§Slipbox Systems

How to Take Smart Notes

Notes and statements should be bloody

You can use a zettlekasten to explicitly interface with the emulations of people that you carry on your shoulder

Science fiction is a powerful tool for transmitting science or economic ideas

Note titles that read as thoughts makes them more memorable, findable, and transmissible

Embedding note titles into prose enables precise thought

A ‘related’ section can serve as kindling for an evergreen note

Prose-based evergreen notes enable better thinking

What about fiction or analogy notes in a slip box system?

Could you build a community the same way you build a zettlekasten?

How do slip boxes deal with facts?

How to collect observations while reading

It is important to have both stubs and an inbox

It’s ok to demote or promote notes

Lessons learned from publishing ARPA Model

Making verbal arguments you haven’t written about is getting over your skis

Maybe notes should be discovery focused or invention focused or have parts for that

Shared premises are critical to debate

Sometimes you create a note that’s the secret note that connects all the other notes in a cluster in a really tight way but it took weeks of staring to understand what was in that negative space. Dark matter notes.

Try to put phrases shared by a bunch of note titles at the end instead of the beginning

What if you just synced the bear database with a server per that talk?

Zettlekasten notes can be isomorphic to presentation slides

# §Slipbox Systems
- [[Where are the lines between the slip box and resources?]]
- [[Try to put phrases shared by a bunch of note titles at the end instead of the beginning]]
- [[Zettlekasten notes can be isomorphic to presentation slides]]
- [[How to Take Smart Notes]]

## Backlinks
* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* Bloody statements are valuable to thinking and [[§Slipbox Systems]] notes in particular. Bloody statements are precise. [[Precise communication enables other people to make decisions]] and [[Precise communication can be refuted]]. Many topics are complicated and making statements as bloody as possible forces you to keep slicing a topic thinner and thinner until you have atomic pieces that you can be assertive about. This slicing is especially useful for notes because bloody note titles force you to make atomic notes.
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* See: [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* See:[[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* Doing the majority of the writing in Zettle form. [[§Slipbox Systems]] ftw
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Notes and statements should be bloody]]
	* Bloody statements are valuable to thinking and [[§Slipbox Systems]] notes in particular. Bloody statements are precise. [[Precise communication enables other people to make decisions]] and [[Precise communication can be refuted]]. Many topics are complicated and making statements as bloody as possible forces you to keep slicing a topic thinner and thinner until you have atomic pieces that you can be assertive about. This slicing is especially useful for notes because bloody note titles force you to make atomic notes.
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[You can use a zettlekasten to explicitly interface with the emulations of people that you carry on your shoulder]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Note titles that read as thoughts makes them more memorable, findable, and transmissible]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Embedding note titles into prose enables precise thought]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[A ‘related’ section can serve as kindling for an evergreen note]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[How do slip boxes deal with facts?]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[It is important to have both stubs and an inbox]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Lessons learned from publishing ARPA Model]]
	* Doing the majority of the writing in Zettle form. [[§Slipbox Systems]] ftw
* [[Maybe notes should be discovery focused or invention focused or have parts for that]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Sometimes you create a note that’s the secret note that connects all the other notes in a cluster in a really tight way but it took weeks of staring to understand what was in that negative space. Dark matter notes.]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Try to put phrases shared by a bunch of note titles at the end instead of the beginning]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[What if you just synced the bear database with a server per that talk?]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Science fiction is a powerful tool for transmitting science or economic ideas]]
	* Ideas are carried on stories and feelings the way a coronavirus is carried on droplets of water, and most ideas from science and economics are exceedingly dry.  [[Stories are a powerful mechanism for idea transmission]].  I’m basically screwing up my own advice by writing this as notes instead of a story (although the linked-context of a Zettlekasten [[§Slipbox Systems]] serves much of the role of a story.) 
* [[Prose-based evergreen notes enable better thinking]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[What about fiction or analogy notes in a slip box system?]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Could you build a community the same way you build a zettlekasten?]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[How to collect observations while reading]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[It’s ok to demote or promote notes]]
	* In a [[§Slipbox Systems]], after you label a note as a “stub” or “evergreen” there is often a lot of mental resistance to changing it unless you significantly change the note itself. It’s totally fine to look at a note with fresh eyes and reclassify it. Allowing yourself to incrementally change the system or criteria itself is important.
* [[Making verbal arguments you haven’t written about is getting over your skis]]
	* [[§Slipbox Systems]]
* [[Shared premises are critical to debate]]
	* Interestingly digital [[§Slipbox Systems]] may make it easier to establish shared premises. 



