🌱 insights or originality occurs at the juncture of two before unrelated concepts

Zettelkasten and Evergreen MOC serendipity

Optimising for serendipity (from roam research – a note taking tool for networked thought), is like creating luck. One does not get more lucky, but creates more opportunities to get lucky.

New insights or ideas occur away from the beaten path. Since there is nothing really new, the only thing we can hope for is a unique combination of two old(er) concepts.

Connecting, by linking, walking keyword-trees Walking keywords shows multiple contexts in which we can find answers and using the visual graph can help discovering new ideas and avenues of thought.

By tagging or linking interesting concepts we also might create opportunities for future interaction between possibly unrelated notes. Don’t worry about keeping tags and links clean, PKMs need limited chaos to flourish substance is more important then form.

This is also one of the reasons why notes should be atomic, smaller notes are easier to. reuse. Wider notes create less possibilities for linking, as they are more specific.

Literature notes

• Just as humans are incapable of generating random numbers, we struggle to consciously generate random ideas - to the point where actively trying to ‘think differently’ often seems to only further calcify existing patterns. Instead of attempting to brute-force creativity, the brain must be confronted with novel stimuli in order to reorganize its perception. Exposure to a certain amount of random ‘noise’ - drugs, dreams, meditation, Tarot readings, mistakes - can jolt thoughts out of well-tracked grooves and into entirely new areas of idea-space. Typically these insights occur at the juncture of two or more seemingly unrelated fields, concepts, or images.

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• The interconnectivity of the Roam knowledge graph constantly creates opportunities for serendipity to blossom. Each node in the network can be viewed in several graphical displays, allowing users to see related ideas, scan up and down the vertical hierarchy, examine nearby clusters of nodes, and observe patterns.

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– roam research – a note taking tool for networked thought