Nat Eliason writes about note-taking with Roam, careers, productivity, health, and ideas on happiness.
HN commenters link his Roam article as an introduction for new users and his book notes, such as the 48 Laws of Power.
> there's always a caveat or asterisk or footnote
Well, when I work on a car engine, I use something like Gojo to clean up. Washing in just water or regular soap&water doesn't cut it. But my Gojo use was always rare.
When I go swimming, the pool requires washing with soap before entering the pool, to avoid urea in the sweat from reacting with the pool chemicals and making that pool smell.
Post-COVID I now wash my hands with soap and water far more often than I did before.
I had surgery, and had to wash with an antibacterial soap beforehand. I had lice and used a lice shampoo treatment.
From all accounts, the people who avoid normally washing with soap would still use soap for these occasions, which all count as a caveat or exception or asterisk.
I don't think the point is to avoid soap at all costs, but to point out that soap is used far, far more often than is required. Searching just now, https://www.nateliason.com/blog/soap "You don’t need to use soap 90%+ of the time you’re using it right now, assuming you’re not regularly doing some kind of dirty laborious work. Water and a towel will do fine."
Even Hamblin, who this article says started the modern dialog back in 2016, says to use soap to wash your hands. (About 5 minutes into https://archive.org/details/theaspen-Clean_-_The_New_Science_of_Skin_Book_Talk_with_James_Hamblin ).
At https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/what-happens-if-you-stop-using-soap-and-shampoo we can read an interview with Hamblin: "And if you…
Seven things came up for me, reading this:
Permaculture has a concept that it is the boundaries where interesting things happen - Where desirable life can be found. Between the forest and the meadow is where lies the life that may be desirable, whether fauna or flora.
I had labeled the two distinctions as destroyer/creators versus maintainers. I tear things down to create better replacements, whereas my partner is an excellent maintainer - As long as my new system is not too onerous, she is usually willing to keep it going, as I move on to the next process. And it seems that the transition from a small company to a larger one is also the transition from the independent to the more conventional minded, even though it contains its own traps (like having independents forced out - even from their own companies, or being strangled into oblivion by bean-counters, as it were).
Those who don't/did not do well in school may be in the independent group, more often than not. But then that misses other underlying reasons, like a few of my friends who had undiagnosed dyslexia.
I found a helpful guide to develop those analytical/independent thinking processes in Harry Browne's book How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World.
https://www.nateliason.com/notes/freedom-unfree-world-harry-browne
Although I have usually been attracted to conspiracy theory just to be at odds with the rest of mainstream thought, I recognize I do not practice enough critical thinking if said theory already…
What you describe is going to be very, very hard to achieve.
Looking at this simply from the standpoint of addition for the sake of simplicity, if you cannot utterly, completely, totally (etc) eliminate every possible chance for you to be able to access what you're trying to access. Whatever you try, you will know that there's a way to work around it and find yourself surprisingly motivated to bypass any limitations you try and impose on yourself.
The best way I can explain this is to reference the example I read that explained this phenomena to me. You can train ferrets to happily sit on your lap and go to sleep, but to achieve this you have to put them on a leash and then make it utterly impossible for them to get off your lap by holding onto the leash and only letting them roam around your lap. It'll take quite a while before they finally give up, accept that they're not going anywhere, and settle down, but they eventually figure out that there is absolutely no way they can change the situation and accept it. Getting yourself to that stage is... you're an IT guy. You can answer that yourself.
On top of that, this whole thing is ten thousand times more intense due to the fact that it's addiction-based.
Now, you could try and get a cellular contract that stipulates an upstream VPN (ie, where the cell signal coming into your phone comes from from a VPN you specify), and do the same for your wired internet (ie, the ADSL/cable/fiber/etc line going into your house also…
My very elementary (just skimmed some blog posts about it for a few hours this morning [1]) understanding of why Zettelkasten is a game-changer is that: its a system of organizing notes in a bottom-up, atomic fashion, instead of the usual top-down categorization where the notes don't lend itself well to reviewing or linking with concepts you've previously learned. Basically, a graph (where links are bidirectional) instead of a tree. The power of such a system is that it maps closer to how knowledge is stored in our brains, and that the more you use the system, the better benefit from "network effects".
In traditional note-taking systems, the category is the most obvious first-class citizen. In ZK, the little ideas take precedence, because some little idea that belongs to category A can easily end up belonging to other categories B, C, D, ... as time goes on and you study more subjects/discipline.
I'm sure the idea I'm describing is nothing new, groundbreaking, or unique to ZK - but this is the impression that I got, and I've had the pain of having very poorly managed knowledge via Evernote/OneNote/Notion/etc. before. I also dabbled with Anki and mindmapping. I believe the optimal solution is to combine all 3, since mindmaps have the "graph" structure part down; Anki only focuses on recall, but not conceptual understanding/linkage; and traditional notes, while obviously storing more information, are usually organized in hierarchical top-down structures that don't lend…
There may be some conflation of value creation with value extraction, they are not the same thing. Capitalism is a hell of a drug and can warp the mind. Some people can get very rich by running scams -- convincing other people to make bad decisions and taking their money -- but is that the person you want to be? SPACs in this time of cheap cash & extreme investor credulity...
Ethics aside, you cannot judge the quality of a decision by the result -- when judging the quality of the decision you need to tease apart the contribution of skill, and the contribution of luck. Some people can get very rich by making bad decisions, taking a huge amount of risk, and getting lucky.
Philosophy offers some consolation:
> Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
> one cannot consider a profession without taking into account the average of the people who enter it, not the sample of those who have succeeded in it.
> Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome, but such a point seems to be voiced only by people who fail.
> The reader can see my unusual notion of alternative accounting: $ 10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry. They are the same, can buy the same goods, except that one’s dependence on randomness is greater than the other.
From Taleb's book fooled by randomness.
--…
> hyperlinks are relevant for navigation. here hyperlinks (as hashtags) are used for discovery.
Hyperlinks in Wikis are very much also structural/semantic. They are not primarily for navigation.
Imagine reading Wikipedia without the links, and where you had to use the search box for every potential link. Imagine all the noise you'd get when you'd search.
BTW, I suspect your question is more about Roam then about Zettelkasten. Don't conflate the two. Roam is a general purpose product which utilizes the power of linking. This author is merely adapting it to the Zettelkasten methodology.
If you're asking about what makes linking special in Roam: Any thing you write as a link in your notes (need not be a hashtag) - Roam will create an empty page for that link - perhaps similar to Wikipedia. You can see what notes link to it.
When you enter a date in Roam, it will create a page for that as well.
Same with hashtags.
I suppose you get a fair amount of querying power. I'm not a Roam user, so I don't know.
I believe the other thing Roam users love is that each bullet/paragraph is an independent entity that you can link to/from. So if my paragraph links to "foobar", then on the foobar page I can see which paragraph (not just which page) linked to it.
I don't think the article does a good job highlighting why people love Roam - he was focusing more on ZK. If you want a better article about the strengths of Roam, see https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam