“Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer’s dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies… Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaler, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?”

— C.S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction”

The notetaking people—and I say this with all the love in the world—are never, like, a researcher at the cutting edge of their field, building this vast cathedral of knowledge, note-by-note, so they can derive new insights. Never a historian who has to read tens of millions of words across thousands of sources to synthesize the life of some historical person. It’s never someone doing something hard. It’s always some blogger. Their “digital garden” is about how to keep a digital garden. It’s very solipsistic: there’s no output, no deliverables. The deliverable is you take a screenshot of your Obsidian graph and tweet about it to show off how much it looks like an incomprehensible ball of twine.

I’ve definitely put off producing by participating in some kind of productivity ritual, so I viscerally know what you’re talking about, but I can honestly see the appeal of maintaining an information index that’s aligned to me, not Encyclopedia Order or SEO

Also, source bias: obviously you read blogs from bloggers, the historians don’t publish their systems, they publish history?

The notetaking people—and I say this with all the love in the world—are never, like, a researcher at the cutting edge of their field, building this vast cathedral of knowledge, note-by-note, so they can derive new insights. Never a historian who has to read tens of millions of words across thousands of sources to synthesize the life of some historical person. It’s never someone doing something hard. It’s always some blogger. Their “digital garden” is about how to keep a digital garden. It’s very solipsistic: there’s no output, no deliverables. The deliverable is you take a screenshot of your Obsidian graph and tweet about it to show off how much it looks like an incomprehensible ball of twine.

I’ve definitely put off producing by participating in some kind of productivity ritual, so I viscerally know what you’re talking about, but I can honestly see the appeal of maintaining an information index that’s aligned to me, not Encyclopedia Order or SEO