Knowledge starts with presence

Knowledge starts with presence

Source: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-06-25-knowledge-presence/

Now we move to the note-taking part of this presentation. While I cover the case of written notes, what I am about to say applies to mental notes as well, mutatis mutandis.

Let me start with a distinction I make between tasks or reminders and notes.

The former are actionable items that target an activity, such as a TODO entry to record this presentation. Tasks or reminders can be used as part of a workflow for building a knowledge base. For example, when we are reading a book, we might want to record a reminder that something important is referenced in page 10.

By contrast, notes are the constituents of our knowledge base. Each of them encapsulates what we have learnt about the given topic. They contain valuable information that tells us something which can stand on its own about a phenomenon or state of affairs.

Both tasks and notes are at their best when they are precise and sufficient. Precision means that they are communicated without ambiguity and have clear start and end points. For instance a reminder to “read the Emacs manual” is imprecise and not very helpful. Should we read it from the beginning until the final page in one go? Are we looking for something specific or is this supposed to be a pastime activity? What is the ultimate objective of this task? A better reminder is to read a given chapter in the manual in order to learn about a specific piece of functionality.

Same principle for notes. We want them to be self-contained.

Continuing with this theme… Here is the anatomy of a bad note:

“Today I watched Prot’s presentation. Good stuff!”

This is the kind of information that has no profundity. It states a fact, records the superficialities of an impression, and provides a link for further reading. If we take this note on its own, we cannot extract knowledge from it.

We do not know what the allusion to “good stuff” entails.

What caught our attention exactly? Is there something specific we gathered from the presentation? Did it change our mind about something we were already doing? If so, how? Did we have any disagreements and which were they precisely?

The idea is to apply what we learnt about parrhesia and presence. We do not want to reduce note-taking to something akin to that frivolous status update on social media I mentioned before. This is not a popularity contest, not a performance to regale our social group.

We want to focus our attention on the activity of explaining, in our own terms and as best we can, what the subject matter is.

A good note focuses on the elucidation of one point. If there are any asides or tangential remarks, they can be turned into their own entries. Why? Because the practice of focusing on one discrete thing helps us stay in the flow of parrhesia and presence. We can always combine different threads once we get better at staying focused. The key is to start small and build from there.

An easy way to test if a note can stand on its own is to either record it on a piece of paper or imagine it is printed on one. We want to have the most low-tech version of our material. No links, no previews, none of the fancy stuff that technology enables. Once we get that, we can better assess the usefulness of what is written.

1. If our note does not say much on its own, it is not good enough.
2. If our note includes too many links without sufficiently describing them or explaining what the connection is, we are putting ourselves in the process of having to hunt down the snippet of knowledge we wanted to record. Not optimal.
3. If our note requires special software to be accessed, we might lose it in the long-term which again detracts from its value.

The general idea is that we want to take notes carefully. Capturing our thoughts is one part, but it is not enough. We ought to read and re-read what we have. The goal is to try to anticipate if our future self will find the record helpful. We do not want to burden our future self with incomplete thoughts and fragmentary information. When we retrieve our note we should not have to go down a rabbit hole of clicking through links in order to eventually discern the thread running through our entries. That might cause frustration and lead to distractions.

We can do better by focusing on the here and now. The key is to take as much time as necessary to substantiate one thought as best we can in that moment. If we have doubts or if there are any lacunae in our knowledge, we must admit them then and there. The note is not supposed to be perfect—this is not about some performance for the public eye. It just needs to be an honest representation of our current ability.

Another way to anticipate a bad note is to assess its potential worth. We get better at this as we gain experience.

Suppose I stumble across a website with tips and tricks about scuba diving in the ocean. I am not a diver, I live in a mountainous area, and may never find an application for this kind of information. If I am not selective with what I want to focus on, I will create a bookmark.

Later, I will find another site which provides insight on hunting techniques. I am not a hunter and will likely never be one. Again, if I do not impose any kind of restraint, I will store yet another bookmark.

Then there will be a third website which discusses the most effective techniques employed by basketball players. I am not playing basketball and likely never will, so again I have no use for this. Without much thought, I will impulsively add a third bookmark to the list.

Before realising it, I will have accumulated all this garbage which pretends to be valuable knowledge. I cannot do anything with it. For me, all these trivia are useless. If I am in the habit of creating records that have a high noise to signal ratio, I am doing myself a disservice. Instead of setting up a knowledge base I can rely on, I am creating yet another major distraction.

The old adage of quality over quantity applies here as well. With parrhesia, we impose order to our chaotic propensities as we pick and choose those items that are likely to give us the most value.

We must never forget that our attention is finite.

The other way to avoid a bad note is to be aware of the motivation behind it. Does the creation of the new record come from a position of control or is it a selfish reaction to something?

Suppose we are taking notes about an insightful video we are watching. We pause every couple of minutes to write down what we think. Sometimes this is helpful, though it can also work to our detriment, as we lack context. We have not heard the whole presentation yet and cannot be sure if there is some more nuance to it or if an initial concept is expanded upon further into the video. As such, those in-the-moment notes may simply be capturing our prior thoughts, not what we learnt from the source material.

With parrhesia, we take a step back and tell ourselves: “Am I being honest here? Do I really need to rush to early conclusions? Who am I trying to impress, anyway?” By doing this, by maintaining our presence and focus on the moment, we keep the right mindset of not allowing premature notions to masquerade as high-quality notes. Instead, we can use tasks or reminders which we will revisit after watching the whole video.

We thus allow ourselves the possibility to remain open to new ideas. This is not about openness for its own sake, as I already explained the importance of being selective. This is where the dialectical side of our disposition comes to the fore. We engage with the source material with the understanding that we are interested in approximating the truth. We thus give it a fair chance in a spirit of selflessness. Remember that we do not stand for our truth but only for the truth. If we have to let go of our thesis, so be it: the review emancipates us from a falsehood.