Scott P Scheper, page 32
This is something also observed by computer science professor and bestselling author, Cal Newport. He advises his readers to talk to reference librarians. “I’m amazed by how often this resource is overlooked,” Newport writes. “Ask the librarian for research help and she will guide you to some amazing sources you would have never found on your own. These extra discoveries make the difference between an average paper and one that shines.”549
Antinet Search Equals Exploration; Digital Search Equals Filtering Irrelevant Information
When you are trying to find something in your Antinet, think of it like Tarzan swinging through trees. He swings from branch to branch and then along stems and leaves of thought. Every time you swing to a different branch by way of vines (links), you trigger a reverberation event. You’re reminding yourself not just of the idea, but of the area and stems of thought around the idea. This experience is lost via digital search. You’re presented with a plethora of useless information. With the Antinet, you’re engaged in the experience of jumping from branch to branch through your knowledge. With digital search, you’re not even in the jungle. You’re in a dim office somewhere reading about the jungle through a computer screen.
The Antinet allows you to experience the power of exploration. It promotes a way of exploring that is curious, deliberate, and that operates within a general and rough context. This is akin to the experience of being in a library and exploring shelved books. Oftentimes, you happen upon profoundly valuable books by way of accidental discovery just by walking down a row in the library that interests you—even if it’s somewhat unrelated to your current project. In doing this, you may stumble upon a book that becomes a critical component of the project or book you’re working on. Digitally searching your notes eliminates this magical experience.
The digital Zettelkasten proselytizers oftentimes think that linking is the core component of Zettelkasten systems. This couldn’t be further from the truth. An entire industry of apps and courses revolve around the idea of linking notes. Yet linking does is not the core component of Zettelkasten systems. It is but one property, along with indexing and others, that makes the system work.
For instance, the analog nature of the Antinet makes full-text search impossible. It forces users to explicitly create very selective links between thoughts. Why? Because you know there’s no full-text search that possesses the illusion of saving you later on. When you’re writing out a note by hand, and you think of a related note, you must create the link right then and there. There’s no safety net. Laziness, in other words, is not an option.
As a result, you invest more energy in creating very selective links. You end up hardcoding cardlinks into your notes with the result that you end up taking them more seriously than you would cheaply created digital wikilinks. After investing that energy, it’s more likely that you will follow the cardlinks and explore your notes, which then takes you to new places in your Antinet where you might stumble upon other information that would lead to more accidental breakthrough insights.
The Bugs of Digital Search
Digital Search Robs You of Maintenance Rehearsal Learning and Association
Manually flipping through your old notes and reviewing them strengths your
long-term memory; it gives more opportunities for maintenance rehearsal (talked about in detail in this book).
Searching your Antinet relates to the process of reviewing flash cards for an exam. Yet it’s not painfully boring like rote learning usually is. Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition—it’s essentially maintenance rehearsal that allows you to keep an idea fresh in your mind, then refresh it when your memory lags. Yet, with the Antinet, it’s a different flavor of maintenance rehearsal. While you’re reviewing your old ideas, you’re oftentimes holding a new card idea in your mind. Why? Because you’re on a quest to install a new idea that you’re probably excited about into your Antinet. The name of the game is similarity. You’re on a quest, looking for the most similar idea to install this card next to. This entire quest is a fun process, it even improves mood, which I’ll detail shortly. In brief, digital search lacks such a process.
By using a digital Zettelkasten, you thwart the richness of the process of inducing maintenance rehearsal while searching for the most-closely associated idea in the Antinet.
Digital Search Kills the Magic of Structured Accidents
When perusing a library, structured accidents often occur. The accidental discovery of an incredible book is not a completely random accident, it’s a structured accident. After all, the book is contained within a structured contextual area of the library. It’s not completely random.
The magic of the Antinet is not only in how it fosters your thinking of and associating the new concept from the book you’ve read with what it relates to (that’s a conventional interaction). Rather, the magic of the Antinet comes from discoveries “which were never planned, never preconceived, or conceived.”550 Important discoveries come about not so much by way of your current thinking; they come about by realizing the magical connections you first missed in your old way of thinking. They also come about by way of structured accidents.
The power of accidents will be covered later in this book, however, let’s take a look at a few examples.
The following is an example of a more conventional interaction that reveals somewhat interesting insights.
Here’s the keyterm indexcard for Association.
