🌱links are more valuable than the notes they connect

Zettelkasten and Evergreen notes interconnection productivity

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What makes links more valuable than the notes they link together? flashcard

The main purpose of a ZK is to link separate small notes together there is understanding in the combination of ideas. If two notes linked together are valuable, a whole string of notes linked together even more so. They form a line of thought, or more practical, a possible outline. Over time individual elements of the string might become outdated. The notes coming before and after, though, can still be valid, so the string is still intact.

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For this to work we should never remove notes. It will break links. Just update, and or invalidate a note. The note can still work as a spring-board. Maybe as a time-machine to see our old thinking. Use daily notes to close open loops and keep a journal and see a time capsule of what happened then.

The product of the links is understanding how concepts and ideas relate. The goal is not having more notes.

Related

thoughts are not unique, but the combination (or linking) of thoughts are what makes them distinct atomic notes should be densely linked Our understanding broadens and gets strengthened by adding nodes and connections to our ZK True understanding is understanding the limits (borders) of a text, and then having the ability to look beyond

Literature notes

In comparison with this structure, which offers possibilities of connection that can be actualized, the importance of what has actually been noted is secondary. Many of the notes will soon become unusable or cannot be used at a given occasion. This holds both for excerpts which are only useful in the case of especially remarkable formulations and for our own deliberations. Theoretical publications do therefore not result from simply copying what can already be found in the notebox. The communication with the second mind becomes fruitful only at a high level of generalization, namely that of establishing communicative relations of relations. And it becomes productive only at the moment of evaluation, and is thus bound to a certain time and is to a high degree accidental. serendipity

Link to original

– Communication with ZK

Transclude of Niklas-Luhmann-Communication-with-Zettelkastens.-An-experiential-report#^czcross01

– Communication with ZK

Fleeting notes

A note is like a moment in time, a current understanding of a subject.

• The links show how a specific fact fits into a web of thought. As thoughts are highly temporal links are a snapshot of the current understanding.

links are more stable and important than (the contents of) notes.

• the goal was a birds-eye view, not the collection of notes
  • notes are temporary, the overall structure permanent
• results are highly temporal, as the results are shown “in the moment”. Later the graph will have changed

links are important yet ethereal, the snapshot is real

• links are more important than the actual note.
  • The note might get outdated, but the links to and from the note stay
    • It’s like a memory about a person you no longer know, but the memories stay
      • and the events that followed also stay
• Notes are not meant to be copied from
  • they are meant to help think about a subject
    • thinking should be about the links and the concepts, not necessarily the text of the notes
      • this needs more thought
• The state of the links is in constant flux
  • this makes every interaction unique
    • this in itself adds entropy
• What is “connections get actualized?”
  • when using the graph, we make notes of the current state of the link
    • those links show the opinion about the issue
      • these are the bullet-points of the work