This description of Lehmann’s system sounds a lot like a Knowledge Base (KB)—a particular kind of database that represents entities with unique identifiers and links between them. A KB that I...
This description of Lehmann’s system sounds a lot like a Knowledge Base (KB)—a particular kind of database that represents entities with unique identifiers and links between them. A KB that I interact with frequently is Wikdiata. There are lots of other domain-specific KBs such as TVDB or TMDB.
Wikidata happens to use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to encode links between entities using subject-predicate-object triples. In terms of a knowledge graph model, RDF triples represent nodes in the graph and the edges between them: subjects and objects are nodes, and predicates are edge labels.
If you’re interested in learning more about Wikidata the project has a lot of resources. The Wikimedia Foundation has a public repository here that allows anyone to set up a local copy of Wikidata from their dumps and the associated query service to search it.
While RDF, in essence, is very simple, robust, real word, general KBs are very, very complicated. The idea of curating personal KBs is a neat idea, and someone recently linked to Obsidian, which looks like it may be an interesting tool if you already take notes in Markdown. While personal KBs are somewhat interesting, collaborative, public KBs I think are more interesting and more generally valuable. I think KBs are going to be the kinds of resources that could unlock a lot of potential for humanity if philosophers and computer scientists can make them easier to interface with. Things like Wikidata are not only rich resources for humans, but since they are encoded in a particular structured way, they are rich resources for computer programs as well (as opposed to Encyclopedias like Wikipedias which are geared specifically for humans).
A knowledge base like that is exactly what I have in mind for what I described here: https://tildes.net/~games/oo1/a_reminder_that_the_elder_scrolls_6_is_very_far_away#comment-50tz Which means, I...
Which means, I could prototype this thing using wikidata as my knowledge base. Use the data from WD as the knowledge base of the actor and see if I can make it output facts that make for a reasonable flow of conversation.
Absolutely. There is even more fun stuff you could do with this like get into epistemology. For instance, you could have a ground-truth KB about the whole world, but you could have each character...
Which means, I could prototype this thing using wikidata as my knowledge base.
Absolutely. There is even more fun stuff you could do with this like get into epistemology. For instance, you could have a ground-truth KB about the whole world, but you could have each character have their own view into the ground-truth KB, and also have the epistemic state for individual characters vary from the ground-truth (if they have been exposed to inaccuracies or incomplete information). And you could also have characters intentionally lie—that is, have a character who knows the ground-truth, but says something different.
I’m pretty sure I read that Dwarf Fortress has implemented some of these kinds of behaviors.
Yeah, I think it's actually a dwarf fortress devblog post that had a part in inspiring this idea. But yeah, in the finished thing, different knowledge bases for different people, including wrong...
Yeah, I think it's actually a dwarf fortress devblog post that had a part in inspiring this idea.
But yeah, in the finished thing, different knowledge bases for different people, including wrong facts, is definitely something I want to build. But the most immediate unknown is whether it's possible to write a program that selects facts from the knowledge base in such a way as to make good conversation. Or rather, how complicated that program gets before it reaches adequate conversation skills.
So much connected stuff in this article about connections between ideas. I'm not anywhere near through with it and it's already super interesting. Anyway: Scientific literature is for the most...
Tools like Evernotescientific journals quickly devolve into dumping grounds as you succumb to the collector’s fallacy — the tendency to collect heaps of information without ever doing anything useful with it.
So much connected stuff in this article about connections between ideas. I'm not anywhere near through with it and it's already super interesting. Anyway: Scientific literature is for the most part a dumping ground. You work, you write it down, you submit it, some people from your field read it, but big picture connections aren't made on a systematic level. The computer scientist might not even know how he's reinventing the wheel and mathematicians have done all this better before. Even worse when the distance between fields grows. I'm waiting for the day when hypertext becomes acceptable academic writing. Hyperlinking in stuff is just such a powerful tool.
Our minds are very good at thinking in relations. When you present someone two pieces of work where a connection can be made, that connection isn't hard to do. The hard part is focusing your attention on the correct items. So a note taking system that helps maintain relations seems like a good idea.
I am however sceptical of the outrageous claims of productivity. Kind of like "drop out of college and start your business now, from your dad's garage if you must, to be like bill gates and get rich".
I'm also not entirely convinced by the superiority of webs over folders. It links neatly into that database discussion - mongoDB vs a proper relational DB. Webs are better at absorbing huge amounts of information, but their structure is harder to navigate. Folder trees have the benefit of being neatly enumerable. You can traverse a tree with minimal mental overhead. If the internal nodes are informative enough for you to safely ignore anything below them, that is super powerful. You have fast, exhaustive search. To be less abstract: If the folders in your computer tell you enough about what's in them that you can tell what is, is maybe and is not in them, then they will be tremendously useful even if you're not really sure what you're even looking for. You just go deeper until you can rule the folder out, then you advance to the next one.
This is a really interesting idea, I think I might give this a shot. I wonder how you accurately link a note in with all of your previous ideas though - once your Zettlekasten becomes too big for...
