Scott P Scheper, page 6
Niklas Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes,” accessed May 5, 2021, https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes. “The slip box becomes a universal instrument. You can place almost everything in it, and not just ad hoc and in isolation, but with internal possibilities of connection with other contents.” Also, “It becomes a sensitive system that internally reacts to many ideas, as long as they can be noted down.”
Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes.” “The slip box becomes a universal instrument. You can place almost everything in it, and not just ad hoc and in isolation, but with internal possibilities of connections with other contents.”
Devon Delfino, “20 Writing Statistics.” Writer, November 11, 2020. https://writer.com/blog/professional-writing-salary-statistics/.
“UNESCO: Facts and Figures: Human Resources,” UNESCO: Facts and figures: Human resources, n.d., https://en.unesco.org/node/252277.
Richard Yeo, Notebooks, Recollection, and External Memory: Some Early Modern English Ideas and Practices. (Brill, 2016), 138.
Ann Blair, Early Modern Attitudes toward the Delegation of Copying and Note-Taking (Brill, 2016), 276.
Alberto Cevolini, Storing Expansions: Openness and Closure in Secondary Memories (Brill, 2016), 168.
Markus Krajewski, Note-Keeping: History, Theory, Practice of a Counter-Measurement against Forgetting (Brill, 2016), 322.
Krajewski, Note-Keeping, 312.
12 This is a common misconception. In reality, Zettelkasten does not fall under the field of PKM. The true nature of Zettelkasten revolves around knowledge development. It does not revolve around storing and managing information (which is what PKM is really about).
Cevolini, Alberto, ed. Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe. Library of the Written Word, volume 53, (Boston: Brill, 2016), 12.
Cevolini, Forgetting Machines, 12.
Niklas Luhmann, “Communication with Noteboxes (Revised Edition),” trans. Manfred Kuehn, https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/. Luhmann referred to this personality as an “alter ego.”
Cevolini, Forgetting Machines, 26.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts (English Translation) (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2002), 83. See the last chapter of “Short Cuts” (available in German).
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); also https://zettelkasten.de.
Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes, 15.
Johannes Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine.” In Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, edited by Alberto Cevolini (Boston: Brill2016), 289; Vanderstraeten, Raf. “Luhmann on Socialization and Education.” Educational Theory 50 (January 25, 2005): 1–23.
Undisciplined, “Archiving Luhmann w/ Johannes Schmidt,” 2021, accessed May 11, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz2K3auPLWU, 24:30.
Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes, 14.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts (English), 82.
Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 3.
Moeller, The Radical Luhmann, 3.
Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 15.
Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 14.
Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 14.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts (English), 17.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts (English), 17.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts (English), 17.
Undisciplined, Archiving Luhmann w/ Johannes Schmidt, 2021, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=kz2K3auPLWU, 21:40 and 28:58.
Undisciplined, Archiving Luhmann w/ Johannes Schmidt, 2021, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=kz2K3auPLWU, 48:30.
This “dark secret” of Luhmann’s life is omitted from Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes, as well as from popular websites like zettelkasten.de
holgersen911, “Niklas Luhmann—Observer in the Crow’s Nest” (Eng Sub), 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRSCKSPMuDc, accessed May 11, 2022, 12:40.
Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 11.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts (English), 11.
Moeller, The Radical Luhmann, 11-12.
Undisciplined, “Archiving Luhmann w/ Johannes Schmidt,” 4:00.
Moeller, The Radical Luhmann, 11ff.
Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts (English), 6.
Undisciplined, “Archiving Luhmann w/ Johannes Schmidt,”, 6:50.
Moeller, The Radical Luhmann.
44 Moeller, The Radical Luhmann.
Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis, trans. Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina, Translation edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2015), xiv.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed., Random (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010), 64.
See Luhmann “Communicating with Slip Boxes”: “Information, accordingly, originates only in systems which possess a comparative schema—even if this amounts only to: “this or something else.” For communication, we do not have to presuppose that both parties use the same comparative schema. The effect of surprise even increases when this is not the case and when we believe that a message means something (or is useful) against the background of other possibilities.”
Ryan Holiday, “The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering, Organizing And Using Everything You Read,” RyanHoliday.Net (blog), April 1, 2014, https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/. For instance, one can observe a dedicated box of notecards being created for Holiday’s book, The Obstacle is The Way.
Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool,” 290.
David Kadavy, Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples, Kindle Edition (Kadavy, Inc.), 35. “By trying to think of how to describe the passage in my own words, I activate the associative machine, which often causes the current idea to collide with some other idea in my mind. Associative thinking promotes a positive mood, so it shouldn’t be a surprise how fun this task is. If writing a passage makes me think of something related, I write it in parentheses.”
Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes”: “The slip box provides combinatorial possibilities which were never planned, never preconceived, or conceived in this way.”
Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes”: “The communication with the slip box becomes fruitful only at a high level of generalization, namely that of establishing communicative relations of relations. And it becomes productive only at the moment of evaluation, and is thus bound to a certain time and is to a high degree accidental.”
Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes”: “This effect of innovation is based on the one hand on the circumstance that the query provokes possibilities of making relations which could not be traced prior to it. On the other hand, it is based also on the fact that the internal horizons of selection and comparisons are not identical with schema of searching for them.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Current Zettelkasten Landscape
Why I Decided to Write This Book
Let’s first start with why i am not writing a book about the Antinet (i.e., an analog Zettelkasten).
I am not writing a book on the Antinet to sell a massive number of books. As mentioned, I started out working with an Antinet because I desired to write about my interests in other fields (specifically: marketing, copywriting, philosophy, and psychology). While working on a book in these fields, I decided to use an analog Zettelkasten to help me. In doing this, I discovered how wrong the conventional wisdom is about Zettelkasten. I had to learn this the hard way. In order to figure out the truth, I went straight to the original source: Luhmann’s online archive. I spent many months reverse-engineering Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. I wrote out many of his notecards by hand to understand how it truly works. I discovered that the Zettelkasten is much different than how it’s described everywhere else.
I think it’s important to publish this book on the Antinet because there’s already a wealth of wonderful books in the field of marketing, copywriting, and psychology. Within the realm of Zettelkasten, there’s really only one dominant book out there right now: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.
This would be fine if the book was excellent; however, there are two issues with the book. First, it contains information that gets the most critical pieces of the Zettelkasten wrong. And second, many people don’t even realize Ahrens’s book exists. This becomes problematic because the online environment for gaining an accurate understanding of a Zettelkasten is even worse. I surveyed the top nine search engine results for the term “Zettelkasten.” In brief, every one of them contains flaws in their description of what a Zettelkasten is.
When searching for the term “Zettelkasten” on Google, the first result is Wikipedia’s entry for Zettelkasten. This entry gets it wrong in several ways. First, it describes the Zettelkasten as a hierarchical structure.76 This is wrong. A Zettelkasten is a tree-like structure wherein each leaf is of the same importance as any other. Each leaf, like each note, just lives in a different location on a tree. Second, Wikipedia posits a Zettelkasten as something built in digital format using “specialist knowledge management software.” The entry then reluctantly admits that it “can be done on paper using index cards.”77 In reality, the true power of Zettelkasten revolves around the fact that it is—in its very essence—an actual notebox!
The second result I was given was the website zettelkasten.de.78 When I first began surveying the top search results for Zettelkasten, I landed on a “Lessons Learned” post on the home page of zettelkasten.de. The post was written by a machine-learning researcher who shared his journey using a Zettelkasten. This researcher mentioned the frustration using tags. The site owners responded, sharing their frustrations with tags, saying that the “mess” it creates resonated with them. Yet as a solution, they referenced a post that discusses a distinction between good and bad tags.79 To me, this just seems like complexity built on unnecessary complexity. Remember, I was very new to the field of Zettelkasten at the time. I soon discovered that the creator of Zettelkasten, Niklas Luhmann, never used tags. This illustrates what I believe happens to many people who are new to Zettelkasten. They end up stumbling across these types of online posts and find themselves unnecessarily confused.
The search engine’s third result on the term “Zettelkasten” also came from zettelkasten.de. It was the Getting Started Overview page where one finds advice such as “Don’t use categories. Use tags instead.”80 The problem here is twofold. First, as stated previously, Luhmann never used tags (as the concept was not yet invented). And second, Luhmann didn’t even subscribe to this notion in spirit. Luhmann used categories and top-level sections for his Zettelkasten. They weren’t strict categories like the Dewey Decimal system. They were more like rough starting points. Nonetheless, they were indeed categories. In Luhmann’s first Zettelkasten, he had 108 categories. His second Zettelkasten was more narrowly focused on his sociological work, yet it still contained 11 top-level categories.81
The next handful of search engine results suffers similar inaccuracies. They contain material overly focused on the digitized—and in my opinion, compromised—version of the Zettelkasten. They also include complete inventions first devised by Sönke Ahrens. They also confuse Luhmann’s numeric-alpha notecard address system by telling readers to use dates for their notecard IDs.82 The best information source on the Zettelkasten doesn’t even make it into the first five pages of the search results.83
Simply stated, learning what a Zettelkasten is by searching the term online is like walking into a minefield of misinformation.
