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My old phd/postdoc notes were models of discipline. I’d summarize every working session at the end, do periodic meso-summaries every few weeks, and maintain a running table of contents with 1-line summaries. In a 2020-21 notebook I just finished there’s only dates.
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But this was 1998-2006 when I had like 10x more meta-cognitive executive attention management energy and also maintained a functional GTD. All that’s fallen apart now. My information empire/second brain is now like late stage Trantor. Brink of collapse.
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Without a cumulative meta-process of progressive summarization, notes are basically private shitposting and a cognitive random walk. The 2020-21 (paper) notebook I just finished is like 10% of the review utility as one of my 3-ring binders from say 2002 when I was great at this.
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I think it’s just regular aging (34y old brain vs 46) but Waldenponders would say Twitter rotted my brain since I joined in 2007 🤣 Whatever the cause, gotta build a senior-citizen second brain system. I though Roam would do the trick and it dies help, bus no magic cure.
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After publishes his book, I’ll write a derivative ebook called “second brains for senior citizens sliding into senility” Subtitle: how to run your life on 10,000 prefrontal cortex neurons or less
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The big problem with evolving a rolled-up state as opposed to periodically rolling up a state-log (aka chrono notebook), is that refactorings are like earthquakes. Imagine rebasing the root of a mind map with 1000 nodes? I think code version control has a similar problem.
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There may be a high floor on the complexity here. Nobody’s yet figured out how to automate something like a fork —> refactor —> merge on even trivial code. Mergeconflict solving I suspect is isomorphic to summary-state notes refractors. Both probably np-hard if well-posed at all.
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Every lifestyle/workflow problem has to be re-solved from scratch for every life stage. The way people usually solve things for the 45-60 life stage is some combination of dropping activities and adding minions. Minions are expensive though and the robot butlers currently suck.
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Hmm, maybe I can set up 2 foundations at opposite ends of my brain to prepare for dark age when main part of brain, the prefrontal cortex empire, finally falls. First foundation will be a notes app. Second foundation will be a small ML model trained on my twitter 🤔