I think, to use your taxonomy, I’m trying to formularize how to produce types 2b and 3. Take the note—“Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers”. To you this might seem like a type 1 note—it’s a “who did what” statement. But actually it’s probably closer to type 3 in that it points to a implicit vague goal I have about appropriating the film grammar and design language used in opening title sequences of both films and television shows, which is a highly compressed and efficient form of storytelling, and making self-contained stories with it.
A way of distilling it might be:
Learn interesting thing → think about kind/type of event/decision this is useful for → think about specific instance this would be useful for (or three) in explicit detail → write that down
What I’d need to do to improve my notetaking (and tell me if this is wrong) is go a step further rather than say “this vaguely points towards this goal”. I should stop, brain storm exactly which techniques from, say the still-photographs chronological progression of Cheers, or the family dynamics in a single shot from Rosanne and how I might build a self-contained story about that. Not just saying “it would be cool to do something based on that” but actively writing down what might be a candidate to apply those techniques. Coming up with a story, even if it’s as simple as “girl meets boy, from wrong side of the tracks” “kind died, queen died of grief”. Because again, now I’m leaving less work for future me.
If I learn about some cool new FFMPEG ability, “oh wow, I can make a carousel with this commandline, that’s cool”—I should stop—and think about what kinds of video content I would want to stack horizontally and scroll. Why? What content would suit it? I should have a provisional answer. This increases the chances of me using that note.
Another source of utility here is preserving information about “paths not taken”. When working on some theoretical problem, you may end up adopting some very promising-seeming assumption and running with it. After a while, that assumption would be baked into your model of the problem so deeply it might be difficult to imagine a world without it – which would be lethal if the assumption was wrong. Seems important to explicitly keep track of it, in a format that isn’t as corruptible as your brain.
Yep, hard agree.
Except, annoyingly, I often find myself with the inverse. My baked-in assumptions are correct (or at least, right within the specific way I’ve chosen to do something—Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem—every complex system is always in a failure but some components are compensating for it). I’ve erected Chesterton’s Fence and forget why I did and quickly remember why with disastrous results.
Disagree with which bits precisely?
I think, to use your taxonomy, I’m trying to formularize how to produce types 2b and 3. Take the note—“Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers”. To you this might seem like a type 1 note—it’s a “who did what” statement. But actually it’s probably closer to type 3 in that it points to a implicit vague goal I have about appropriating the film grammar and design language used in opening title sequences of both films and television shows, which is a highly compressed and efficient form of storytelling, and making self-contained stories with it.
A way of distilling it might be:
Learn interesting thing → think about kind/type of event/decision this is useful for → think about specific instance this would be useful for (or three) in explicit detail → write that down
What I’d need to do to improve my notetaking (and tell me if this is wrong) is go a step further rather than say “this vaguely points towards this goal”. I should stop, brain storm exactly which techniques from, say the still-photographs chronological progression of Cheers, or the family dynamics in a single shot from Rosanne and how I might build a self-contained story about that. Not just saying “it would be cool to do something based on that” but actively writing down what might be a candidate to apply those techniques. Coming up with a story, even if it’s as simple as “girl meets boy, from wrong side of the tracks” “kind died, queen died of grief”. Because again, now I’m leaving less work for future me.
If I learn about some cool new FFMPEG ability, “oh wow, I can make a carousel with this commandline, that’s cool”—I should stop—and think about what kinds of video content I would want to stack horizontally and scroll. Why? What content would suit it? I should have a provisional answer. This increases the chances of me using that note.
Yep, hard agree.
Except, annoyingly, I often find myself with the inverse. My baked-in assumptions are correct (or at least, right within the specific way I’ve chosen to do something—Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem—every complex system is always in a failure but some components are compensating for it). I’ve erected Chesterton’s Fence and forget why I did and quickly remember why with disastrous results.