Nat Eliason

Roam is phenomenal, I seriously love this app. There are these two articles that can show new users what this app is about: - https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam - https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/eho7de/building_a_secon… There is also https://www.remnote.io/ , but it's too complex and clunky right now, at least for me.

This book is regarded as pseudo-science by psychologists. Although it's not like there is much good science when it comes to a subject this complex. For anyone wondering what the list of proposed laws are: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/48-laws-power-robert-greene > Law 7: Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit Always shocks me that some people are actually proud of and recommend this kind of stuff. I guess it makes sense for a google talk, especially given how the google promo and perf review system works.

I've gotten a lot of use from a version of Zettelkasten in Roam recently. The general idea is this. 1. Take "Literature Notes" in your own words as you consume content. These are little summaries of ideas in the text that are usually 1-3 lines. For paper books, I do this in a little Muji notebook. For digital resources, these go straight in Roam. 2. When you have finished the resource, copy your notes to one page and summarise them in "Permanent Notes". 3. Keep your Permanent Notes in one Permanent Note page and link everything together. The best guide I found for getting this kind of system set up was https://www.nateliason.com/blog/smart-notes. The original "How to Take Smart Notes" book is also good, but much less concrete. Really, I found step 1 to be the most valuable. I was previously processing highlights from articles and books and that weirdly took more time. Writing little notes as you go along saves only what is relevant and it's much more direct for your use cases. As a word of warning though, I really haven't gotten this stuff to work very well for programming (or disciplines where you need to exercise knowledge rather than archive it in a system). I either find I need to memorise the stuff more directly with Anki, or having to practice skills in a real world context.

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. --…

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…

> 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

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…

Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”. “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.” https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman

I have been feeling this for some time. I think it is covered tangentially here https://www.nateliason.com/blog/de-atomization-is-the-secret-to-happin… by the term "atomization"

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-history/its-time-let-five-sta… The 5 stages were from what I like to call the "just make shit up" era of psychology. Because if it sounded true it was psychology! Some would argue that era never ended, but I think that's just cynical. https://www.nateliason.com/blog/psychology-myths

Author here. You are right. Doing hard things just for the sake it builds your confidence. Relevant article: https://blog.nateliason.com/p/proof-you-can-do-hard-things

Actually, that pain actually helps you remember your studies, possibly even more than reviewing the cards themselves! It's similar to how taking notes during a lecture help you remember better, even if you never review the notes again. Fluent Forever[1] teaches an effective method for maximizing the benefits of SRS. It specifically targets foreign language learning, but the concepts can be applied to whatever you want to learn. [1]: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/fluent-forever-gabriel-weinberg

I liked the quote from Turning Pro [0] that was mentioned: > Sometimes, when we're terrified of embracing our true calling, we'll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us I've unfortunately experienced first hand the tendency to fall back onto paths that are easy, low risk, and comfortable. [1]: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/turning-pro-stephen-pressfield

Hi, I come across a lot of blogs when I curate for my newsletter Interesting Things [1]. Just looking through the links that have been curated in the past month or so, I would suggest: Tech - https://wasteofserver.com/ - https://tonsky.me/ - https://brianschrader.com/ - https://blog.thea.codes/ - https://fasterthanli.me/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://blog.royalsloth.eu/ Non-tech - https://www.drorpoleg.com/ - About work and society - https://staysaasy.com/ - About tech work - https://www.nateliason.com/ - About life in general - https://andymatuschak.org/ - https://craigmod.com/ - https://perell.com/ And, of course, shameless plug: https://bengtan.com ---- [1] https://bengtan.com/interesting-things

You might benefit from a tool called Roam Research: https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam

Thanks for the warning. I'll go with my normal approach to non-entertaining non-fiction and just read a couple of online summaries. E.g. https://www.nateliason.com/notes/antifragile

I agree on most of the arguments in the book "The Sovereign Individual" on what will most probably happen in the next decades. Summary: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/sovereign-individual

Every time I say something negative about Soylent here at Hacker News I get voted down hard. But I will say it again: Soylent has not even come close to making a product that can compete nutritionally with goat milk, cow milk or arguably even coconut milk! In fact it is most likely bad for you. https://www.nateliason.com/blog/soylent

You might like Nat Eliason's summary and notes of the book: https://www.nateliason.com/lessons/12-rules-for-life-jordan-peterson/. I read that this morning and it was incredibly intriguing, I'll definitely have to pick up the book this weekend.

> 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_B… ). At https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/what-happens-if-you-stop-using-soa… we can read an interview with Hamblin: "And if you…

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…