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translate novel ideas into the context of your thinking

Evergreen en meta make-public

previous name

when creating evergreen notes for ideas found elsewhere - translate them into the context of your thinking

When you do so - you ensure that the content of the notes uses the same mental models, analogies and examples as your brain does. Making incorporating the ideas from your notes into your thinking far more seamless as compared to just storing a reference to a third-party source.

The act of translation also allows you to test and improve your understanding of the idea as you are reconstructing it with the words and concepts you use to look at the world. It moves you a bit closer in the direction of truly internalizing the new concept

Doing this is in a way an exercise of Benjamin Franklin method for writing - you take the ideas expressed by someone else - process them and write your own summary of them. You can compare results to your sources and the way other people expressed the idea, as a source of feedback.

challanges

I'm struggling to do this, I don't quite have a coherent explanation on why, but the notes that do this often end-up unfinished/rough collection of references and quotes

reference

we can truly understand a concept if we would be able to regenerate it from underlying knowledge

use multiple levels of processing information for learning & understanding

He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning as truthfully as possible. Writing that an author struggles in one chapter to justify his method can be a much more adequate description of this chapter’s content than any quote from the text itself (this would call for an explanation, of course).

As we are the authors of all the notes, we learn in lockstep with the slip-box. This is another big difference from using an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. We use the same mental models, theories and terms to organise our thoughts in our brains as in our slip-box. That the slip-box generates an excess of possibilities enables it to surprise and inspire us to generate new ideas and develop our theories further. It is not the slip-box or our brains alone, but the dynamic between them that makes working with it so productive.

When we extract ideas from the specific context of a text, we deal with ideas that serve a specific purpose in a particular context, support a specific argument, are part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use. This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to be embedded into new contexts of our own thinking, the different context(s) within the slip-box. Translating means to give the truest possible account of the original work, using different words – it does not mean the freedom to make something fit. As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.

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translate novel ideas into the context of your thinking