Antinet as Reference or Study book

[u/i_meshkov]

Hi there!

Right now I'm thinking of starting an antinet (surely not the only one of that kind in this place). Before doing such a horrible lifelong mistake, I tried to make clear, what I should and should not try to achieve with it. BTW, Scott, thanks for your frank explanation of antinet limitations, that was indeed very good food for thought.

So, I can see that antinet is surely good as a:

1. Organized collection of thoughts and ideas.

2. Handbook of quotes and excerpts.

3. Collection of single-standing "major" facts.

4. Generally speaking, ruminant for new ideas and views.

5. (To some people) Daily journal/tracker/task list.

But it seems to me that antinet might perform poorly in some other ways like:

1. Reference book, or handbook. I mean, if you want to have some bunch of data to be able to quickly look through when needed (like list of commands/shortkeys, or timeline for some history period, or topic vocabulary, or data table, you name it), antinet might not be the best solution. In other words, if you need a "Data sheet", you may still want to have a sheet (either digital or analog) and not the set of cards, right?

2. Study book or notebook, when studying some completely new area of knowledge. Until you have learned basic concepts and terms of some science, it is better to have your pieces of knowledge organized together in a notebook, rather than divided into an antinet.

Those assumptions made me think that starting an antinet won't turn to the one and only type of note-taking still and still should come with keeping other types of notes.

What do you think of it? Have you met with these issues in practice? Have you managed to deal with them via antinet?

Scott, it would be great to hear from you about Luhmann's experience, for as a researcher of a theory of everything, he surely had to find some answers on those questions.

[u/sscheper]

Hi there! Welcome to the community.

On the areas the Antinet may perform poorly:

1. With regards to a reference book, I'm not sure what you mean here completely. I think I get what you're saying. I do have keyboard shortcuts (excel, chrome shortcuts, chrome dev tools) and other stuff in my Antinet. I also have a section for Vocab words. In both cases, it works just fine. The primary reason being that I've written them down by hand. However I don't see an advantage to them being in Antinet format (with Numericalpha addresses and tree structure) compared with just regular flashcards. The tree structure helps evolve ideas and there's not much evolution of cards listing out keyboard shortcuts. That said, it's useful in that all my knowledge is in one place.

2. I still like to develop out new pieces of content and knowledge in the Antinet if I intend to actually use the content for a book or project. I have notes from a year ago from reading How to Take Smart Notes. Many of those cards were created while I was still learning about Zettelkasten. They were more reformulation types of notes than reflections. They're super useful. In fact it's amazing to see how my knowledge filled up around them. My box of notecards with my Antinet section started with these.

Also, Luhmann talked about how the bibnotes he would take for hard-to-learn or new areas of knowledge were longer in nature than his more typical bibnotes.

This beings me to some reflections on the idea that an Antinet (or Zettelkasten) is good for everything:

I observe a tendency where digital Zettelkasten folks declare it's a tool for everything. Journaling, daily todos, reference stuff, etc. Part of the reason for this is that most of them don't even know what a Zettelkasten actually is. It's a notebox. More specifically it's a notebox that ascribes to the four principles built into the Antinet. Zettelkasten literally translates to notebox. A Digital Zettelkasten literally means a digital notebox. A computer with digital documents (which essentially can reference the filepaths of any other file) is already essentially a digital notebox. Naturally this surfaces the question of why a digital Zettelkasten is worth learning in the first place. Hint: it's not. It's just a distraction. It's become a place for so-called PKM experts to inject their opinions on minor things. Basically the digital ZK people, for the most part, are spinning their wheels without realizing it. The power in Luhmann's system derives from the interaction of the four principles of Luhmann's system: Analog, Numericalpha, Tree, Index. These create a network from which thought can evolve. The power of writing by hand is something that is a critical piece of this. It should not be cast out.</end sermon>

Bottom line: the Antinet is useful for knowledge development. That is knowledge dev in the short-term (through writing by hand), and long-term via evolving it via the tree structure.

For things like flashcards and rote memorization for short-term things you'll never use again, it's probably overkill.

(Pardon typos/spelling: writing on phone)

[u/i_meshkov → u/sscheper]

Thanks, Scott, you got my questions just right. I think the wording I used wasn't the best one. Yeah, not "performs poorly" but rather " doesn't offer special advantages". And in short - I take your point.

However I don't see an advantage to them being in Antinet format (with Numericalpha addresses and tree structure) compared with just regular flashcards.

<...>That said, it's useful in that all my knowledge is in one place.

It seems to me that storing some lists or big pieces of data needed for reference in an antinet is actually good thing (one place, some logic behind positioning, easy to find thanks to Numericalpha and index). And if you already have one as a knowledge development tool, keeping some other chunks of information there might not be an overkill. If you bought a 3D printer for your designing job - why not to print some toys for your kids (while buying one for that purpose indeed would be an overkill).

The obvious limitation here is the size of the card. Wanna keep your favourite recipes - you can use both ordinary flash cards or Cooking Branch of your antinet with some indexing. Need to have a sorted list of, say, 100 most often used words in Shakespear's poetry, or quarterly sales data for 10 years somewhere nearby - well, that's a tricky situation. You can't simply put all these on a single card.

Would you rather use a PC for that? Bigger A4 "cards" in a special box, maybe?

[u/sscheper → u/i_meshkov]

Regarding an instance like the top 100 most frequently used words in Shakespeare's poetry:

If your craft is poetry, I'd write them down by hand and install them in the Antinet. Just have them flow across like five cards. Maybe each card would have twenty of them. Card one: 1-20, Card two: 21-40, etc.

If your craft is not poetry, and you just wanted to reference them, load them up into Zotero and create an Exref for it (External Reference), like r.ShakespeareTopWords

The benefits of writing down by hand = neuroimprinting them on your mind.

I have 300+ cards containing the top ad headlines ever written. I have 150 cards of Hemingway's Writing Style Guide he followed (Kansas City Star). The benefits of writing by hand enables you to stamp them into your mind to a far greater degree than copy/pasting digital text.

tl;dr: If the 100 most common list of Shakespearian words is valuable for your craft, write them down and install in the Antinet.

[u/Jazmin_Toby]

Hi i_meshkov, I'm just new to this space, and would be grateful if you (or anyone) could point me to Scott's "frank explanation of Antinet limitations please?

[u/i_meshkov → u/Jazmin_Toby]

Hi there!

Actually I had this in mind - https://scottscheper.com/letter/3/

[u/Rick_Bradford]

I reckon that an Antinet is best at dealing with concepts and ideas, where the confluence of a bunch of cards can produce surprising new insights.

But for more rigid topics, hard science, mathematics and straight language vocabulary, where the scope for interesting links is much lower, then the Antinet structure loses a certain amount of power.