Scott P Scheper, page 38
The Trouble of Selection: Feedback
Here, selection refers to the entire process of thinking that takes place in your mind when you encounter a new idea. It refers to the process involved in determining what thought generated by a text should be (1) extracted onto a card by writing it out by hand to ruminate on or elaborate on; (2) stored in the Antinet by installing it in the position most similar and most closely associated with it; or (3) discarded entirely because it’s not worth the time investment of extracting or storing the thought.
This process occurs very quickly in the mind. It’s also not trivial. Consider what Alberto Cevolini observes: “Troubles arise when one wonders about the criteria according to which one should select, store, or discard.”622
The notion of troubles arising with regard to the information one should select or not select while reading is echoed by other scientists. Cognitive scientist, Fiona McPherson, holds selection as the most critical skill you can master. It is the foundation upon which others skills rest. Yet “no-one has yet to come up with an effective way of teaching this skill,” observes McPherson. However, there is some good news: what McPherson meant is that there’s no universal one-size-fits-all way of teaching this. Each person will pick up the skill of selection in a different way. It is a skill that can indeed be taught. However, certain people may require more practice than others.623
Developing the skills of selection requires one thing: feedback.
Feedback equals growth. In a classroom setting, you can quickly tell how well your notetaking is working from the feedback you receive in form of test scores. Yet in creative work with long timelines (like one or two years), feedback is a bit more difficult to receive in a timely manner. Sönke Ahrens makes such an observation in his book How to Take Smart Notes. “The linear model of academic writing comes with few feedback opportunities,” Ahrens writes.624 Yet he makes an interesting assertion that, by choosing to reformulate or reflect on your reading, you’re essentially testing yourself on whether or not you understand the material well enough to explain it in your own words. You’re testing yourself to see if you even know it well enough to reformulate the material. You’re also testing yourself whenever you attempt to write a reflection note. Do you truly understand it well enough that you’ll be able to reflect on what you’ve selected?
However, receiving feedback is tricky when it comes to selection. Whenever you attempt to write notes on something, you receive feedback on how well you understand the material. Yet, this does not provide feedback on whether or not you should have selected the material in the first place.
The question is: How do we gain feedback from the notes we create?
One argument is to just publish your notes. In other words, create a so-called ‘digital garden’ or a personal website which shares your notes so that others can provide feedback. Not surprisingly, this is something I do not advise for a number of reasons. In brief, when you publish your notes, you’re publishing information. This is less useful to people than publishing knowledge. With knowledge, you’ve contextualized and further processed that information. As a result your knowledge provides the reader with much more value than unprocessed information. In turn, if you do indeed receive feedback from such notes, the feedback will be misguided. To a large degree, it will be a waste of time, which is why I advise against it.
In sum, perhaps there are no shortcuts here. The best way to select material is to do so with a clear understanding of why you’re reading the source you’ve selected. It also requires that you have a clear understanding of your audience.
I’ll offer a few suggestions for getting better at selection:
First, create a profile of your dream reader. Search photos online and cut out a stock photo of him or her. Paste the image on a notecard and write down a made-up name for the person. They’re your dream reader, your dream avatar whom you wish to serve. Ideally, create a male and female avatar (unless you’re specifically targeting a gender). Write down a one-to-three sentence profile on them, detailing what their interests are, what they like, or dislike, etc. Heck, your avatar could even be your professor if you’re a student. Place the picture(s) on your wall or some place you’ll see regularly. Whenever you’re reading a book, read with your dream reader in mind. This is another reason why it’s helpful to adopt a contribution mindset (as opposed to a personal growth mindset).
Second, I recommend publishing short pieces of your work or material as you’re writing. Instead of publishing under-processed notes, I recommend that you give readers chapter samples and tastes of your writing. Do this by publishing short pieces or blog posts online. This is something I’ve done myself over the course of writing this book.
Later, I’ll be introducing you to something called priming, which promotes more effective reading. You’ll end up selecting information aligned with why you’ve set out to read a book.
“Selection is a highly personalized activity,” writes scholar, Alberto Cevolini.625 In other words, every person is unique, and everyone will spot unique material that speaks to them. Your job is to channel your internal voice and select the material that uniquely resonates with you, plain and simple.
Selection doesn’t just mean “gathering,” it means “making a judgement.”626 However, what then follows is the question of what you should even make a judgement about! From here, we can rely on the wisdom of early modern literature: select only what is considered to be of future utility.627 That is, select what will be of future utility to you, and through you, what will be of future utility to others.