This is a really interesting idea, I think I might give this a shot. I wonder how you accurately link a note in with all of your previous ideas though - once your Zettlekasten becomes too big for you to keep in your head, wouldn't it also become too big for you to know how every new piece of information relates to every previous piece?
Today I was coincidentally looking into Org-Roam, which is an implementation of Roam, which is pretty much an implementation (or a close relative) of this method in the form a database with handy...
Today I was coincidentally looking into Org-Roam, which is an implementation of Roam, which is pretty much an implementation (or a close relative) of this method in the form a database with handy insertion, linking, and navigation commands, as well as node visualization. Seems both useful and manageable. I’ll give a try this week.
I saw this article on HN the other day: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead A lot of the post is a description of how he uses Roam for it.
I really like this idea! (Never thought I'd be excited about a system for note taking) Stumbling across connections between seemingly disparate things is very exciting, but I've found that even if...
I really like this idea! (Never thought I'd be excited about a system for note taking) Stumbling across connections between seemingly disparate things is very exciting, but I've found that even if I do remember a study or article or something from several years ago, it's basically impossible to find the source material again. Either it's been purged from a website, the search engine is flooded with asinine results, or who knows what. I'll probably end up saving a copy of the original material in my system as a permanent storehouse I can reference back to on my note card.
I use Tiddlywiki as my Zettelkasten, with the help of the Stroll plugin. I used to compulsively hoard notes in Org files that I never revisited, but now everything that gets entered into my...
I use Tiddlywiki as my Zettelkasten, with the help of the Stroll plugin. I used to compulsively hoard notes in Org files that I never revisited, but now everything that gets entered into my Tiddlywiki gets linked to one or more other 'tiddlers'. The new connections between ideas that I have made as a result of this have been surprising, and I am very excited to keep going.
Neat, but are you sure you want to emulate Niklas Luhmann? Are his books interesting to you? Do you want to write lots of books? Do you even want to write one book? (In retrospect, I do kinda wish...
Neat, but are you sure you want to emulate Niklas Luhmann? Are his books interesting to you? Do you want to write lots of books? Do you even want to write one book?
(In retrospect, I do kinda wish I had taken some notes while reading some history books, though, so I could go back to them more easily.)
Surely organizing your ideas better is something that just about anyone could benefit from, even if you have no interest in being an author or emulating some 20th-century sociologist. A...
Surely organizing your ideas better is something that just about anyone could benefit from, even if you have no interest in being an author or emulating some 20th-century sociologist. A programmer's notes might be on algorithms and design patterns, a gardener might take notes on plants and cultivation techniques, an architect might have drawings and schematics. The real benefit would be the ability to better connect ideas from disparate areas of your life, if you commit to documenting everything from your hobbies to your job to your pleasure reading.
I'd like to have my own personal wiki, but I suspect I wouldn't have the motivation and willpower to commit to it long enough for it to really shine.
Yes, some kind of organization helps, but what worked for him might not work for you, and I think it takes a few tries to figure it out. I tried keeping a journal for a while and eventually...
Yes, some kind of organization helps, but what worked for him might not work for you, and I think it takes a few tries to figure it out. I tried keeping a journal for a while and eventually abandoned it, but having a lot of simple subject-based lists in Google Keep works pretty well for me.
But then again, I'm mostly reading for pleasure, not for work, and for many things one can assume an Internet search will find the answer.
This description of Lehmann’s system sounds a lot like a Knowledge Base (KB)—a particular kind of database that represents entities with unique identifiers and links between them. A KB that I interact with frequently is Wikdiata. There are lots of other domain-specific KBs such as TVDB or TMDB.
Wikidata happens to use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to encode links between entities using subject-predicate-object triples. In terms of a knowledge graph model, RDF triples represent nodes in the graph and the edges between them: subjects and objects are nodes, and predicates are edge labels.
If you’re interested in learning more about Wikidata the project has a lot of resources. The Wikimedia Foundation has a public repository here that allows anyone to set up a local copy of Wikidata from their dumps and the associated query service to search it.
It’s a somewhat involved process, and requires a decently heavy machine to set up.
Here’s another resource from someone who set up their own Wikidata instance.
While RDF, in essence, is very simple, robust, real word, general KBs are very, very complicated. The idea of curating personal KBs is a neat idea, and someone recently linked to Obsidian, which looks like it may be an interesting tool if you already take notes in Markdown. While personal KBs are somewhat interesting, collaborative, public KBs I think are more interesting and more generally valuable. I think KBs are going to be the kinds of resources that could unlock a lot of potential for humanity if philosophers and computer scientists can make them easier to interface with. Things like Wikidata are not only rich resources for humans, but since they are encoded in a particular structured way, they are rich resources for computer programs as well (as opposed to Encyclopedias like Wikipedias which are geared specifically for humans).
A knowledge base like that is exactly what I have in mind for what I described here: https://tildes.net/~games/oo1/a_reminder_that_the_elder_scrolls_6_is_very_far_away#comment-50tz
Which means, I could prototype this thing using wikidata as my knowledge base. Use the data from WD as the knowledge base of the actor and see if I can make it output facts that make for a reasonable flow of conversation.
