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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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.