Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes. Any good piece of writing should undertake to present the relevant perspectives, and treat them seriously. But this is where I stumbled to understand Brennan's position. While he presented the counterpoints, or counterarguments to these positions, he didn't seem to treat them in the same manner as his primary arguments and points. That has caused me to think about his article from a different perspective. What Was the Purpose There is a statement, or rather a question, that forms the premise of Brennan's argument about Personal Knowledge Management: Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge? That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. It's taking the idea of a single piece of technology, a single application, and asking what that tool has contributed to the world. How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world? Take for example a couple of applications that have been around for many more decades than Obsidian: Emacs and vim. Have Emacs and vim contributed to “public-facing” understanding or knowledge? No, they haven't. However, what they have enabled people to do a lot of things: write code, programs, applications, papers, documents, books, poems, and a lot more. The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. But Brennan goes on to double down: I think it's safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique values and principles of Obsidian (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, “future-proofing,” etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value. And this is where the wheels come completely off the train. Basically nothing about the linked document supports the statement that Brennan is making. The page in question does not mention: data privacy, portability, or “future-proofing.” What it does suggest is, “We believe in plain text for something as important as your knowledge base. […] When the file system replaces the cloud, you get flexible options to work with your files: you can back them up with Dropbox, use Git to do versioning, or encrypt your disk for security. Whatever works on your file system will work on your Obsidian knowledge base.” There is no hint at the concepts being “higher-brow” or anything to indicate an ascribed “epistemological value.” Instead, the core argument the Obsidian team makes is nearly the opposite: Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone. Instead of providing you with an opinionated and assembled product, Obsidian gives you a foundation and numerous functional building blocks to discover and build your own solution. The foundation is to be able to view files, edit them, and search them. For the minimalist, that's enough. So where Brennan came up with all of this “future-proofing” and “highbrow” and “epistemological value” is minimally unclear, and maximally misleading. Obsidian is just a tool. A tool that is designed for users to create the system they want or need. Where I think Brennan has gone wrong with this is reading or watching what others have said about Obsidian as a tool. I have seen this ecosystem that seems to have developed around Obsidian, and honestly it is quite off-putting. But should we judge a tool by its users? Or should it be judged based on what it's developers have provided? I think I am going to side with the developers on this one. Brennan then posits his central thesis a second time: My concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer. I do wonder what “complex, robust systems” he means at this point. He's only mischaracterized Obsidian, which certainly at its core is not all that complex. It's a personal Wiki with a few extra features. Wikis have existed since 1994 when Ward Cunningham developed the first one (which was installed online in 1995). Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to the meat of Brennan's article yet. This article is so dense with information that it's going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination. Personal Knowledge Management Systems After providing a list of PKM's (most notable of which are PARA, Johnny Decimal, Zettelkasten, GTD, and Commonplace Books), Brennan sets out a series of questions for the examination of these systems: First, what does it mean to make an important and meaningful contribution to our understanding of the world? Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism. Third, what does the process actually look like for the actual people who write important papers and books? Fourth, what is the throughput and output of the people who have dedicated themselves to PKM frameworks? This series of questions, in itself, is something of a mess. The first question doesn't have any relationship to personal knowledge management. What a person contributes to the world isn't measured by their ability to store or regurgitate information. Making an “important and meaningful contribution” is a highly nebulous concept that is dependent on the audience and the author. The second question is a complete shift in scope. Making “important, meaningful contributions” to academia and communications is not the same as making a contribution to “our understanding of the world”. And then there's this: “…shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.” To many, academia is quite literally a form of elitism that gate keeps information. (Aside: I could make a long argument here about what happened to Aaron Swartz in his attempt to liberate the information that was being gate kept by academia.) Third question: surely it looks like whatever works for them, right? I mean, this is what the promise of Obsidian is in the first place: “Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.” If someone wants to use PARA, they use PARA. If they want to invent their own system (spoilers) then they will do so. Again, how is this relevant? Is a person's choice of system indicative or predictive of their ability to perform some task? The fourth question is, possibly, the most valuable, and yet the most difficult. How do you know what people are choosing to use for their knowledge management? How does someone measure “throughput and output”? Certainly you can perform a quantitative analysis of this, however assessing the qualitative nature of this question is far more difficult. Next we talk about German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose Zettelkasten system has become widely known, and is frequently cited as a “genius” method for organizing one's notes or information. Brennan here thinks of this as a “Myth” because no one has been able to take Luhmann's notes and create new works based on them. People have realized that his system was idiosyncratic to Luhmann himself. But does that make his methodology a “myth?” I don't think so, it just means his method was specific to him. The Questions At this point Brennan starts going through the questions that he outlined (as quoted above), only there's a bit of goal shifting here. For example, question one is now stated as “What counts as a meaningful contribution to understanding?” Before it had to be both “important and meaningful” and it had to apply to “our understanding of the world”. But, nonetheless, let's continue. Brennan states: The empirical literature on insight and creativity centers on incubation, the act of stepping away from a problem, unconscious restructuring, working memory offloading. This is not the act of browsing a hyperlinked card catalog. Incubation is, quite literally, a portion of the process that systems like PARA (Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Vol. 1. Simon and Schuster, 2022.) actually supports. In Chapter 3, he quite clearly states: There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives. (Emphasis added.) The understanding is that this is very much in line with the ideas that works about insight and creativity have suggested. This isn't just spending time “browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.” It's storing information such that it can be found when it is needed and additional information might surface during the process that allows intuitive leaps in problem-solving. This whole concept is completely in line with the papers being cited.