(I don’t claim to be using my notes to any great effect, but this is what I do with them):
To me, I’ve noticed that I seldom actually use my notes as a reference. When I need to refer to something, I go to a place in a book somewhere. Rather, during a lecture, my notebook for the class seems to function more as a way to keep me paying attention to the lecturer, and to run various complicated pieces of information (equations, etc) across my mind. (Okay, I do sort of refer to these during exam study, but the books tend to be more legible).
I also do a lot of my own investigating of various subjects. I will be reading a book, and noting the equations, then go off on a tangent playing with the equations, or attempt to re-derive something that I may or may not have played with before. I have several 5-subject spiral bound math notebooks that I will fill with whatever ideas I am currently playing with. I try to expend one of these every 3 months or so, though my current one is 5 months old. :’/
When I am done, I clip the spiral binding and roll it out of the notebook, then use my document scanner to scan the thing and put it in my notebook library for future reference. (Some of it I do end up looking back to, but hardly most of it,.)
The problem that I’ve always had with the “utility monster” idea is that it’s a misuse of what information utility functions actually encode.
In game theory or economics, a utility function is a rank ordering of preferred states over less preferred states for a single agent (who presumably has some input he can adjust to solve for his preferred states). That’s it. There are no “global” utility functions or “collective” utility measures that don’t run into problems when individual goals conflict.
Given that an agent’s utility function only encodes preferences, turning up the gain on it really really high (meaning agent A really reaaaally cares about all of his preferences) doesn’t mean that agents B,C,D, etc should take A’s preferences any more or less seriously. Multiplying it by a large number is like multiplying a probability distribution or an eigenvector by a really large number—the relative frequencies, pointing direction are exactly the same.
Before some large number of people should sacrifice their previous interests on the altar of Carethulu, there should be some new reason why these others (not Carethulu) should want to do so (implying a different utility function for them).