Digital Note-Taking
Updated onI originally conceived of a blog page for my website, but much as I like reading blogs, blogging does not come naturally to me. Also, if you have a subject you want to interrogate, what's the point in writing a single essay about it? That assumes you'll draw a definitive conclusion. I think a better approach is the living document: a record of your thoughts on a subject, updated as those thoughts come to you.
The other thing I like about this idea is that it aims your thinking at the future. When you write about a subject, the question is, "What can I learn from this, and how can I best explain it to myself so I can use it in the future?"
This isn't my brilliant idea by the way. What I've just described is a digital garden. I just prefer to think of it as a notebook. I built mine with Foam.
Second-order Relationships
If A is related to B, and B is related to C, then A has a second-order relationship to C. But Foam doesn't generate these relationships.
As Kasey Klimes notes, second-order relationships are by definition less obvious than first order relationships. So second order relationships hold even more potential for surprising insights.
The Future of Digital Notetaking
Digital notetaking is probably a primitive attempt to manually create neural networks in our brains. So the goal of all such technology (like Anki), is to reduce the gap between the knowledge we put in the computer and the knowledge we put in our head. And I guess the perfect version of that system would be one that permits Matrix-style "uploading" of knowledge directly to the brain.