There’s one curious entry there written as Fallacy of: (Persian Messenger): ‘2432/4’. This pertains to the Persian-messenger fallacy commonly known as shooting the messenger who bears, and is thus associated with, bad news. Because association is at the core of the fallacy, the keyterm points me to this area of my Antinet.
This type of thing often occurs in digital search. This, however, is not an unconventional insight. Nor is it something that necessarily produces breakthrough creative insights.
Breakthrough insights come about by way of unconventional interactions. They come about by way of structured accidents. This is why it’s critical, in Luhmann’s words, that your “selection and comparisons are not identical with the schema of searching for them.”551 Simply searching for a keyword robs the potential for innovation to occur. You are only presented with information you feel is related at the time. Ingenious insights come from unconventional discoveries you make along the way. The breakthrough ideas that come from flipping through your related past thoughts, in a structured way, are what unlock truly unconventional interactions. The tree structure of the Antinet induces these structured accidents.
While the Persian messenger association fallacy introduces an interesting interaction, the more compelling ones come about by exploring the items around the area where the concept resides (in this case, exploring around 2432/4). The truly unconventional interactions come about when navigating through and around the tree structure of the Antinet.
Structured accidents are critical for procuring breakthrough insights. The random pieces of information you encounter in your quest of exploring the Antinet create valuable opportunities to experience incidental learning (by way of structured accidents).552 Digital search mitigates such phenomena from occurring.
Digital Search Robs You of Developing a Unique Structure for Evolving Your Mind
The Antinet’s structure allowed Luhmann to store deeply complex and inter-
connected information, thanks to its tree structure. It allowed him to gracefully navigate his mind and his memory (past and present).
As has been mentioned before, developing his mind and memory came about from two processes. It occurred first by neuroimprinting thoughts by writing by hand. Second, by engaging in an ongoing process of tending to his file, Luhmann engaged in constant maintenance rehearsal, eventually developing the ability to recall thoughts without effort.553
When you instead review your own thoughts, written in your own handwriting, the process is often very fun. It’s also very humbling. You see your thoughts and brilliant ideas written on cards from years ago. It also helps mitigate the sense that you haven’t written something. When you see your own handwriting with your own brilliant ideas, you experience a sense of being impressed by your old self! More pertinent, this process builds your memory. It builds it in such a way wherein your thoughts are primed to compound.
With digital search, you’re constantly searching for and through documents without any life or personality. They contain your thoughts, yes. But they’re in some system-standardized font; the files are not living. They’re constantly changing, being deleted, and overwritten. You have no chance to view the changes in your thinking because all traces are erased.
Digital Search Robs You of a Positive Mood
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Sound like a scam?
It’s not. As crazy as it may sound, the act of associating concepts helps cure depression. It’s a self-referential cycle. A researcher at the Harvard Medical School found that “positive mood promotes associative processing, and associative processing promotes positive mood.”554 Every single thought in the Antinet can only be installed by embarking upon an associative process.
Every new idea, every new thought, every new extension of thought comes by way of exploring your tree of knowledge (which is a chain-linked set of associations). You then aim to associate any new idea with the concept that most closely resembles the chain of ideas already installed in the Antinet.
The Antinet improves mood, whereas digital search eradicates much of the magic inherent in associative processing. Finally! We have proof. Digital search robs you of a good mood. Digital search worsens your quality of life. If you want a better life, as counterintuitive as it sounds, go analog!
Conclusion
In this chapter, we moved through some very important concepts. And we moved through these in rather swift fashion (compared to the previous set of chapters)! We covered the theoretical structure of the index. You learned about the two types of indexcards. You learned how the index box works, and saw several examples. You also learned the truth about digital search: it’s a bug, not a feature. Last, we capped off this chapter by covering the negatives of digital search.
The next chapter is very brief, it’s the “net” in the Antinet. Keep reading. You’ve made it through the most challenging part of this book!
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/.
“Understanding Latitude and Longitude,” accessed April 4, 2022, https://journeynorth.org/tm/LongitudeIntro.html.
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/.
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/. “It becomes a sensitive system that internally reacts to many ideas, as long as they can be noted down.”
Johannes Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine,” Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe 53 (2016), 306.
Johannes Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine,” Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe 53 (2016), 306.
Alberto Cevolini, ed., Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, Library of the Written Word, volume 53 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 16. Emphasis added.
Alberto Cevolini, ed., Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, Library of the Written Word, volume 53 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 9.
“ZK II: Slip 9/8h - Niklas Luhmann Archive,” accessed April 1, 2022, https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8h_V.
