The credit goes to Luhmann. Ahrens wrote a book about Luhmann's system, but Ahrens' book was more about the practical side of study habits and the nature of knowledge as much as it was about the practical side of actually using a zettelkasten.
I bought Ahrens's book to learn how to take smart notes. It should've been called Why to Take Smart Notes. The book was more about how good and lifechanging it is to use Zettelkasten, which was a bummer because I was already interested enough in the idea to buy a book about it. I was looking for more of a how-to.
Edit: Upon a quick scan, this looks more like what I learned as "Linking Your Thinking", which resonates way more with me than a strict Zettelkasten format where you try to arrange notes linearly to match some artificial constraint.
And I think that's a good thing, just not how Ahrens described Zettelkasten.
Yes that is fair, I adjusted and simplified the system for my usage. I didn't include any of the note "phases" / transitions, so e.g. no fleeting notes.
That wasn't the issue. The problem was that most of Windows system utilities are not managed, but the WPF move was trying to make a patchwork quilt of managed vs. unmanaged utilities, making the entire system very difficult to reason about and introducing regressions constantly. From the Windows Team's perspective, the .NET people just made a mess out of everything they touched.
Perhaps if WPF really did stay at the presentation level, or used VMs or something to keep it away from the Windows core, it would have panned out better. But is it goes with "paradigm shifts", when a company thinks it has a great idea, it wants to suddenly do that great idea everywhere.
No, the issue, as outlined in the post, is real problematic behavior of real people on the internet who are inclined to tell anyone who is skeptical regarding the data (whatever it may be) that they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.
The post is about the author, not crime. The critique of Scott. A's posts is an example of the kind of online content that led the author to become "apostate to the Church of Graphs".
I'm now in LA. There are illegal food stalls over over the place.
Some people like them but irrelevant, a crime is being committed, nothing is being done.
So every day I see these crimes. They weren’t here 10 years ago.
Hence, my experience is crime is up since I visibly see it every time I go out.
This is the first example provided. It is not new, and it is legal.
Don't mean to be curt, just, puzzled me to read to say the least. Googled it myself 2 months ago. [1]
In general, the problem is that the strong arguments in the essay are epistemically local - they say specific things about specific measurement gaps - but they're translated into a general license to privilege vibes over data. And that move is where the essay falls apart for me.
I think this is an important point lurking behind a lot of disagreements about these kinds of issues: basically, there are a fair number of things that are legal that people don't want to be legal, and there are a fair number of things that are not legal that people do want to be legal. The first category likely includes, for instance, all manner of tax trickery practiced by the wealthy; the latter category includes things like going 75 mph on the freeway.
There are also cases where it's not entirely clear what most people want, but where (I would say) the legality should be based on what most people want, but it is instead based on a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people. I would put the food stalls in this category. If more people want the food stalls in LA than do not, then they should be legal; if more people do not want them, then they should be illegal. But their legality should not depend on which advocacy group was able to muster a bigger war chest to fund their legal fees and win a court judgment one way or the other.
I believe this is a symptom of fundamental failures in our system of law and government that have caused it to be quite unresponsive to the actual desires of the citizenry. This causes us to waste a lot of time and energy fighting over things like "crime" without making much progress because we are working against the grain of the social/legal apparatus that some people put in place over a long period of time.
Don't read following as a caricature/driveby, really appreciated the thought and framing and it wins out over what I'm about to say, I'm just putting my thoughts after 2 minutes musing as concisely as possible:
There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.
i.e. "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things" - if it was popular to get rid of food stalls in LA*, should be pretty easy, people are pretty plugged in these days
There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.
* it wouldn't be, they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event. If someone said something like they did in real life, you'd ignore it because it's fringe, or, tell them to move to Newport Beach (ritzy suburb). Even just ~15 years ago, in Buffalo, it was perfectly polite to say "sounds like you should move to the suburbs."
> There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.
I think there's much less to be said for that than we currently are trying to say for it. :-)
> "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things"
Maybe to some extent, but overall I think not really. The thing is that the people working to change things are not, as far as I can see, actually working to find out what people want and then do that. Instead there are different groups each working to implement what they want, and it is a matter of who shouts the loudest and fights the hardest.
> There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.
Yeah that's a direction I think we should move in. I mean not exactly live poll, but the point is I think policy decisions should be structurally much more anchored to people's desires on individual issues. Right now our political system is mostly "vote for someone and then live with whatever they decide for two years". Representative democracy makes sense but increasingly it seems the perspectives and incentives of the representatives are out of sync with those of the citizenry. I think there should be a healthy role for direct democracy, a way for people to override or modify the representatives' decisions, basically saying "I may still be okay with you representing me, but you were wrong on this issue so we're going to change that one."
> they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event.
