# How do you know which concepts in each discipline are most powerful?
[[How to Take Smart Notes]]
          


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Connections create new knowledge

People will remember you more if you elicit an emotional response

In modernity objects are becoming more simple and society is becoming more complex

Idea sex

Conversation with Sophie Yang at the Moon

Generalists create connections between high-degree nodes

People will remember you more if you stay on their radar

The slip box is the platonic writing style

How do slip boxes deal with facts?

How do you do reference notes for fiction?

How do you find the note that is on the tip of your mind?

How do you know which concepts in each discipline are most powerful?

If lit notes should be resummarizations, what about the juicy details or examples from references?

It’s expensive to experiment with brain-externalizing systems

Say ‘X is more important than Y’ instead of ‘X is important’

Slip boxes boxes are a possible way to create paradigm shifts

We are really bad at knowing the structure of our own minds and especially our future minds

What do you do when you just see a connection between two pieces of literature?

# How to Take Smart Notes
- Elaboration is the most important learning method
- Elaboration is the technique of connecting to other topics
- Page based KPIs do not work well for non fiction
- Thinking requires internalization
- Forgetting is actually our brain filtering
- Elaboration connects new knowledge to old knowledge more effectively
- Note sequences are important
- It is ok to assign context-relevant keywords sparingly
- Lehmans system is especially good at finding structural patterns between two systems
- The slip box acts like a nit picking partner 
- The slip box allows you to get feedback without another person
- The value of the slip box is interconnected ideas
- P75 Raw quotes require context that isn’t there - use them soaringly
- P79 Explicitly note counterarguments 
- The goal of the slip box system is to create *causal* connections
- Literature notes need to be resummarizations
- Oral arguments allow you to get away with unfounded claims
- Reading without taking notes enables you to make unfounded claims to yourself
- Effective reading techniques mirror effective teaching techniques
	- <This needs an example>
- Slipboxes help surface and make explicit paradoxes which let us know the edge of a paradigm 
- The slip box should allow you to encode the most powerful concepts in each discipline
- Create a latticework of theories and mental models to stick information to 
- The five techniques to understand things are 
1. Elaboration
2. Variation
3. Spacing
4. Contextual interference
5. Retrieval 
- Comparison and little differences lead to breakthroughs
- Ask about counterfactuals
- It is better for complexity to be from the system, not the components of the system
- p130 - literature notes should be of the form “on page X it says Y”
- p131- structured systems allow you to compare ideas 
- p133 - brainstorming was invented in 1919
- p133 - brains more easily remember things that have emotional content and are recent  [[Thinking Fast and Slow]]
- p136 Familiarity with the details of a subject let you be creative 
- p136 - when you’re writing, it is important to be able to opporunistically change objective

## Author
[[Sönke Ahrens]]

                        

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