Undisciplined, Archiving Luhmann w/ Johannes Schmidt, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz2K3auPLWU, 41:48.
Johannes Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine,” Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe 53 (2016), 302.
Alberto Cevolini, ed., Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, Library of the Written Word, volume 53 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 32.
Élisabeth Décultot, The Art of Excerpting in the Eighteenth Century Literature: Subversion and Continuity of an Old Scholarly Practice (Brill, 2016), 122.
Richard Yeo, Notebooks, Recollection, and External Memory: Some Early Modern English Ideas and Practices (Brill, 2016), 134.
“Deliberate Practice—an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics,” accessed April 1, 2022, https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/deliberate-practice.
“Luhmanns Arbeitsweise Im Elektronischen Zettelkasten," Strenge Jacke! (blog), September 8, 2015, https://strengejacke.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/luhmanns-arbeitsweise-im-elektronischen-zettelkasten/.
“Luhmanns Arbeitsweise Im Elektronischen Zettelkasten," Strenge Jacke! (blog), September 8, 2015, https://strengejacke.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/luhmanns-arbeitsweise-im-elektronischen -zettelkasten/.
Michael Michalko, Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, Revised edition (Berkeley, Calif: Ten Speed Press, 2006).
David Kadavy, Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples (Kadavy, Inc., 2022), 17.
Alberto Cevolini, ed., Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, Library of the Written Word, volume 53 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 33.
Alberto Cevolini, ed., Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, Library of the Written Word, volume 53 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 33.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, Norton pbk (New York: Norton, 2009), 142.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, Norton pbk (New York: Norton, 2009), 142.
“Monday Master Class: The Most Important Paper Research Advice You’ve Never Heard —Study Hacks—Cal Newport,” accessed April 11, 2022, https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2007/12/17/monday-master-class-the-most-important-paper-research-advice-youve-never-heard/.
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/.
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/.
Michael Jacob Kahana, Foundations of Human Memory. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 18-19.
Johannes Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine,” Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe 53 (2016), 305.
Moshe Bar, “A Cognitive Neuroscience Hypothesis of Mood and Depression,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 11 (November 2009): 456–63.
CHAPTER TEN
Network
In 1956, on a gray evening in the padded cell of a mental hospital, W. Ross Ashby sat at his desk. He was putting the finishing touches on his manuscript Introduction to Cybernetics. Ashby was not a patient of the mental hospital, however. He was a trained psychiatrist, research pathologist, and at the time, was serving as the Director of Research at Barnwood House Hospital in Gloucester, England.555 He simply found the padded cells of his patients to be the perfect environment to focus. In this padded cell he published a paper which would greatly influence some of the brightest thinkers in information theory, mathematics, and technology for decades to come.
Ashby was always up to some odd research project. A few years prior, he built what may be the first device in history capable of adapting itself to its environment: the homeostat. For that work, Ashby’s wife proffered their kitchen table as the workbench for his experiments that, in the homeostat’s case, included Royal Air Force bomb parts.556
From this experience Ashby devised his theory of cybernetics.
The Cybernetic Network of The Antinet
On the very first notecard Niklas Luhmann wrote down in preparation for describing the Antinet Zettelkasten, he wrote that it’s a cybernetic system.557 We also know that Luhmann was familiar with the work of W. Ross Ashby because we find Luhmann writing of Ashby’s work a few cards later.558 We also know that Luhmann was deeply familiar with a subfield of cybernetics called autopoiesis (which is the concept of a system producing and maintaining itself by creating itself).
Cybernetics derives from kybernetes (Greek), meaning “steersman,” and refers to having a goal and achieving the goal through steering in the proper direction by way of the communication of feedback. W. Ross Ashby defines it as “the art of steersmanship.”559 One of the pioneers of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, characterizes it as “control and communication in animal and machine.”560 It arose as a disciplinary field involving information theory, engineering, and computer science, and continues to have a wide-spanning range across many different disciplinary fields.
Luhmann’s reference to the structure of his Antinet as a cybernetic one makes sense. This field of study centers on communication. It’s no accident that Luhmann titled his paper on the Antinet, Communication with Noteboxes. The communication process arises out of the cybernetic nature of the Antinet, utilizing control (by way of a fixed goal), and feedback. Cybernetic systems are modeled in both machines and living organisms. In the former, such systems are closely related to machine learning, specifically Q-learning (which artificial intelligence systems use to learn by way of reinforcement).
