Scott P Scheper, page 36
This is a “see also” cardlink.
As you can see (pun intended), numeric-alpha addresses are powerful. They enable a whole wealth of possibilities and ways to link bits of your knowledge together to generate new connections. This is where a system like the Antinet really begins to outshine other systems.
“See Also” ExRefs
“See also” cardlinks not only pertain to internal cardlinks (which link to cards within your Antinet). They can also be used for ExRefs (external references).
For instance, say you read a book that contains a good passage relating to Love. Yet you’re not working actively on a project related to Love. Instead of developing an elaborate main note on love, for sake of time, you can simply create an entry, which reads See also: r.Moeller, 36. Luhmann did this frequently.
How Do I Create Notes for Cold Hard Facts?
While writing the section at the beginning of this book, I received the following question: How do I install cold hard facts in my Antinet?
The individual who asked me this question works in the field of French real estate law. He was wondering where to file the following note: “French real estate law requires each condominium to be divided by unit, and each apartment is a unit.”
On this matter, I’ll say a few things.
I have indeed installed cold hard facts in my own Antinet. They are cards like population size by country, revenue figures of businesses, etc.
However, I created these cold hard fact cards in the pre-Antinet days.595 So that’s one reason they even exist. I have since retroactively gone back and installed many of these cold hard fact cards into my Antinet. In every case, I’ve found the academic disciplinary fields to accommodate them. There’s always a branch for where they can go. And even if there isn’t a clear branch within the academic disciplinary fields, you can just create one (and likely place it in branch 5000).
I like to place my cold hard fact cards on 3 x 5 inch cards. I like to consult them from time to time in order to unearth accidental insights.
Yet, as I touched upon in the beginning of this book, the Antinet is primarily useful for creators. It’s useful for those who wish to elaborate on thoughts and evolve them by reflecting on them. You evolve your thoughts by linking them to more thoughts filed behind them.
If you wish to just memorize a bunch of cold hard facts, an Antinet may be overkill. Heck, even digital tools like Anki do the trick for this type of thing. Of course, there is certainly value to be obtained from the act of writing facts down by hand.
Typically, those who benefit most from an Antinet are writers, researchers, and creators who wish to evolve thought.
After sharing my response with the individual who asked the question about cold hard facts, he provided more clarity. In actuality, his work in French real estate law is for his thesis. In this case, the Antinet will have more use, and provide more value.
To wrap this up, it is possible to use the Antinet to store cold hard facts. For example, you’d place the previously mentioned card in Real Estate Law branch. For instance, 1310. Near that branch, you could create a branch for French Real Estate Law at 1312. Within that branch, you can begin creating cards pertaining to specific laws at 1312/1. Again, these numbers are arbitrary and can be chosen by you based on personal whim.
Conclusion
We’ve covered a lot in this chapter. We started with important principles involved in building an Antinet. We covered the mindset with which you should approach the beginning phases of building an Antinet. We emphasized that you must not get lost in the trap of perfectionism. We also capped off this preamble with the concept of goals, and growth vs. contribution.
We then dove headfirst into building out your own Antinet. If you followed the steps (which I hope you did), you now have a solid base. You have the start of your own Antinet!
Now that you have a solid foundation, it’s time to embark upon the next phase of our journey: Knowledge Development. Get ready. This section of the book is a lot more fun than it sounds. It also serves as the core process for building your knowledge. Let’s go.
Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2017), 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) , 296. https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2942475.
Johannes Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine,” Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe 53 (2016), 310. Emphasis added.
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.
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/. “This proves to be helpful because our own memory—others will have similar experiences to mine—works in part with key words and in part with author’s names.”
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. “However, Luhmann did not systematically pursue this strategy.”
I pulled the 96% out of my ass; yet, when I surveyed the search results, I found that roughly 9/10 results regurgitate Sönke Ahrens’s interpretation of Zettelkasten, which is not how Luhmann’s Zettelkasten worked.
Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2017), 5.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts, Orig.-Ausg., 4. Aufl, Short Cuts 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2002), 37.
OP A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan, Reprint edition (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 11.
Niklas Luhmann, Niklas Luhmann Short Cuts (English Translation), 2002, 11.
Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis, trans. Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina, Translation edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2015), 5.
Richard W. Hamming and Bret Victor, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Stripe Press, 2020), 386.
Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 1, trans. Rhodes Barrett (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), xi.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, Norton pbk (New York: Norton, 2009), 43.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, Norton pbk (New York: Norton, 2009), 61.
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/.
Niklas Luhmann, Niklas Luhmann Short Cuts (English Translation), 2002, 22.
“Explore-Exploit Tradeoff—Definition and Examples,” Conceptually, accessed April 12, 2022, https://conceptually.org/concepts/explore-or-exploit.
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Later prt. edition (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), 226.
Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 11.
Mortimer Jerome Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, Rev. and updated ed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 45.
Niklas Luhmann, Niklas Luhmann Short Cuts (English Translation), 2002, 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), 310-11. Emphasis added.
Johannes Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine,” Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe 53 (2016), 311.
If you are living in a geographic region adhering to ISO standards, use the A6 paper size. Or, if you do not have access to 4 x 6 inch or A6 notecards, just get creative. Cut out a piece of paper to such a size. Luhmann used old pieces of paper from his father’s brewery, as well as paper from his children’s old coloring books.
Luhmann chose the top-left corner; I prefer top-right corner.
I host this paper on a website I created while I was releasing daily writing pieces (part of a daily publishing challenge).
Since the website was created by yours truly, and since it is called The Daily Scott Scheper, and, since it is a page about Zettelkasten, that’s where the abbreviation comes from: “TDSSZ.”
Undisciplined, Archiving Luhmann w/ Johannes Schmidt, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz2K3auPLWU, 36:50.
For over a decade, and before discovering the Antinet, I used a notebox system organized by book or category (like Ryan Holiday’s notebox system).
CHAPTER TWELVE
Knowledge Development
The category zettelkasten finds itself lumped into is called personal knowledge management (PKM). PKM is a disciplinary subfield of knowledge management concerned with the personal collection, organization, storing, and sharing of digital information.
As it applies to the Antinet, I dislike the categorical term PKM for several reasons. First off, notetaking systems do not exclusively contain knowledge; they contain information, which helps one develop knowledge. In addition, the entire point of Luhmann’s Antinet centered on the development of knowledge (not management of knowledge).
Luhmann’s Antinet is not seen as a memory tool, but a thinking tool. It’s a thinking tool that aims to develop one’s thoughts. It’s a very active system, not something that is properly encompassed by the term management. Because it requires action, a better term for it is development. The goal of the Antinet is to develop one’s thoughts (revealed in the notes you create), as well as your own thinking (revealed in how your brain works to link together ideas). For this reason, I encompass both thoughts and thinking under the umbrella term knowledge. In turn this gives us the label in which I categorize the Antinet: a knowledge development system.
Two Processes of Knowledge Development
As Johannes Schmidt observes, there are two processes of the Antinet as
a knowledge development system. The first process involves developing thought through the practice of writing by hand. The second process involves interacting with the Antinet as a communication partner.596
Process I: Short-term Knowledge Development
In Luhmann’s own Antinet, one finds the following handwritten note: “Underlying the filing technique is the experience that without writing, there is no thinking.”597
In the short term, the Antinet enables users to develop thought through the practice of writing by hand. As I’ve illustrated throughout this text, I contend that this practice develops thought better than digital systems because of the deliberate attention required. As Schmidt observes, “writing things down enables disciplined thinking in the first place.”598 I also contend that the analog nature of the Antinet develops one’s thinking better because it neuroimprints ideas on the mind far more effectively than digital tools.
Process II: Long-term Knowledge Development
As Schmidt highlights, the second process of knowledge development centers on the Antinet emerging as a communication partner during research. This happens by way of the tree structure of the Antinet evolving your thoughts over the long term.
