I always check for proof of good synthesis when reading yet another Second Brain guide.
Yes, yes, you can tell me how you’ve set up the perfect notetaking workflow, but can you show me how it’s helped you?
I want proof of work, dammit.
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(To be clear, has ample proof of synthesis — read anything by him about the Toyota Production System, for instance.)
And so if I check your output and see no proof of more-than-surface-level synthesis/thinking, it’s likely you don’t have much to offer me.
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This tweet mostly brought to you by the fact that I have an implicit bar for comparison — my own writing.
To take a random example, commoncog.com/blog/learning- was the result of a year of thinking, and draws from > 30 different sources.
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One of the things I struggle with is the fact that the best synthesisers I know … connect their thoughts … in their heads.
Myself included.
The question isn’t ‘can a better notetaking workflow help us think better’, but ‘can a better workflow augment what we already do.’
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If I were to use a leaky computational analogy: let's say that short term memory is CPU cache, that long term memory is RAM, and that notetaking is ... well, is externalised thinking, so think of it as swapping out to disk.
Not a perfect analogy, I know. But humour me.
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In a computer, swapping out to disk is to take an extreme performance hit. So computations usually load data into RAM and process in cache.
Something very similar happens with the way I do synthesis. Notes are for retrieval. But all the connection building happens in my head.
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Sure, I can externalise and capture the connections between ideas, but the connection building *must* occur in long term memory, where I sit on or investigate some topic for a very long time.
And this appears to be similar to a lot of other synthesisers I know.
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Connection building between notes is like saying 'perform computation on disk, with no loading to memory'. It's silly — too slow. In my experience it leads to surface level connections or thoughts.
The really deep connections happen at the substrate of thought.
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Because it's a lot faster.
To use my Complexity piece as an example, the 'smell' of the idea was to notice that people who were infected by the CAS idea-virus seem to all have a similar approach when thinking about complex domains.
Noticing this similarity was the key insight.
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I could've written it down in a note.
But when the idea is a seedling, sometimes you shouldn't crystallise it because you're not sure what you're noticing. You just want to sit with it, in your head, and notice how the shape of the idea itself changes as you investigate.
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Eventually two things — a meeting with two years ago where he argued against predicting the future, and a paper on Complexity investing (nzscapital.com/news/complexity), crystallised the shape of the idea in my head.
It was like pulling the cloud down and firming it up.
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The organising principle was that all the similarity between these thinkers that I had been noticing (for about a year!) was that they were acting without prediction. They observed the nature of the complex system and reacted to it.
This finally allowed me to write the piece.
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My point: good, deep synthesis is more like this than not. You sit with an amorphous cloud of an idea in your head, and wait until you can find an organising principle to give structure to the cloud.
'Connecting ideas' or 'connecting notes' misses the point.
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The limiting factor is getting better at 'sitting with the cloud', 'noticing interesting threads in your inputs', and 'developing taste for good organising principles'.
You think better by learning to think better, not by making better notes as a substitute for thinking.
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(I should add that and are working on interesting things here, and if someone cracks the ‘how do you synthesise better’ question, I’m hoping it’s them).
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Just take notes in anki and study every morning and Bob’s your uncle. Recall > Backlinks
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Sadly, I’ve never found recall to be a good aid in insight development/synthesis.