in the technical report that I cited in my last comment:
These are three categories of principles. The principle of hierarchy (or tree structure) is in the structural framework category. The principle of atomicity would be in the knowledge elements category (specifically, the size of knowledge elements). See Davies et al. for other examples. (That publication is not the last word, of course, as it was written in 2005.)
@iylock asked:
No, it's not hard. But people like the complainant on Reddit get fixated on the particular implementation of some guru such as Luhmann. And, like that same complainant, they "study the system methodically before starting to use it intensively" instead of starting from their own problems.
One of the most useful things that came out of the discussion for me came from this comment by @Andy:
My Zettelkasten was helped immensely by this since I implemented the ability to easily move subtrees (and yes, that changes my Luhmann IDs, but effortlessly. My "permanent ids" are timestamps. All links are automatically updated, too, and I am warned of any dead links, which is rare). The specific semantics of the moving is that I need to specify under which note this subtree will be placed and don't have to manually specify the lumen IDs of that note. It happens using the automation tool called Alfred, and I see a view such as the following, where I can type a few letters of the title to quickly select the parent.
Now, when I am revisiting an area and am I planning on adding notes in that space, I can take a few minutes to tidy up what's there before adding things. This tidying up sometimes involves moving that family of notes to its own tree, starting with its own root, if that family of notes has grown a lot.
From the previous post in this thread:
I would like to add a fourth principle. Having different views of the same underlying data. I do all my editing in the The Archive, but a background process keeps converting this to HTML pages with well-rendered mathematics and mermaid diagrams and even argument maps (Do you use argument maps, @Andy, and if so, how do you render them?). Here I see not just outgoing links and their "sizes" (a proxy for how detailed that note is), but also incoming links. A third view shows the tree structure (and this holds very different semantic content, naturally) and a fourth view shows a graphical structure (rendered via graphviz). There was an upfront cost of setting this all up, but it has been nicely repaying itself.
@amahabal said:
Very true. I should have mentioned that the three categories in Davies et al. are categories of the data model of the knowledge base. In addition to the data model, they mention the user interface (views) and architecture (file-based, database-based, or client–server-based) as separate characteristics.
@Andy Thanks. and the three categories of principles you mentioned seem like a good mental model for me to use in dealing with knowledge.
@iylock I think @Andy pointed you in a good direction. There are all kinds of structural frameworks that you can use. Hierarchy was one of the major frameworks I focussed on. I was drawn to the strange, almost contradictory concept that you use a hierarchical pattern (Folgezettel with parent-child-relationships) to make non-hierarchical possible.
If you jump right to the end of the entire thinking process about structural frameworks, you see the relationship between Folgezettel vs Structure Notes + Time-ID: Folgezettel implements hierarchy to transcend hierarchy. Structure Notes are starting in the already transcended stage. Hierarchy becomes just one of many possible structural frameworks that you want to use as an epistemiological tool. A Structure Note starts empty, yet is ready to absorb the complete rest of your Zettelkasten, if you want it to do. You can use hierarchy or circular structures to represent the part of your zettelkasten governed by the Structure Note. You can even have both as alternative structures on the same structure note or on separate structure notes as different perspectives on the same matter.
But Folgezettel itself is obsolete and outdated. It is baggage, learning wheels at best. Mostly, it is a distraction.
I am a Zettler
I was initially drawn to the concept, but soon realized that it wasn't.
indeed! If you try Structure Notes, you'll see how bad Folgezettel is. It's like switching from Microsoft Paint to Adobe Photoshop.
Is this what you mean by circular structure?
No.
I mean the structure that you are using on the structure note. So, you could for example use the circle of life as the structure drawn as ASCII-art with links in it.
I am a Zettler
I see. Thanks