Selection helps form the uniqueness of your second mind. If you fit an entire library into your Antinet, it would demolish the unique personality you’ve injected into it by way of selection. Digital apps like Pocket or Read Later or Evernote do not create a second mind. They are mere repositories of quotes, articles, and material from others. As scholar, Richard Yeo holds, a second mind is selected material (from books, a library, articles, etc.) that you capture through creating notes which then are installed in your Antinet. This entity works in tandem with your internal biological memory to create an internal dialogue, and what results serves as your second mind.628
You don’t want your Antinet to embody characteristics of just any library. Rather, you want it to be a personal library. As one scholar observes, one of the most impressive aspects of the process in building an Antinet is that it builds a universal personal library out of a universal library.629 “Such re-arising of the world (of learning) inside the world (of learning),” Alberto Cevolini writes, “is possible through selection, and in turn selection is the crucial operation for begetting complexity, that is, an excess of possible combinations, links, or references among meaningful data.”630
Think of it like this: reality is equal to all data in the cosmos. Science is the study of reality. Yet science proceeds very slowly and selectively in advancing our understanding of reality. We extract only strands of reality and do our best to provide theories and experiments that clearly explain this slice of reality. Luhmann makes mention of science and reality never being whole. They’re never equal. Why? Because science proceeds “selectively, because this is the only way to bring order and comprehensibility.”631
In brief, you don’t want all the data in the universe in your Antinet. Nor do you want tools that bring you closer to this non-ideal maximum. Digital tools have the tendency to do just that. They have the tendency to create overselection (something I’ll cover shortly). You simply want to select the most important information from the sources you engage.
As Fiona McPherson writes, “Anything that helps you select the most important information is good.”632 Only you, yourself, can determine what strategy works best for you in selecting material that resonates with you.
In the next chapter I’ll teach you some different extraction methods, which will make selecting material easier for you. But until then, let’s continue our journey through The Matrix (that is, selection).
Selection Underlies Communication
Communication was a critically important area in Luhmann’s research; likewise, for the Antinet, it also stands as a critical component. We’ll detail the concept of communication later in this book. However, for now, it’s interesting to note one peculiar thing involving Luhmann’s concept of communication: it’s founded on selection.
According to Luhmann, communication is an emergent reality that emanates from three different selections: (1) selection of information, (2) selection of the message of this function, and (3) selective understanding (or misunderstanding) of the message and its interpretation.633
The concept of selection is critically important pragmatically, as well as theoretically, for the Antinet. For this reason, we shall spend time on both the theoretical and practical matters of selection.
Knowledge Selection as Natural Selection
In natural selection, the environment essentially selects organisms that have qualities that are best adapted for it to survive and reproduce. The process of selecting information and turning into knowledge is not much different.634
The first step in knowledge selection is actually information selection. Knowledge is created from information. As found in nature, reproduction (generally) involves an individual selecting a mate with corresponding genetic information. With an Antinet, you select information from sources that you read. The sources are analogous to a mating partner.
Selected information is then processed into knowledge by reformulating or reflecting on the information, to which you add your own experiences and understanding, anchored by your own unique perspectives (and the context in which you’ve experienced life). When you create a reformulation note or reflection note, you essentially create a new entity altogether: you create knowledge. In evolutionary terms, you give birth to a child—a new, living organism (after exchanging information in the form of genetic code). In knowledge-science terms, you give birth to a book or other creative work (after exchanging information in the form of reading other authors’ works).
Your (intellectual) environment is populated by your audience of readers. If the knowledge you create (your book) resonates with your audience exceptionally well, it will be selected. It will be selected apart from other competing books, to rise in popularity and essentially reproduce.
For your work to survive, it doesn’t necessarily need to be the best ever. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the most optimal piece of work. Rather it must be sufficiently better than the other pieces of work competing for your reader’s attention. In turn, your work will rise in popularity and reproduce itself.
This highlights some important points:
1. The success of the knowledge you produce is very much a function of: (a) the source material you select. This means the books, articles, podcasts, lectures, videos, or other media you select; (b) what genes (or ideas) that you select from your mate (or book); and (c) how you then process that information and its genes to produce a new creation (a baby, or a book); and (d) how you then organize that creation (by deciding where to file it, or how to raise it).
2. The output of this process that is best adapted to its audience of readers (that is, its environment), will survive and reproduce more successfully than less adapted output.
The Levels of Selection
The Antinet can be thought of as a system containing relations of relations of relations. Encompassed in this model are three levels of selection: (1) selecting what source to engage with (choosing what books to read), and (2) selecting what material to extract, and (3) selecting where in the Antinet to install and link to the selection(s).
Let’s explore each of these levels of selection now.
