Increasingly curious as to why the tools-for-thought folk talk a lot about note-taking tool features and plugins and not at all about the cognitive science of better externalised thinking.
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An example of why paying attention to the cognitive science is important:
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One of the basic ideas: bullet points make it easy to create the *facade* of order. You don't need to specify logical relations, like "A causes B" or "A explains B" - bullet format encourages jumbles without narrative or logical cohesiveness.
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If this is meant as a dig against outliner TfTs, I don't get it. Creating the "facade of order" is exactly _why_ I use them. I want to brain-dump as fast as possible while taking notes, not get bogged down in formalizing relationships. (That's what discourse graph ext is for)
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I haven’t read Tufte’s full argument yet, but it matches what we’ve observed about the difficulty of transmitting information in outliner form. (I’m fairly certain you’ve talked about this before). Outliners work in single player mode, but perhaps not multiplayer.
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Contrapoint: big client I've helped transition off of storing information in PPT to an outliner-based TfT with Discourse-grammar style indentation and splitting information up in explicitly labeled claims and evidence reports: "This was the most productive meeting in 20y at Corp"
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Imo the constraint is formatting: PPT doesn't work because of the low resolution required (as per thread you linked). TfTs have no such space constraints, and with judicious use of indentation and tagging, it _is_ possible to create relationships between points.
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I agree that raw output from individual outliner can be a poor medium for multiplayer.
Though I bet w/ (lightweight!) conventions + tooling to "compress/synthesize" from outliner inputs (as notes below), multiplayer quality can > just prose under some conditions.
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