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§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics

Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation

Modularization requires legible interfaces

New ideas need to come out of a single mind

Specialists create knowledge within fields

Idea sex

The tech tree creates new nodes either through idea sex or learning by doing

The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation

Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community

Fast moving fields have lots of unconnected nodes

Generalists create connections between high-degree nodes

Science and technology advance through the same fundamental mechanism

Interfacing between closer neighbors on the tech tree is easier than between nodes that are farther apart

DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers

How can you describe the difference between learning by doing and idea sex?

Untapped technical people near the end of their careers may have more potential than young people

Slow moving fields are almost “fully connected”

Being at the frontier in many dimensions helps advance the frontier

If new knowledge is combinations of other pieces of knowledge, can macro inventions in the mokyr sense exist?

Memorizing creates the mental anchors to create connections between

# Connections create new knowledge	
# Connections create new knowledge	

### Rererences
- Originally from [[How to Take Smart Notes]]
- [[neumannOneProcess2020]]



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olsonManagingModesEffort2020

Idea sex probably happens more often in generalists

Notes that get screwed up somewhere in the pipeline

# Generalists create connections between high-degree nodes 	
This note was originally “Generalists create connections between disciplines.” That statement is imprecise because [[The tech tree is fractal]] so the line between disciplines is mushy. Roughly, the higher the degree of the nodes that someone is connecting ([[Connections create new knowledge]]) the more of a generalist they are. 

### Related 
- The idea of elaboration in [[How to Take Smart Notes]]
- [[Connections create new knowledge]] 
- [[The difference between specialists and generalists is fractal in nature]]. 



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# How do slip boxes deal with facts?
# How do slip boxes deal with facts
They’re not really evergreen observations about the universe 

For now I’m just going to make the, their own hashtags. Or are they different than case studies?  Sub case studies?

- [[§Slipbox Systems]]

Maybe the answer is in [[How to Take Smart Notes]]





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# How do you do reference notes for fiction?
# How do you do reference notes for fiction
Like [[The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas]]
Maybe it’s just there as a node to connect to 
[[How to Take Smart Notes]]
          


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# How do you find the note that is on the tip of your mind?
# How do you find the note that is on the tip of your mind
[[How to Take Smart Notes]]
          


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

Slip boxes boxes are a possible way to create paradigm shifts

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

People will remember you more if you stay on their radar

Conversation with Sophie Yang at the Moon

The slip box is the platonic writing style

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

My System

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]]

### Related
- [[§Slipbox Systems]]


                        

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Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem

DARPA is relatively tiny and flat

Conception is the imaginative design of a heuretic

Architecture matters for creativity

It’s interesting that idea sex/learning by doing + invention (technology)/discovery(science) really do form a good 2x2

# Idea sex
Another reformulation of the idea that [[Connections create new knowledge]] when the new knowledge comes from the connection between two pieces of old knowledge.

### References
- [[How to Take Smart Notes]]



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# If lit notes should be resummarizations, what about the juicy details or examples from references?
# If lit notes should be resummarizations, what about the juicy details or examples from references
[[How to Take Smart Notes]]
          


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Conversation with Nicholas and Keegan

Demystification is showing the world for the way it is

What about the increasing complexity of Software?

In modernity, physical things are becoming more simple, but both software things and human things are becoming more complex

# In modernity objects are becoming more simple and society is becoming more complex
Examples: Tables - things have less filigree. How structures are connected
[[How to Take Smart Notes]] makes the argument that complexity should come from the system with simple components. This trend may be a manifestation of adhering more closely to that principle. You can’t reasonably subdivide a complex chair.

## Reference
[[Conversation with Nicholas and Keegan]]



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# It’s expensive to experiment with brain-externalizing systems
For people who in part live in brain-externalizing systems (here we could be talking about Evernote, Roam etc but for many people it’s Excel, photoshop etc.) it really does require rewiring your brain to use a different tool. So it’s very hard to just ‘experiment’ with a new one. 

