@dkl9 wrote a very eloquent and concise piece arguing in favor of ditching “second brain” systems in favor of SRSs (Spaced Repetition Systems, such as Anki).
Try as you might to shrink the margin with better technology, recalling knowledge from within is necessarily faster and more intuitive than accessing a tool. When spaced repetition fails (as it should, up to 10% of the time), you can gracefully degrade by searching your SRS’ deck of facts.
If you lose your second brain (your files get corrupted, a cloud service shuts down, etc), you forget its content, except for the bits you accidentally remember by seeing many times. If you lose your SRS, you still remember over 90% of your material, as guaranteed by the algorithm, and the obsolete parts gradually decay. A second brain is more robust to physical or chemical damage to your first brain. But if your first brain is damaged as such, you probably have higher priorities than any particular topic of global knowledge you explicitly studied.
I write for only these reasons:
to help me think
to communicate and teach (as here)
to distill knowledge to put in my SRS
to record local facts for possible future reference
Linear, isolated documents suffice for all those purposes. Once you can memorise well, a second brain becomes redundant tedium.
@dkl9 wrote a very eloquent and concise piece arguing in favor of ditching “second brain” systems in favor of SRSs (Spaced Repetition Systems, such as Anki).