Source Selection
Before embarking upon the process of determining which material to select from the books you read, there is an even more critical challenge: selecting which books are even worth reading in the first place!
As the Catholic intellectual, Antonin Sertillanges writes, the process of selection is prepended with an important stage: “to choose books and to choose in books.”635
Here are some guidelines for selecting which books to read in the first place. These guidelines are not set-in-stone rules. Nor are they comprehensive; yet, I think they’re helpful enough to keep in mind as a guideline for selecting books.
Guideline #1: Do Not Trust Bestsellers with Catchy Titles
“Do not trust interest[ing] advertising and catchy titles.”
–Antonin Sertillanges636
Even non-sponsored books on Amazon are suspect these days. Major publishers with big idea hardbound books produce some of the biggest horse-shit out there. Ghost writers are behind more books than you’ll ever know. Big publishing houses thrive on publishing crap. I’ve been behind the scenes during this process and witnessed how it plays out. The New York Times Best Sellers list is really a list of synthetically engineered crap.
Guideline #2: Do Not Trust Popular Channels That Books are Advertised Through
If you heard about a book because the author was featured on a popular podcast, be suspicious. Such authors are backed by a publishing house. They’re backed by a public relations circuit that swaps in their latest figurehead. I know this because (again) I’ve been behind the scenes and have seen it firsthand. In some cases, there’s a lot of pressure for show-hosts to accept guests, regardless of their quality. Why? First, shows need content. Second, the publishing house probably did the show-host “a solid” recently. For instance, a publishing house may have gotten a movie star on their show recently during the star’s book tour of their memoir. The show-host may then feel a sense of obligation to return the favor. How do they return the favor? By saying yes to whichever guest the publishing house proposes to feature on their next show (regardless of guest quality). The guest then proceeds to hype-up whatever new (rehashed) book they’re launching.
Guideline #3: Go to The Original Source
“The majority of writers only edit and publish other writers’ thoughts,” Sertillanges writes. “Read only those books in which leading ideas are expressed at first hand.”637
When you read this book, you are reading the first-hand account of the Antinet. You are reading of my experiences building an analog knowledge machine—a second mind—using the principles of Niklas Luhmann’s Antinet. My primary source is the primary source (Communication with Noteboxes). Yet I’m not just regurgitating his paper. I’m sharing my knowledge and my first-hand experiences in developing knowledge with such a system. You’re reading about my experiences from thousands of hours of using the system. You’re learning my nuances and ways of teaching the system. You’re reading the primary source of the Antinet.
Many books are secondary sources. They’re merely edited curations of the primary source. This includes books like The Complete Idiots Guides. Don’t read these books. Read a Wikipedia article instead. Do your own research. Soon, you’ll spot recurring themes and sources that are regularly cited. These are the original sources, the primary sources. Go to these sources. They’re a must.
Of course, secondary sources can be helpful as well. Specifically, they can be helpful in spotting how the secondary sources got certain things right and certain things wrong. In addition, the secondary sources may point out the things you missed when reviewing the primary source(s).
Secondary sources are also useful in helping you compile a repository of frequently cited works or authors.
In my readings, there are certain thinkers who are mentioned over and over and over. These people include Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, René Descartes, John Locke, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and more.
The main take-away from this guideline is this: primary sources are a requirement, secondary sources are not.
Link Selection
Another level of selection within the Antinet is selecting where to connect the idea (i.e., where to install the card within the Antinet).
Selective Relations
“The communication with the second mind becomes fruitful only at a high level of generalization, namely that of establishing communicative relations of relations.”
–Niklas Luhmann638
It’s not the relations between notes that make the Antinet a powerful system; rather it’s the selective relations that do so.
Johannes Schmidt specifically calls attention to the importance of selective relations near the end of his paper, where he points out that the specific readings and the material one selects from the readings are important to the Antinet. However, what is also critical is found in Luhmann’s case with “(selective) relations established between his notes by means of his referencing technique.”639 That is, you must also be selective in linking your selections to certain cards and ideas.
Note how Schmidt encloses the word selective in parentheses in the passage. He did this to call out the implicit truth that Luhmann’s links were selective in nature. When Luhmann used the phrase communicative relations of relations, there was no need for him to specify that he meant selective relations.
For Luhmann, relations (or links) between notes were, by nature, selective. They were not trivial to create. They could not be bulk-applied to digital files using templates, regular expressions (regex), and tags. Links were hard-coded into one’s Antinet, and as previously indicated, they were neuroimprinted onto one’s mind. This network of highly selective links is a result of the analog nature of the system, the benefit of which we touched on in the analog chapter of this book.