I believe there are only a handful of sources the inquisitive are left with if they wish to gain an accurate understanding of Zettelkasten in its purest form (the analog form). Those sources are (1) the online archive of Niklas Luhmann’s actual Zettelkasten, (2) the paper outlining Zettelkasten written by Niklas Luhmann himself, titled, Communication with Noteboxes, (3) the works of Johannes Schmidt, a scholar at Bielefeld University who heads up Luhmann’s archive project, and who has studied Luhmann’s materials closest.84
These three sources are difficult to penetrate and understand. With pen and notecards in hand, I spent one month reading Luhmann’s paper, Communication with Noteboxes. When printed out, this paper totals a mere four pages. It’s so densely written it requires very careful reading in order to grasp what is being said. I spent over a month reading this paper! Yet, my careful review was worth it; there is so much to learn by reading the paper. I spent about six weeks doing the same thing with Johannes Schmidt’s in-depth article on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten.85 This, too, was a very dense read.
I tell you all of this not necessarily to encourage you to do the same. Instead, I tell you this in case you’re curious and want to venture down the rabbit-hole of Zettelkasten knowledge yourself. These are the primary sources. They’re difficult. Thankfully, however, you don’t have to spend weeks trying to piece together a Zettelkasten from those few articles. That’s why I’m here— to introduce to you the world of the real Zettelkasten (without boring the heck out of you with dense academic prose). Even if I do bore the heck out of you in some parts, just know that it could be worse, much worse. If you doubt that, just try reading Luhmann’s paper!
Before moving on, let me first outline my intent in describing the misinterpretations others hold in regards to Zettelkasten. I am not doing this because I’m motivated by some sadistic pleasure gained from criticizing the well-intentioned work of others.86 In fact, I feel bad about calling to light what I see as the errors and misinterpretations of such people. Every individual I’ve come across in the personal knowledge management and Zettelkasten fields are well-intentioned. Granted these people often sell online courses, or online consulting, and have agendas related to those sales; yet it’s not disguised. It’s quite apparent what the catch is. Every one of them believes he or she is teaching material that will help people produce better knowledge. Moreover, much of the proselytizers of Zettelkasten knowledge come close to getting things right. Indeed, some authors share useful principles that even Luhmann himself did not bother mentioning.87
As I was learning Luhmann’s Zettelkasten myself, I observed something that reminded me of a cognitive error called the availability cascade. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term, you’re undoubtedly familiar with its concept. An availability cascade describes the phenomenon of an idea spreading rapidly and creating a self-reinforcing cascade of information. It occurs as the result of encapsulating a novel and complex concept into a simplified version—and here’s the key part—the simplified version is slightly less accurate. This creates a waterfall of incorrect information that re-circulates itself and spreads rapidly. Why? Because simpler ideas spread more easily.
Recently, a study at UC San Diego was published showcasing the availability cascade. The study found that research that is less likely to be true is cited 153 times more if the material is interesting. Implicit in this is the following idea: research spreads more if it’s simplified enough to be interesting in the first place (regardless of its accuracy).
The phenomenon of the availability cascade finds itself ever-so-present within the land of Zettelkasten. It’s negatively affecting every well-intentioned knowledge worker who becomes hopeful and excited about Zettelkasten. Here’s why: a second wave of teachers of the Zettelkasten finds itself emerging right now. Most of them do not use the primary sources as their material for teaching others about what a Zettelkasten is. Instead, this new wave of Zettelkasten evangelists use Sönke Ahrens’s work, namely his book How to Take Smart Notes, as the primary material on which they rely.88 The problem with these new Zettelkasten evangelists is not just their misunderstanding of how the Zettelkasten truly works, but also the contradictions they introduce.89
For instance, one self-declared bestselling author published a book recently on how the Zettelkasten works.90 His book not only preaches Ahrens’s work, it appends new inventions onto it. As a result, one is left with inventions built on top of an already sizable list of inventions. I will introduce you to these inventions shortly. They derive from a new quasi-religion that has developed a rather malignant growth inside the world of Zettelkasten. I call this quasi-religion, Ahrensianity.
Ahrensianity
Mark Twain once wrote to himself privately in his notebook, “If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.”91 This indeed may be true. After all, Jesus referred to himself as Jewish and never called himself a “Christian,” for one. Second, he was a poor Galilean who was illiterate and didn’t speak Greek (the language the New Testament was written in). Where did “Christian” come from then? From the early Hellenic-Jewish Apostle named Paul—a man who never met nor knew Jesus, yet who served as a forceful voice in the formative decades after the death of Jesus. Paul’s teachings and writings formed the core beliefs and doctrines of Christianity. In brief, his interpretations of a remote Jew he didn’t even know are what ended up giving birth to Christianity as we know it.92
