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deep thinking requires external scaffolding

Evergreen writing Tools for thought externalization external scaffolding make-public

people have a very limited short-term memory. To be able to think complex and deep thoughts people need a way to surpass this limit.

External scaffolding such as writing allows us to swap out things from the short-term memory without a fear of loosing them. The [densely interlinked]([[evergreen notes should be densely linked]]) nature of notes allows us to faithfully serialize the context of our thinking and swiftly recover it afterwards.

Offloading the complex thought onto external representation also allows you to focus on improving the parts of the thought or argument without a fear of loosing the other parts of it. So you can work on your thesis part by part and then integrate it into the new whole

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When we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box than a protocol of preconceived ideas. Any thought of a certain complexity requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently from the author. The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good – even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally. We need this distance to think about an argument – otherwise the argument itself would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it.

Philosophers, neuroscientists, educators and psychologists like to disagree in many different aspects on how the brain works. But they no longer disagree when it comes to the need for external scaffolding. Almost all agree nowadays that real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing. “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbook of neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions in this book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.) In our system, the scaffolding is done explicitly by connecting the thoughts within the external memory of the slip-box. Luhmann writes: “Somehow one has to mark differences, keep track of distinctions, either explicitly or implicitly in concepts,” because only if the connections are somehow fixed externally can they function as models or theories to give meaning and continuity for further thinking (Luhmann, 1992, 53).

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deep thinking requires external scaffolding