Herbert Lui on The Note-Taking Bullshit Industrial Complex

Lui debunks the purveyors of note-taking courses and a lot of other bullshit about note-taking.

My Obsidian Graph centered on Economics

Herbert Lui kind of buries the lede, and wanders a bit in this meandering essay, comprised mostly of observations from others. But he got my attention in paragraph two with this quote from Max Nussenbaum:

An entire digital ecosystem has sprung up of productivity gurus who claim that taking notes on what you read and organizing your ideas the way they do is the secret to supercharging your creative output.

Lui is disparaging about an unnamed ‘merchant’ of note-taking courses, pointing out that the merchant had started writing paper notes instead of using the system he has been marketing. Hilarious.

---

---

A few other of the scraps in his scrapbook stand out to me:

In the same way that recording the present moment diminishes presence, capturing a flow of information diminishes resonance. A person with thousands of notes views information primarily for its utility, and not for how it moved them when they first came across it.

| Lawrence Yeo

This reminded me of the scene in High Fidelity when Rob (John Cusack) decides to reorganize his enormous record collection autobiographically after his break up with his girlfriend. So, if he undertakes that, does he ever get to stop reorganizing? In the movie, at least, we never see him complete the process.

Organization of anything has to considered relative to the organizer’s patterns of use. For me, as a ‘scruffy’, I aspire to the least organization that allows me to create, link, and find notes. To the extent that what I create or import involves emotions, they wind up in sidenotes, or in the summaries I write at the head of notes. To me, the end — the purpose — of note-taking is sense-making: adding to my understanding of the world. Emotions are an aspect of that, but not the point.

…

Again, from Max Nussenbaum, some thoughts I disagree with:

My number one piece of writing advice — really, my only piece of writing advice — is that basically everything that isn’t writing, revising, or editing is a waste of time. This is especially true for beginners, who are prone to procrastination in the guise of planning. […] Taking elaborate notes on what you read is even worse, since it’s busywork that disguises itself as productivity. How many people are out there convinced they’ve taken the first step towards being an insightful blogger or essayist, when really all they have is a folder full of a bunch of other people’s ideas?

I wonder. Perhaps it’s because I see myself as a researcher, a learner, driven by curiosity rather than an urge to write. My goal is understanding, not grinding out yet-another-blog-post. Also, I am not really measuring my productivity, or worrying about it.

Take economics for example, increasingly one of my greatest passions. I accumulate a lot of writing by a broad range of economists across many aspects of economic history and thought. I read those writings deeply, heavily annotating them, and cross-linking them, developing a spiderweb of connections, observations, and questions.

At various points along the way I write something about one or more topics in economics, but the writing isn’t the end goal, per se. The end goal is understanding, and the purpose of the writing is to help others understand, as well.

This is like the distinction between the Greater and Lesser Vehicle models of Buddhism. The Lesser Vehicle says that the point of life is to become enlightened. But the Greater Vehicle finds the highest aim is to help others become enlightened.

So, is writing a way to express ourselves? Or is it a way to share understanding?