I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that agency and good writing/note taking are orthogonal skills, and both are desirable, but both have no relation to each other.
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Actually “is painful or takes persistence” are legible reasons for why people fail at application. A pernicious, less legible, more interesting version is “unable to let go of their existing lenses, and so block themselves from internalising the worldview needed to make it work”
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Replying to
I acknowledge the personality factors you point to that make it difficult to apply insights learned, and that those factors are orthogonal to the quality of notes that a person takes. However…
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Do you believe that if someone puts in the effort to engage more deeply with the material and retain more of it has not increased their likelihood of effective application?
Hard to argue against that, but given your valid personality points I get to “not necessary or sufficient”
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This is the thing I'm trying to get at. I THOUGHT that people who engage more deeply with the material and retain more would increase their likelihood of effective application. I'm heavily biased to believe that.
And yet I have two counter-examples.
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My experience here is consistent with 's observation that the most effective readers and thinkers he knows do not take notes.
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Similarly, some of the most effective operators I know don't take good notes. (I suppose you could add this to my list of counter-examples, which bumps it from 2 to ... 5?)
My current conclusion is that there's something else at play that is unrelated.
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(Mind you, I'm only thinking of operators who read widely; there are many who don't do much book-learnin')
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Well yes there exist people who can retain & apply material without taking good notes, so notes are only one of many methods they can use. Without (sub)conscious retention they would have to independently come to the same conclusions in order to apply, so notes aren’t necessary.
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And there exist people who take great notes and don’t apply their insights, so those aren’t sufficient. Factors you point to also influence.
But the existence of these groups of people don’t disprove retention as a prerequisite to application and notes as a method to get there
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1. There are people who take good notes and are effective.
2. There are people who don’t take notes and are effective.
3. There are people who take good notes and are ineffective.
4. There are people who take bad notes and are ineffective.
Seems like there’s no correlation!
Effective at applying things in books*
(This is mostly tongue in cheek, at this point ;-)
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That's assuming a 25-25-25-25 distribution... perhaps might know of some research that would shed light on this discussion?
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You'd need a way to accurately count each box before making that last claim.