Understanding | It’s best to create notes which are only about one thing—but which, as much as possible, capture the entirety of that thing.
Understanding | It’s best to factor Evergreen notes by concept (rather than by author, book, event, project, topic, etc). This way, you discover connections across books and domains as you update and link to the note over time
The most straightforward way to take notes is to start a new note for each book, each project, or each research topic. Because each note covers many concepts, it can be hard to find what you’ve written when a concept comes up again later: you have to remember the name of each book or project which dealt with the topic
Understanding | If we push ourselves to add lots of links between our notes, that makes us think expansively about what other concepts might be related to what we’re thinking about. It creates pressure to think carefully about how ideas relate to each other - AnalyticalThinking - the difference between synthetic thinking & analytical thinking
by recording the connections, we document how we came to our conclusions, which may be useful to us (or our colleagues) later. As much as is possible, we should Prefer fine-grained associations. By contrast, Tags are an ineffective association structure.
Fine Grain Association | Links between materials in an information system can be fine-grained (like a citation in the middle of a sentence of a paper) or coarse-grained (like a “see also” section).
It’s generally better to make fine-grained associations. For instance, rather than evaluating a jumbled list of papers related to the paper you’re reading, it’s more helpful to see that I noticed paper X relates to paragraph N.
This is particularly true when links are bidirectional, since you’ll need help to see why the “backwards” relationship makes sense.
it's a conversational association between two concepts as opposed to a reference
As opposed to Tags - by regularly creating "fine grained association" documentation of our research and referencing our notes we can create detailed write ups on how different concepts relate to each other - this is what I'm hoping to accomplish with my My Thoughts section of Roam.
First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. It’s one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself, unlock your creative potential, and move from linear to non-linear results.