One of these days.
Absolutely. There is even more fun stuff you could do with this like get into epistemology. For instance, you could have a ground-truth KB about the whole world, but you could have each character have their own view into the ground-truth KB, and also have the epistemic state for individual characters vary from the ground-truth (if they have been exposed to inaccuracies or incomplete information). And you could also have characters intentionally lie—that is, have a character who knows the ground-truth, but says something different.
I’m pretty sure I read that Dwarf Fortress has implemented some of these kinds of behaviors.
Yeah, I think it's actually a dwarf fortress devblog post that had a part in inspiring this idea.
But yeah, in the finished thing, different knowledge bases for different people, including wrong facts, is definitely something I want to build. But the most immediate unknown is whether it's possible to write a program that selects facts from the knowledge base in such a way as to make good conversation. Or rather, how complicated that program gets before it reaches adequate conversation skills.
So much connected stuff in this article about connections between ideas. I'm not anywhere near through with it and it's already super interesting. Anyway: Scientific literature is for the most part a dumping ground. You work, you write it down, you submit it, some people from your field read it, but big picture connections aren't made on a systematic level. The computer scientist might not even know how he's reinventing the wheel and mathematicians have done all this better before. Even worse when the distance between fields grows. I'm waiting for the day when hypertext becomes acceptable academic writing. Hyperlinking in stuff is just such a powerful tool.
Our minds are very good at thinking in relations. When you present someone two pieces of work where a connection can be made, that connection isn't hard to do. The hard part is focusing your attention on the correct items. So a note taking system that helps maintain relations seems like a good idea.
I am however sceptical of the outrageous claims of productivity. Kind of like "drop out of college and start your business now, from your dad's garage if you must, to be like bill gates and get rich".
I'm also not entirely convinced by the superiority of webs over folders. It links neatly into that database discussion - mongoDB vs a proper relational DB. Webs are better at absorbing huge amounts of information, but their structure is harder to navigate. Folder trees have the benefit of being neatly enumerable. You can traverse a tree with minimal mental overhead. If the internal nodes are informative enough for you to safely ignore anything below them, that is super powerful. You have fast, exhaustive search. To be less abstract: If the folders in your computer tell you enough about what's in them that you can tell what is, is maybe and is not in them, then they will be tremendously useful even if you're not really sure what you're even looking for. You just go deeper until you can rule the folder out, then you advance to the next one.
This is a really interesting idea, I think I might give this a shot. I wonder how you accurately link a note in with all of your previous ideas though - once your Zettlekasten becomes too big for you to keep in your head, wouldn't it also become too big for you to know how every new piece of information relates to every previous piece?
Today I was coincidentally looking into Org-Roam, which is an implementation of Roam, which is pretty much an implementation (or a close relative) of this method in the form a database with handy insertion, linking, and navigation commands, as well as node visualization. Seems both useful and manageable. I’ll give a try this week.
I saw this article on HN the other day: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead
A lot of the post is a description of how he uses Roam for it.
The past few days saw a surge of posts about roam and related concepts. I’m sure not if that was a coordinated effort but it does seem like it.
I really like this idea! (Never thought I'd be excited about a system for note taking) Stumbling across connections between seemingly disparate things is very exciting, but I've found that even if I do remember a study or article or something from several years ago, it's basically impossible to find the source material again. Either it's been purged from a website, the search engine is flooded with asinine results, or who knows what. I'll probably end up saving a copy of the original material in my system as a permanent storehouse I can reference back to on my note card.
I use Tiddlywiki as my Zettelkasten, with the help of the Stroll plugin. I used to compulsively hoard notes in Org files that I never revisited, but now everything that gets entered into my Tiddlywiki gets linked to one or more other 'tiddlers'. The new connections between ideas that I have made as a result of this have been surprising, and I am very excited to keep going.
Neat, but are you sure you want to emulate Niklas Luhmann? Are his books interesting to you? Do you want to write lots of books? Do you even want to write one book?
(In retrospect, I do kinda wish I had taken some notes while reading some history books, though, so I could go back to them more easily.)
Surely organizing your ideas better is something that just about anyone could benefit from, even if you have no interest in being an author or emulating some 20th-century sociologist. A programmer's notes might be on algorithms and design patterns, a gardener might take notes on plants and cultivation techniques, an architect might have drawings and schematics. The real benefit would be the ability to better connect ideas from disparate areas of your life, if you commit to documenting everything from your hobbies to your job to your pleasure reading.
I'd like to have my own personal wiki, but I suspect I wouldn't have the motivation and willpower to commit to it long enough for it to really shine.
Yes, some kind of organization helps, but what worked for him might not work for you, and I think it takes a few tries to figure it out. I tried keeping a journal for a while and eventually abandoned it, but having a lot of simple subject-based lists in Google Keep works pretty well for me.
But then again, I'm mostly reading for pleasure, not for work, and for many things one can assume an Internet search will find the answer.