After finishing the book “How to take smart notes” by Sönke Ahrens, I came to realize the following: I have been exposed to two ways to learn that use notes as a basis of the system. The first is embodied by the Zettlekasten and depicted through Ahrens’ book. The second relies on spaced repetition and Ankification of notes if you will.

It is only natural to question myself which way (if any at all) I have found best suited for me. I do not have an answer yet and do not know if I ever will, even after having tried both methods, admittedly to different extents. However, I have stumbled upon two texts that might shed some light on what learning is for me and what method I believe might help me to reach there.

The first text is from Hebert Wilf on the occasion of Donald Knuth’s 64th birthday. On the occasion, Knuth wrote Wilf a letter while on a plane, without access to any resources. The resulting 4 pages generated the following reaction on Wilf:

There followed four pages of tightly handwritten information that was a gold mine of the history of the sequence b(n) and related matters. It contained references to de Rham, Dijkstra, Carlitz, Neil Sloane, Stern (of Stern-Brocot trees fame), Eisenstein, Conway, Zagier, Sch ̈onhage, Hardy, Ramanujan, and so forth. It did not merely mention the names. It contained precise statements of the results of interest, of their relationship with the result of Calkin and myself and with each other. It contained a number of Don’s own observations about related questions, and had several conjectures, with background, to offer.

What struck me is the breadth and depth of Knuth’s knowledge, and how accessible it is to him. There was no need for a second brain whatsoever. Pure interest, mingled with facts resulting in insights into the questions posed by Wilf and Calkin. This is to me a picture of what knowledge should look like and how it should operate. And by this, I do not mean we should all aim to be of Knuth’s caliber. But that knowledge walks hand in hand with memory. Selection of what we memorize and retrieval is, indeed, important. And I, would not like to delegate it entirely to a second electronic brain.

The second text is from the introduction to Hannah Arendt’s “Between past and future”. The 9th edition presentation, written by José Carvalho, tries to elucidate why ‘the present’ was not directly referred to in the title. One of the passages by Arendt, which I’ll translate freely:

For memory and depth are the same, or rather depth can only be reached by man through remembrance.

Resonated with me deeply. It seems that delegating part of yourself to a tool to harness some efficiency improvements over productivity or creativity as Zettlekasten proposes comes at a cost of one’s depth. We keep ourselves shallow so indexing and retrieval are optimized elsewhere. It seems a new version of Taylorism where instead of the division of labor between employees to complete assignments as efficiently as possible, one seeks the division of cognitive labor between yourself and a tool.

So, as a result, I believe I aim for depth. I am not optimizing for a productivity metric of some sort. I also do not claim I will not use the Zettlekasten, as I see it fit for academic applications. But as a general principle, I am more inclined to use SRS soon and see how I feel about the subjects studied. For now, this is all subjective and that is ok. Better explore the concepts and stick to something I find coherent given a north.

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