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!
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Effective at applying things in books*
(This is mostly tongue in cheek, at this point ;-)
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My thoughts on this haven't changed much since I wrote that note, but one thing I wonder now is: maybe writing (and other related augmentation pathways) shifts some marginal people from the "doesn't take notes / ineffective" pile to "takes notes / effective."
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To put it another way: there are (and have always been) people who don't take notes and are very effective. On the margin writing may not help them much. But effective people are rare; most people aren't. On the margin, writing may allow otherwise-ineffective people to join them.
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I like this take. At this point I’ve mostly thrown my hands up and gone “ok note taking isn’t it (the thing that makes effective people effective), but so then what is?”
I don’t know, but I’m eager to go hunting; I want to find out.
I'm not sure "what makes effective people effective?" is the right question. No monocausal explanation there (imo) and even hard to narrow down.
Either: "How do I make effective people _more_ effective?"
Or: "How do I make previously ineffective people effective?"
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Finding one intervention for either case has more value (even at a lift of 1%) than any ~general insight into first question.
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