Note-taking
Introduction
Now since we have gone through some of the basics, let's get deeper into the main ideas of note-making. As mentioned in main idea of note making is to build the basic infrastructure to understand ideas in terms of systems and flow through this system to excavate great ideas and observations. These notes we construct are way beyond a simple documentation of ideas, and this more about how to think about subjects and concepts.
What does it mean by that?
Consider a well, and you need to draw water from it. You are a primitive man and your available option is to draw water from the well with a bucket .
What does it imply?
Now for all the water requirements, you need to draw water from the well.
If you are a little bit lazy and you live in a tropical region then you will be taking shower once a day or you prefer taking your shower in ponds / river instead of your bathroom, the bathroom will be less clean compared to today's standard considering you cannot use a lot of water.
Since water is instrumental to hygiene, these conditions would have impact on hygiene.
This could be a pretty bad example to people living in sub-tropical zones, but you get the idea. Now everything will change when you have a water pump at home. When you have a water pump at home.
You can store water, abandonly use the water for hygiene , you need not need to travel to the pond or lake to take your bath you can take you bath at home itself.
Your overall water consumption itself increases as you update to a better mechanism to draw water from the well productively.
This phenomenon, known as the snowball effect or domino effect, occurs when one event sets off a chain reaction of events. There are many classic examples of this effect in everyday life. Recall our discussion about weak links in one of the previous blogs; here, we're discussing the weak link component within our habits. While this concept might not resonate with everyone, it's observable in numerous developing countries where you can see a cascade of similar transformations in the lives of ordinary people. Consider the impact of smartphones on your life to understand the point.
The intention behind introducing this concept was to provide a context for understanding how seemingly simple inventions can have a significant impact on our overall operations. In this instance, we introduced a water pump to enhance productivity and efficiency within the system. The key factor that made a difference in both cases was the implementation of a straightforward tool: the water pump. Initially, what we lacked were effective tools to address the problem, which can manifest as tangible solutions like the water pump or intangible systems based on ideas. The challenge lies in constructing infrastructure conducive to generating and implementing ideas, thereby initiating a domino effect to simplify our lives. While we have already introduced concepts such as modeling, system reduction, and adopting a holistic view, we were uncertain about how to integrate these ideas seamlessly.
Like I mentioned in one of my previous blogs out note-taking mechanism should be
Consistency: How consistent you were in learning those?
Productivity: How productively can you finish a future task?
Robustness in the idea: How strong are you about those ideas?
How to come to a solution with it?
How can you explain the ideas at different levels?
I want to add one more point here that is flexibility, we want our system to be extremely flexible, we don’t want to build a system that fails whenever we take a break from the ideas, also the ability to retrieve the information should be high, this is a very hard thing to do in the conventional notebooks where it takes some effort ad time in mining the information from the old notes.
Structure
Questions
Through a process of questioning the ideas, you are defining a structure of how the systems work. As you can see sometime the question forms a hierarchy of questions. So when you are into a research process the first thing you need to do is capture the questions which form the structure of the information. Everything works together hands to hand you are simply figuring out which hand is held to another one. This is done with questioning. And it's not necessary that you need to answer all the questions, the idea of the question to provide structure in the thinking. Once you mine the question and if you organize them (here it's unorganized) a picture stares to reveal what this all about.
Look at the difference, there are much more details to be added, yet this structure of the questions provides a great way of looking at how these ideas are framed.
Evidence
In this world of abundant information, it’s not hard to find the information but the idea is to get the most accurate information and understand this through different perspectives. The search engines and books are 2 greats friends help me to collect the evidence. Evidence is concreating answers for what you are looking for. It's not necessary that you can interpret all the answers so we use multiple answers for the same question and excavate the maximum information possible to understand what does it mean. This can be a video, text, podcast transcript anything. The idea is to merge this evidences and debate each of them (not necessary in some case) and derive what does it mean by this and understand this concept, understanding comes when you can interpret something in your terms. Through using multiple sources for the same information you are reducing the ideas and seeing how others are describing this idea. And then you build your concept on this.
This is a simple example of how I collect the information on two concepts from machine learning , from multiple sources. These are screen short from notes.
Ideas
Like the name suggest the idea of "idea" is to document the idea, while you are researching about concepts your creative mind comes with a 100 explanation on how things could be working, and this can be improved. This whole section is dedicated to considering your creative freedom, here we document all your analysis. Now in most cases when you collect the evidence you encounter different views on things the idea can be used to test and document those views. As you collect more evidence your perspective broadens and you get more concreate on your view or you abandon which you find are not accurate. Have this column in my notes to improve my creative thinking about subjects. I believe that a lot of the concepts are pretty much common sense so, I come up with my own interpretations on things and later try to verify things through pieces of evidence. This increases your engagement in your activity and improves how you think about different subjects.
Task
The task is the unit which regulates all your function. Task look into what is kind of information you need look into, why do you need to look into this particular information. In some if you are a coder, a data scientist who actively does experiments one of your sources of information is experiments, formation is experiments, task keeps an account of the task you need to accomplish to bring that information. The task is regular and directs you to different activities on that note. I use tasks very creatively, I make plenty of diagrams maps, and a lot of visual representation on my notes all these ideas go to my task list. I have a column in my task called why? Which explains why do I need to do this. It explains to me why do I think I should do this activity to make things better.
Summary
As the name suggests, the goal of the summary section is to organize all the ideas in the section.
The summary should explain all the key ideas with diagrams, and short points or steps.
This is also a skill with could take some time to develop, it's simply because although you have all the compounds on your screen I add some of my creativity in making this summary pretty robust.
Remember one of the ideas of making these notes is to create great robustness on ideas.
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