For context: this was a chain of toots. I think a lot by externalizing and thus you can see how my viewpoint shifts from the start of this text to the end. There is no final conculsion as I will continue to think about things for the rest of my days. With "I think a lot by externalizing" I mean that I form my opinion WHILE writing what my opinion could be. My partners, collegues and mastodon followers only know this too well!
Yesterday I was asked how I organize my personal knowledge
I dont I have a to do list, a calendar, a pile of books I never read and when asked I have to search which book actually said what I remembered (thanks Calibre search)
To the other person (doctorate of social studies) this is a big topic. I understand why one needs a solution for this. I am quite happy w/o a solution
He said his mind works in a non-linear way. For those in the know lets just drop the words #Systemtheory, #Kettelkasten and #Obsidian. To paint a picture for those who know.
Now a day after our encounter I have to think: I have to linearize my thought before they exit me. It pains me but it's true. I can only write/talk one thing at a time. I have paused writing my journal to write here publicly. I can't do communicate than one thing at a time.
I think a lot of my notes are agressively linear
What do I mean with "agressively linear"?
The mastodon doesnt really count. It auto-deletes and its not really part of my personal book keeping.
My diary/journal is linear because it's chonological text. There are no metadata linking things together. Yes perhaps I talk about the same things in different entries but its the job of the reader / their search engine / ... to figure that out.
my to do list is quasi-linear despite being a tree of dependencies (I should bother less with that...)
But of course all of this is about a structure outside of my mind. He has his obsidian graph and I am so happy this works for him. I know my mind would be very obsidian-compatible.
Perhaps I never bothered re-hydrating my thoughts into a graph-structure and kept it flat. Yes I know "re-hydrating" is a very funny word to use here and yes it typecasts me into an ORM fan
I have many structures and they are all interlinked and have complexity of O(n). A physical paper filing cabinet, ...
... a sqlite-powered todo list, a (quasi) append-only journal. Its okay to read the journal but almost 100 % my interaction is append only and that's OK.
I really have to ask myself why I never put my things on a graph. And I don't think its about the O(n) complexity because thanks to search this is a triviality.
I still think I dont need it. But perhaps with a system like obsidian one does not have to linearize and de-linearize ones thoughts?
That's actually a perspective which is new to me. Perhaps when one is used to graph-based note taking (e. g. #Obsidian and all the others) then one is free from linearization. Yes you still only type one after another but when you trust the system you can keep the structure in your memory while you type it all out. Thus avoiding the linearization cost I just said a few toots ago being inevitable. Huh. That sounds pretty smart.
And my previous argument "you gotta linearize it anyway" sounds dull
SoI just looked up #Obsidian and its open source competitor #Logseq. First of all Logseq is a horrible name for a tool supposedly offering NON-sequential knowledge management. But what do I know.
I never used Obsidian and I never tried. It's properitary and thus I am blind to it.
Obsidian runs on markdown and Logseq runs on some sql backend. Boooo what an easy Obsidian W. what an Logseq L.
The things aren't even mututally exclusive. You can have a database caching md files no problem
for the record: I never used Obsidian nor Logseq perhaps those are very cool and fine tools
according to alternativeto.net buth are very beloved