All of Mauricio_AG's Comments + Replies

This is a good point. We can explain why students in medical school carefully digest millions of words by discussing the near-term incentives of final exams and the long-term incentives of increased salary and social status.

This is an excellent point. I'd like to deflate it a little bit though, since your supporting comments for the evolution of sweating mechanisms are part of a general principle.

For every mental strength we confidently point to, there will be an excellent physical strength we could also point to as a proximate cause, and vice versa. Discussions like this sound like evolutionary "missing link" arguments for the fossil record, where any 2 provided examples imply some intermediate step that's roughly as deserving of attention.

Pointing out t... (read more)

2jeronimo196
I agree with you. I just find the particulars oddly inspiring - even if we are not the fastest land hunters, we are genetically the most persistent. This is a lesson from biology that bears thinking about. Also, we could point to our physical strengths, but people usually don't. We collectively have this body image of ourselves as being "squishy", big brains compensating for weak, frail bodies. I like disabusing that notion.

Thanks for the great summary of the book. There are many software tools whose designers sought to implement the Zettelkasten method while taking care of many of the tedious and precarious details (like links) under the hood. In particular, the founder of the tool Roam Research cited How to Take Smart Notes and the Zettelkasten method as core sources of inspiration.

Source for a conversation (with a transcript written up in Roam, no less) where he stated this