- Hieararchy:
- is a way to organize information
- useful when relationships between items of different depth levels is clear and straightforward
- which can be easily divided in chunks
- has different depth levels
- the deeper you go the higher the detail
- summarizes complex concepts
- if well done, allows to understand the essence of a text by reading only the higher level
- when created, forces the author to systematize their communication
- improves thoght
- by showing key concepts first
- and detailed consideration below
- with the possibility of linking to other sections
- by showing key concepts first
- facilitates multiple accesses to information
- by breaking down a topic into sections
- by providing a structured approach
- by promoting an inventory of concepts
- by categorizing content
- is a way to organize information
Category: Posts
Notes on Hierarchy
Observe Trends, Prepare for the Future
Sometimes we don’t want to see the future. We have all the signals in front of us, explicit. It would take such a little effort to relate trends and behaviors that we could anticipate what would happen soon. It’s a good investment to monitor the key tendencies and movements in our society. Especially about our fields of interest. If we feel like a trend is becoming more and more solid and we receive signals from multiple and diverse sources it could be worthy to invest some time in investigating its nature. That’s one of the possible ways we can act to be more prepared for the future or to become part of those forces shaping it.
Revise For Meaning Then for Syntax
Read aloud your draft. Does it make sense the sound of what you are saying? It’s not important to fix the big and small syntax mistakes. You want first to have a piece which is expressing what you want to communicate in an effective way.
After an initial round of revisions, when the writing flows then it’s time to wordsmithing, cherry-picking and finessing.
As somebody said in computer science, premature optimization is the root of all evil.
On Improvisation and Relevance
The question is not why I wrote this article but why you should read it. That’s one great realization I made today.
The other is a simple summarization of how to write: just do it. Badly. And accumulate drafts. Then refine them up until one of them is good to publish. That’s it. So if you don’t accumulate drafts you’re making so much effort to conceive something decent and you would be really lucky if you achieve it.
Improvisation requires a lot of work. Relevance, too.
329.
How To Discover Your Beloved Ones’ Desires
Gift them with something you think they would like. It doesn’t matter if it is not perfect. That is the point. Before giving the gift to them ask, “Guess what am I about to give to you, you have three chances”. Take note of what they say, now you know what they desire.
Oh, remember, then, to give their gift. Next time, you have at least three valid options to try.
Accepting Compliments
When somebody gives you compliments or shows their gratitude to you, do not diminish what you have done. Be humble but accept the nice words without feeling obliged to appear less than what the others are seeing in you.
Note-Taking Liberates You from Your Moods
Note-taking allows you to separate your current mood from the idea you want to capture. If you have a commitment to write at a certain time, in a certain context, you are slave to the context. You might not feel like writing, you might have no ideas, you might want to do something else. And, since you are human, aren’t you, you are profoundly affected by that context.
Note-taking, instead, allows you to capture the essence of your thoughts, observations and considerations and store them. If you deem it meaningful you can still save the mood of the time you took that note, but it would become a record, like many others you can have. And you can choose, when it’s finally time to write, if you want on the spur of the moment or if you want to carefully select your idea from the catalogue.
We Need More Scientific Attitude
To have a scientific attitude we need to: observe, measure, verify, investigate, confront and, also, use our creativity, imagination and fantasy. It requires effort and presence and can help us in mitigating bias, reducing prejudices and setting the right expectations when observing and experience reality.
Contextual Paraphrasing Must Be Done Early
Paraphrasing a concept is a way to extract knowledge while interpreting its meaning. It promotes understanding, memorization, and thus learning. The rewriting should happen immediately after the annotation to maximize leveraging the freshly acquired context. It becomes less efficient and practical to collect highlights first and then trying to make sense of them and finally rewriting them. That means reading much slower than just going over the text while quickly taking notes. But it means also saving time in rereading and reinterpreting the context after the superficial first iteration. Further rereading is still useful, by understanding better and better the concept expressed by the author we open up the possibilities for connection and even deeper understanding.
Paraphrasing contextually requires a change of habit if you are used to reading quickly and highlight what interests you. You still have to reread the source but it makes you more effective and efficient when you stop, make an effort to interpret what caught your attention, and rewrite it with your words into notes to add to your archive.
Article 324.
Note-Taking is Personal
Summarizing an article means compressing information. If I am able to reduce an article to a summary, annotated and I can efficiently remember what’s in it, I should be able to read my summary and throw away the source. But besides filler words or elaborated ways of conveys meaning, when I am summarizing I am interpreting that content. So I need an intention. I should have clarified the reason why I am reading that source and what I want to do with the knowledge I can extract from it. So a summary can never be universal, each reader will do their own version of their summary and their notes. That’s also why the value of personal notes is limited unless you are annotating for specific public and you are curating the readability and the consistency of your notes.