Communicating With Slip Boxes by Niklas Luhmann
Fleeting- External reference: https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes
Communicating with Slip Boxes by Niklas Luhmann
A system based on content, like the outline of a book) would mean that we make a decision that would bind us to a certain order for decades in advance! This necessarily leads very quickly to problems of placement, if we consider the system of communication and ourselves as capable of development.
it is less important where we place a new note. If there are several possibilities, we can solve the problem as we wish and just record the connection by a link
recording back links in the slips that are being linked to.
Bibliographical notes which we extract from the literature, should be captured inside the card index. Books, articles, etc., which we have actually read, should be put on a separate slip with bibliographical information in a separate box.
As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with who we can constantly communicate. It proves to be similar to our own memory in that it does not have a thoroughly constructed order of its entirety, not hierarchy, and most certainly no linear structure like a book.
The entirety of these notes can only be described as a disorder, but at the very least it is a disorder with non-arbitrary internal structure
Some things will get lost (versickern), some notes we will never see again
there will be preferred centers, formation of lumps and regions with which we will work more often than with others. There will be complexes of ideas that are conceived at large, but which will never be completed; there will be incidental ideas which started as links from secondary passages and which are continuously enriched and expand so that they will tend increasingly to dominate system
epistemology has given up the idea that there are “privileged representations” that allow us to control the truth value of other representations or claims
give up the idea in preparing a card index that there should be privileged places or slips that have a special quality of guaranteeing knowledge
Every note is only an element which receives its quality only from the network of links and back-links within the system
A note that is not connected to this network will get lost in the card file and ill be forgotten by it.
- A good idea for a review for expiring notes: use the degree and the date of the note as a hint. An old unconnected note may be forgotten to avoid polluting the system. A good companion capable of discussion and surprising us should (IMHO) also be capable of forgetting fading stuff, like I do.
Its rediscovery depends on accidents and on the vagary that this rediscovery means something at the time it is found.
sensitive system that internally reacts to many ideas, as long as they can be noted down. If we ask, for instance, why on the one hand museums are empty, while on the other hand exhibitions of paintings by Monet, Picasso, or Medici are too crowded, the slip box accepts this question under the perspective of “preference for what is temporally limited.”
The slip box needs a number of years in order to reach critical mass. Until then, it functions as a mere container from which we can retrieve what we put in. This changes with its growth in size and complexity.
One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other.
communication becomes more fruitful when we succeed to activate the internal network of links at the occasion of writing notes or making querie
the query provokes possibilities of making relations which could not be traced prior to it.
the importance of what has actually been noted is secondary
Many of the notes will soon become unusable or cannot be used at a given occasion
The role of accidents in the theory of science is not disputed
producing accidents with sufficiently enhanced probabilities for selection
Notes linking here
- create a lot of zettels and keep them forever to be surprised
- how I organize my static files with IPFS and org-roam
- org-roam makes difficult having twice the same note
- raison d’utiliser un second brain
- Tutorial: How to control the flow of a GuidedTrack program 101 - YouTube
- you never know what note will be useful in the future
- zettelkasten == system 1.5 ?
- zettelkasten and junk notes