You also can’t really use more than one at any more time

### Related
* [[Where are the lines between the slip box and resources?]]
* [[The slip box is the platonic writing style]]
* [[How to Take Smart Notes]]
           


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# My System 
Last updated 26 Aug 2020
![](BearImages/7D623D56-4A64-4D4E-8C58-2A92BCD49D71-61320-0006204A5DB1F49B/64AF60E0-B532-43C7-888B-D1A5325E5889.png)

High level, my system is just a combination of [[Getting Things Done]] (for tasks - with [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/) as the corresponding tool) and [[How to Take Smart Notes]] (for thoughts and ideas with[Bear](https://bear.app/) as the corresponding tool) 

#### Key Tools
- Mac
- iPhone
- Small notebook that can fit in back pocket
- Pile of paper
- Bear
- Things

**A quick note on tools** The specific tools are not important. What is important is (imho) having a separate tool for *tasks* and *thoughts.*  I have a Mac/iPhone centric workflow and I prioritize tools that do one thing well, have lovely design, and are native applications for speed. 

### Workflow
External non-digital input (a thought, a verbal agreement, etc. either goes direct into Things inbox or gets written down in the butt notebook) 

External digital input (an email, message, etc) is either dealt with when seen or put into Things to deal with later. *Inboxes  and browser tabs should not be todo lists* This lets you separate responding to a message from work that message entails. 

Outside of meetings, I work in Pomodoro cycles - 25-35 minutes focused on a single task, followed by a five minute break. I do at least three pomodoros of writing in the morning before doing anything else for the day.

At the end of every day
- Butt notebook and paper items get entered into appropriate digital places *and then thrown away/filed*
- Tabs are closed and entered into appropriate places
- Write down the three things that will make the next day feel like a win even if I get nothing else done
- Write short recap of meetings and encode follow-up tasks in things

At the end of every week
- File everything in the Things inbox

At the beginning of the week
- Write down the three things that if I get done make the week feel like winning

Things get stored as:
- A note in bear if it’s a thought/idea/draft 
- A todo in Things, sorted by project
- An event in my calendar
- A file on dropbox if I want to easily share it or it’s a paper
- A file in google drive if it’s anything else in a Project related 

Here is a screenshot of my task inbox
![](BearImages/D72452BF-4E59-4E7F-BB8D-B7A6102FBB61-61320-00062B88E4BAF6D4/3D5B8A75-2FAF-40C0-AE80-BE488E767D19.png)

Here are the online public facing version of my notes notes.benjaminreinhardt.com


![](BearImages/(null)/(null))￼

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§Networking for Nerds

Make friends with people before they’re useful to you

People will only remember three things about you

People tend to talk about successes more than failures

Exceeding expectations sticks in people’s heads more than meeting them

§There are many tricks for adulting that people don’t talk about

# People will remember you more if you elicit an emotional response
“Nobody remembers what you say, they remember how you made them feel.” 

[[How to Take Smart Notes]] points out that people remember things that are more emotionally salient. 

### Related
- [[§Networking for Nerds]]
- [[Stories are a powerful mechanism for idea transmission]]
- [[People will only remember three things about you]].



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Life Style Guide

# Say ‘X is more important than Y’ instead of ‘X is important’
For example [[How to Take Smart Notes]] states that it is important to be able to opportunistically change objective. 

For example, startups should be able to pivot quickly.
There aren’t any areas where it isn’t at least useful to be able to opportunistically change objectives. However, that will come at a cost. Which tradeoffs to make is the important chunk of knowledge.

### Related 
- [[Life Style Guide]]
- [[§Program Design]]
- [[Precise communication enables other people to make decisions]]
          


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Loss aversion

People are more averse to short term losses than they are attracted to long term gain

Has anybody come up with a good theory of risk aversion focused on innovation?

# Thinking Fast and Slow
### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Daniel Khaneman]]
- [[Amos Treversky]]
## Link

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# We are really bad at knowing the structure of our own minds and especially our future minds
That’s why [[it’s important to allow categories to emerge]] , 
[[The slip box is the platonic writing style]], and
[[Where are the lines between the slip box and resources?]]
Ref:
[[How to Take Smart Notes]]
          


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# What do you do when you just see a connection between two pieces of literature?
# What do you do when you just see a connection between two pieces of literature
[[How to Take Smart Notes]]
           


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Benʼs working notes

How to Take Smart Notes

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