(2023-08-27) Thoresson Notetaking Notethinking Ai And Peripheral Vision

Anders Thoresson on Note-taking, note-thinking, AI, and peripheral vision. If all you do is store quotes, you are only getting halfway, or probably even less. I want to put my notes to work, to use them

finding the connections isn't enough. Making meaning from the connection is the important part

They're designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?"

My answer is yes, AI will – and already have. My experience is that note-taking apps indeed make me smarter

It's not the note-taking part of a note-taking app that provides its true value. It is how well the tool assists in thinking.

Andy Matuschak argues that peripheral vision is an important feature of physical notes that are hard to replicate in a digital context. When sitting at a desk working with ideas on Post-It notes och index cards, it's easy to group them together, form clusters, and build hierarchies

Reading Matuschack, I realized that I've been striving for peripheral vision in my note-taking process for years. And also slowly getting there. In Obsidian...

Smart Connections is the latest addition to my toolset. It uses OpenAI's API to create embeddings of my notes, and based on them suggest notes that are similar to the active one

what Smart Connections, and the other methods listed above, do is give me suggestions. "Based on the note you are working on right now, these are other notes that have some similarities with it."

Smart Connections, or really any of the note-taking tools I've tried or read about, can help you with "A relates to B", but it's me who adds the important part: "A relates to B because X"."