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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4607 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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For about 13 years, in different forms.

Used to be a physical notebook, with the chronicle of ongoing problems and solutions and dreams and other stuff. Now Obsidian-based pile of Markdown files (primarily). I hope to one day integrate it all – maybe neural networks will soon get up to the task of OCRing my scribbles.

I have a backbone structure in the form of a diary, where I write things I generally do not want to forget or might find valuable to review in a year or more, plus registration of mundane events that might or might not come in handy later (health/security concerns), plus everything else from drafts of Motte posts to documents to code to dumps of web pages, sometimes interlinked for convenience.

All of this is streamlined with templates. The daily template looks like

  • Headline (date, one-line summary)

  • Mission

  • Day Planner section with a more or less precise timetable that is parsed into time tracker with notifications

  • Diary section

  • What I have read (links to files or webpages)

  • What I have written/made (links to files)

The Weekly note template consists of a mission, one-paragraph summary, a table for recurring observations, and expanded links to individual days.

There are independent hierarchies of nested tags and folders, plus some minor structures implemented with dataview.

I believe that my system, like many others of this sort, is a product of path-dependency and cognitive sluggishness, far from optimal for its purposes, so I'm uninterested in providing more details and spreading it. There are communities of people obsessed with journaling, GTD, Zettelcasten, you name it; they care a great deal about optimizing it, but it doesn't seem to help very much.

Day Planner section with a more or less precise timetable that is parsed into time tracker with notifications

Interesting, how does the notification system work?

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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