Atomic Notes
- Alex Woods | Don’t let AI write for you.
- N. Cailie | I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era.
- Elizabeth Spiers | The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites.
- “We can decide that we want to be human” | The Guardian.
- Less Wrong | Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture.
- Manuel Morale’s two-step process for writing AI-free blog posts (an amusing response to an interesting discussion).
Simon Willison says:
💬 “I’m effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email.”
I already do this easily via micro.blog and it’s a lot less convoluted. I guess he has complete control of the output though, provided he’s happy to tinker like this.
On Mastodon, Harold Jarche points to the renewed relevance of Harold Innis, the mid-20th century Canadian scholar who called out US media imperialism for what it was.
💬 “We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises.”
I’ve written about Innis’s lost notes but his warnings about the distorting power of the media are very appropriate now.
Jorge Arango’s book, Duly Noted: Extend your mind through connected notes, has its own Flickr page, with a set of photos, images and screenshots — illustrations that inform the book’s text. I like this idea and am saving it here in case it’s useful in future — whether for me or for someone else.
Thoughts on ‘The Memex Method’
Today I noticed that the ridiculously prolific author and tech activist Cory Doctorow is commissioned to publish a book in 2027 on “The Memex Method”, which he described in a post of that name back in 2021. The basic idea is that he publishes continually in public by means of many, many blog posts, then collates it into books.
💬 “Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.”
I mentioned this post back in 2023, when I suggested: to build something big, start with small fragments.
Writing is still about thinking
According to author Larry McEnerney, writing is an essential part of a sophisticated thinking process. He says:
💬 “So here’s what you’re doing, you are thinking about your world in very difficult ways. This is a terrifically good thing, and it’s the source of most of the value of your work. Now, you are also writing about that world, and this is where it starts, the problem starts arising. Unlike a journalist, almost surely you are using your writing process to help yourself think. In other words, the thinking that you’re doing is at such a level of complexity that you have to use writing to help yourself do your thinking.” - Larry McEnerney: The Craft of Writing Effectively | Youtube
In my own reading I’ve felt there’s a difference between published writing as useful information (e.g. ‘how to fix that annoying computer problem’) and published writing as the voice of a human grappling with complexity (‘how I fixed my annoying computer problem ‘).
In the first instance I don’t care if the ‘author’ is AI, so long as the suggested fix actually works. I don’t need evidence of a thought process; I just want to fix my computer. In the second instance, the central thing I’m looking for is evidence of human thought. And if the writing starts to smell of AI, I don’t bother even finishing it.
But even though the AI-written information articles always seem highly plausible, I’ve found the ‘information’ contained to be highly untrustworthy. Sometimes it’s correct and helpful, other times it’s wildly off beam. That’s not exactly ideal. I noticed that at least one version of Microsoft Copilot says it’s ‘for entertainment only’ - which makes it a bit worrying that they named it Copilot.
So whether I do need a human or don’t need a human, either way, AI prose isn’t really doing it for me.
Well, here are some articles that consider the vexed question of whether AI text counts as writing, or just glorified Lorem Ipsum filler – or worse:
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters, which I wrote myself and I also took all the photos myself. If you’re interested in learning, teaching, art, fighting, or Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, you might just find this short book of relevance to you.
AI is changing how we think. Many people now swap deep reading for building with agents. Is the Zettelkasten just a nostalgic relic of a Twentieth Century academic process? This article explores why “efficient” tech might actually fail our cognition.
💬 It’s intriguing that despite incredible, relentless waves of innovation stretching right back at least to Gutenberg, the age-old question of how best to write and publish for an audience is still not completely settled.
Will the last Zettelkasten practitioner please turn off the lights?
#Zettelkasten #AI #PKM #Philosophy
Will the last Zettelkasten practitioner please turn off the lights?
In the olden days (approximately 2010) there was a mass exodus to social media from blogging. It was like the Rapture but with tweeting. And today there’s a new mass exodus to AI from… well, everything.
It seems all anyone can talk about now, or even think about, is AI. Here’s some breathless reportage from the front line:
💬 “I replaced Netflix with Claude Code. I lie in bed thinking about what I can spin up before I fall asleep, what can run while I’m unconscious. Reading a novel feels indulgent now. Watching a movie without a laptop open feels wasteful. This voice in my head that says “something could be running right now” just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.” - Token Anxiety | nikunjk.com
So maybe many of the people who used to be interested in the Zettelkasten, an approach to maintaining a useful collection of notes, are now interested in AI agents. After all, just look at those efficiency gains!
But it seems to me that the Zettelkasten concept was always rather antiquated. After all, it looks quite a lot like the fetishization of an obsolete process for writing academic papers by hand, that ended in the late 1990s when its most visible proponent, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, passed away, just as digitization took over.
A mind like a skittish and unbroken horse
“Unless it is occupied with some governing object that restrains and disciplines it, the mind will scatter itself wildly across the vast field of imagination.” - Michel de Montaigne, “De l’oisiveté” (Essais, Book I, ch. 8), first published 1580.
It’s important to work with the end in sight, says Venkatram Belvadi. He says he limits the projects he works on concurrently to only two. This is laudable, provided it can be done. I can’t do it, and neither, apparently, could the French essayist Montaigne.
In fact, Montaigne didn’t know to what end he was writing. He simply (or so he claimed) recorded his disordered thoughts.
“[The mind] engenders within me so many extravagant chimeras and fantastical monsters—so disorderly and irrational, crowding upon one another—that, having leisure to observe their foolishness and grotesque strangeness, I have begun to keep a record of them, hoping that, if I live long enough, I may one day make my mind ashamed of itself.”
If you do know what you’re working on then Venkatram’s advice, no doubt, is very sound. He abandoned his Zettelkasten, his unhierarchical collection of notes, and replaced it with a series of folders. Meanwhile, I’m sticking with Montaigne and letting my mind wonder “like a skittish and unbroken horse”. To coral at least some of the prancing about, I’ve found my Zettelkasten to be quite effective. I wonder if I should add Montaigne to my deeply irresponsible list of writers with ADHD?
💬 “You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something.” - Sam Henri-Gold
Are you accumulating notes or actually creating something?
Semyon Vengerov gathered two million filing cards but never finished his dictionaries. What lessons does this Russian scholar offer for modern personal knowledge management?
#PKM #Zettelkasten #Writing #History #Notes