When you begin exploring your notes as you prepare to write a manuscript, a communication experience emerges. For instance, you first come upon a note written seven years ago. Following this note is a newer note recently added which seemingly contradicts the first note. What happens next illustrates the internal dialogue that takes place: you question why the notes contradict one another, and then you begin investigating the sources of the notes. You begin investigating your chain of thoughts that resulted in coming away with a different understanding from what you now hold as true.
This is an instance that exemplifies the long-term thought development that takes place while using an Antinet. Thoughts are developed both in the short term as well as the long term.
Before we get into the four specific phases of knowledge development, let’s first take a step back into the abstract land of information science.
The Nature of Knowledge and Information
In order to better understand knowledge, we need to distinguish it from its close relatives: data, information, and wisdom. This brings us to the DIKW pyramid.
The DIKW Pyramid
A convenient model that emerged within the information science field is called the DIKW pyramid.
Like all models of reality, the pyramid is fuzzy and imperfect. Every scholar in information science seems to have their own interpretation of the four components of the pyramid. For instance, one paper contains 130 different definitions of data, information and knowledge from 45 different scholars. The paper was created because it recognized that an issue with information science revolves around the lack of clarity on these fundamental concepts.599
The different components of the DIKW pyramid get so fuzzy that I almost scratched this entire section when I started to second-guess whether or not I was getting things right. I would read one scholar’s explanation and come away with an understanding of information only to find another scholar classifying the same thing as knowledge!
Regardless, I’ve assembled the following explanations, which are more than sufficient for our purposes.
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed stimuli from the universe. The raw material can be physical in nature or metaphysical in nature. Data is raw material, like the universe’s energy waves and particles: light, heat, sound, force, and electromagnetic components. Think of data as sound wave represented in computer symbols like 010110100011011. We cannot understand what this data means at this point.
Information
“To be informed is to know simply that something is the case.”
–Mortimer Adler600
Before data can be converted to information, it undergoes a phase transition. The phase transition is the interpretation phase. This phase involves our sensory system (sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, balance). For example, our ears receive data, and then interpret the data. We then transcribe the data into forms we can comprehend.
In brief, information is data we can comprehend. For instance, the sound wave data from the previous example (010110100011011) is interpreted through one’s ears. It is then transitioned into a comprehensible sound: the sound of a train, which is information.
Knowledge
“To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.”
–Mortimer Adler601
Knowledge is information multiplied by meaning. Knowledge is useful information. I also like to think of knowledge as structured information. Knowledge integrates, correlates, and collects several pieces of information.602 Say, for instance, we have the information that the sound we just heard is that of a train. Knowledge assembles and structures other useful pieces of information onto this: the information comprising the who, what, where, and when properties attached to data.603 For instance, we know what we heard sounds like a train (what). Yet we piece this information together with other properties: it involves you and the train (who), its general direction (where), and how recently we heard it (when).
Knowledge enables us to connect and structure these disparate pieces of information together to create meaning. It tells us, holy crap, I’m on the train tracks right now and I just heard a train. This brings us to wisdom.
Wisdom
“Intelligent action depends on knowledge.”
–Mortimer Adler604
Wisdom is knowledge multiplied by action. When you take action after the information phase, that’s intuitive action. However, when you take action after the knowledge phase, you’re taking wise action. You’re making a decision based on multiple pieces of information. This doesn’t mean you’re necessarily taking the right action; however, it does mean you have a higher likelihood of taking the right action. Knowing things only gets one so far; wise action stands as a critical phase.
Formulaic Summary
Here’s a formulaic summary of what we just covered:
Data = Raw Stimuli
Information = Comprehension x Data
Knowledge = Information x Meaning
Wisdom = Knowledge x Action
Knowledge Creation and Sharing is The Goal
With the Antinet, the goal is to create knowledge, not information. Information is a means to an end. We don’t just want to collect facts and material we can comprehend; we want to create knowledge.