Well, maybe, but that too is a decision that should be based on what people actually want. Like maybe people are okay with the stands in certain locations, certain types of foods (e.g., meat vs. fruit), certain numbers of stands, whatever, but not others. And if that's the case it is those preferences of the population that should be aggregated to arrive at a decision.
> they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.
OK, I look at two objects [1] and posit that object B is larger than object A. I see it with my very eyes, I directly experience this feeling of largeness and smallness. How dare any data, any calipers or rulers (must be oppressive rulers!) tell me that my perception is wrong, and the sizes are equal?
The whole thing is based on the idea that seeing with one's own eyes is somehow not interpretation, but unadulterated truth. This is, unfortunately, not exactly so. No matter who you ask, Buddhist practitioners or cognitive scientists, anyone who paid attention to the problem know that "direct experience" is not very direct.
Tools to rectify biases in perception exist, and statistics (when properly implemented) are one such tool. But accepting one's own bias is psychologically hard; it's much easier to think that all these other people have a bias, or several. (It's an important part of growing up though.)
Part of the problem is that a lot of people are legitimately delusional, and the correct answer for them in their lives is, in fact, "discount your personal observations (they're not real)".
Like, if Fox news tells some people that San Fran has a ton of crime, then they will start seeing that crime. They will observe it. But that doesn't mean that crime has actually went up. It means they were primed and that they are biased.
When your political opinion relies on some set of facts being true, then you will just believe those facts to be true, ala 1984. And then to you, they are true. Your eyes can most definitely deceive you.
The modern treatments are much more effective than anybody had expected, Ocrecus went from something used in the last resort to standard care in less than a decade. I have no issue with it whatsoever though that’s not the case for everyone, and it’s now available as a 6 month injection rather than a 8+ hour infusion thankfully. The older drugs were unbelievably bad (blindness, infection, you name it), but Ocrecus has been very tame in comparison. Can’t get vaccinated for Measles (and have 0 immunity) but that’s my only limitation really.
Glad to hear Ocrecus is working for you! My wife was diagnosed last year and has been on Tysabri for about 6 months. So far, so good. Having to go in for a monthly infusion isn’t something she loves, but zero side effects as of yet. Thankfully it’s a 1 hour infusion not 8.
If I can ask, what are you on now, and what happened that took you off of Tysabri? Feel free to not answer - it may be a bit sensitive to ask. I'm just trying to understand this all better since this is very new for my family.
It's fine, ask me anything you'd like! I was diagnosed 10 years ago and had my first (luckily only so far) relapse 11.5 years ago, so I'm very used to this and remember the first years very well. They're scary.
I'm on Kesimpta now, and I like it. It's worked well for me.
I went off of the Tysabri due to issues with getting it paid for: while there was assistance for the medicine itself, there was not assistance for the administration of the medicine, so I moved to a DMT that I could self-administer. We tried Tecfidera first (this was...I want to say 5 or 6ish years ago), and then when the side effects of that proved to be a problem, we decided to start me on Kesimpta. I've been on the Kesimpta for years at this point, and it seems to be working well, though of course it's hard to tell with a DMT since no news is good news.
Very glad to hear, both Tysabri and Ocrevus tend to have extremely good outlooks from what I've heard from neurologists. I originally received it before it was commonly perscribed and the assumption then was that it would slow disease progression by 50%, for many like myself it has been essentially a complete halt on progression for nearly 10 years.
I'm really glad to hear its going well for you! Her neurologist told us the achievable goal was to stop progression entirely. We were both surprised to hear that. She chose Tysabri because her brother has also had great results with it, and also because it mostly acts to keep your immune system outside the blood-brain barrier, rather than to target specific types of immune cells. Our understanding is you can basically stay on this until it stops being effective or you test positive for JCV exposure, at which point it's on to Ocrevus most likely.
A direct conclusion. The insight I'll draw from that is that academia gives voice to the results the current zeitgeist finds interesting and believable without properly verifying the evidence.
Famous experiments are not chosen by academia. They are chosen by non academics. What you usually find is academics being much more reserved and more critical of these then journalists, bloggers or random commenters on HN.
The purpose stated in the article in the mind of Birren was to reduce eye strain. I don't think it's so much that humans "prefer" it as such, more that we're very well adapted to work in environments with lots of it.
While I agree with the sentiment for the effect its adherents want to have, but...
Why not just
"Communicate clearly"?
- Don't add fluff
- write as plainly as possible
- write as precisely as is reasonable
- Only make reasonable assumptions about the reader
- Do your best to anticipate ambiguity and proactively disambiguate. (Because your readers may assume that if they don't understand you, what you wrote isn't for them.)
- Don't be selfish or self-centered; pay attention to the other humans because a significant amount of communication happens in nuance no matter how hard we try to minimize it.
reply