How to Take Smart Notes (Ahrens)

09 Jul 2020 book-review · note-taking · smart-notes

I read this book after seeing Sreejith’s 5-star review. It was a habit-changing book for me.

The most important take-away for me was the difference between a writer and an archivist. As I have been reading more and more non-fiction books in the past couple years, I realized that there were several connections that I was noticing but wasn’t really making on paper anywhere. I was making notes about separate pieces of literature, but I wasn’t really connecting them. My behavior was that of an archivist.

To move into a writer’s mindset I realized that I have to start thinking about how anything I read is changing my mindset and actually write my thoughts down (apart from the things that have already been said by the author).

A few other things that were expressed very well in the book:

• Writing is everything; everything must lead to writing; the final written piece could be a research paper or something that you never publish, etc; but everything you do around “research” must have a single goal: To write something about it
• Writing is the process of understanding: Reading something, understanding the gist and the meaning, and writing it down your understanding improves the understanding process
• People who take hand-written notes better understand the material, when compared to people who are taking notes with a computer: I want to read the study on this. The author’s reasoning is that writing is slower than typing and hence we prepare ourselves to cut through the peripheries of the speaker’s arguments and get to the gist as quickly as you can and in as few words as you can. Everything else that’s part of the understanding process has to happen in your mind before you write down your understanding.
  • I took hand-written notes for nearly 5 years in college. My understanding wasn’t really improved a lot because mostly I was simply copying what was being written on the board into my notebook. I was postponing the understanding to the 2 weeks before the test.
• Once a piece is written down, what you meant is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you wrote down. Any piece disconnected from it’s author has the same goal: to make a convincing argument. And the author gives a clear description of a convincing argument:

The criteria for a convincing argument are always the same, regardless of who the author is or the status of the publisher: They have to be coherent and based on facts. Truth does not belong to anyone; it is the outcome of the scientific exchange of written ideas. This is why the presentation and the production of knowledge cannot be separated, but are rather two sides of the same coin (Peters and Schäfer 2006, 9). If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.

• Categorizing the information that is being fed into students in colleges into neat topics and grouping everything together is detrimentary to the student: Frequent context switching, using tests as a means to show students what they need to learn instead of using them to simply ensure that they are learning what they should have, allowing students to decide their curriculum autonomously
• Avoiding feedback in the short term is disastrous: It leads to feeling smarter in the present, instead of becoming smarter in the future
• Goal: Developing new ideas; connecting a variety of pieces together; answering the questions you have concretely; writing down your new idea because no other book has exactly what you are looking for.

P.S In a crazy connection, the author says that the book about the rise of the shipping container, The Box, that I read a few months ago was one of the reasons he realized that simple ideas find it especially hard to become popular and widely adopted. I read The Box because of my interest in shipping containers and the logistics world in general only a few months ago.

Tools

I have started looking into Org roam in the past couple days. With my recent switch to start using Emacs more in my daily workflow, I think integrating Org roam and using it to take notes should be easy to begin. I want to write notes about some of the topics that I have read about in the past few months (and heard podcasts about) that are connected to each other:

• Literature: Technological Progress (Mokyr)
  • About how every time must have felt like a revolutionary and insane time, focus on the time when the printing press was invented
  • Literature: Differences between China and Europe
    • Oriental things in high demand in Europe, but no matching demand in the East for things made in the West. Why?
• Literature: Short History of the 20th Century - Lukacs
  • Wars can’t be won using air strikes alone, you need an army on the ground
• Literature: The Box
  • Simple idea, execution required some critical scale though
  • Some unions blocked this idea constantly, while others did not; why?
• Ezra Klein Show with that organizer
  • Why are unions good?
  • The people who are good at their job have good relationships with their boss and won’t participate in union activities
• Vox video about Afghanistan
  • No central government has succeeded in Afghanistan; why?

The book advises you to simply start writing notes for new literature that you read and forget about everything that you read until now. Some of the books I read in the past couple years were extremely important though, so I am definitely going to put my reading on hold for a week or so and actually write these notes down and get a good workflow going with my slipbox and reference system.