An outstanding figure, in ancient Greece and ancient China, that is, in Greek and pre-Qin thought, he draws lessons from the past and revives the present, points out the gains and losses, and explores the underlying reasons that make the two cultures go on different tracks. Julian regards Chinese philosophy as a mirror and an other, hoping to find a good cure for the modern diseases caused by Western rationalist thinking.

Highlights the difficulty of translating concepts and ideas from the traditional way of thinking of one country to the traditional way of thinking of another country

It adopts the method of comparing the most fundamental differences and understands the limitations of traditional Western thinking through comparison (both are effective).

That is, slow and steady improvement, promoting continuous and subtle changes in thinking, and the interdependence of things

Representative genre?

If you refuse to be a porter of knowledge, you must write it down in your own words.

What needs to be recorded is knowledge, not information

There is no need for mechanical classification, but let the relationships slowly grow automatically.

one page method

Nine-square grid method

mind mapping

Feynman Notes

Cornell note-taking

PQ4R method

Work in peacetime

subtopic

They are likely to suffer from what psychologists call "impostor syndrome," which is that they feel they are not really qualified for the job even though they are the most qualified of all the people.

The Dunning-Kruger effect refers to a cognitive bias phenomenon in which people who lack ability draw wrong conclusions based on their ill-considered decisions, but are unable to correctly recognize their own shortcomings and identify wrong behaviors. These people who lack ability are immersed in the illusory advantages created by themselves, often overestimate their own ability level, but cannot objectively evaluate the abilities of others.

A good, organized work process allows us to take the initiative in our work and have more freedom to do the right thing at the right time.

Making a plan is to impose rules and regulations on yourself, and the progress becomes step-by-step

Splitting notes into piles, stacks, or separate folders can reduce their complexity, but such a process reduces the likelihood of discovering potential connections between notes, making notes difficult to balance between usability and usefulness;

Complex content can be built with simplified structures

The Importance of Overall Workflow

In the 1960s, the young German Niklas Luhmann changed the way he took notes. He wrote all his notes on small pieces of paper, numbered them on the corners of the pieces, and then collected them into card boxes. middle.

With the help of the card box, Luhmann completed his doctoral thesis and professional thesis in less than a year. During this period, he also took sociology classes and was selected as sociology professor at the University of Bielefeld in 1968. professor and holds this position for life.

Twenty-nine and a half years later, Luhmann completed "The Society of Society," a radical new theory that not only changed sociology but also sparked heated discussions in the fields of philosophy, education, political theory, and psychology. Each chapter of this work is published independently, and each book discusses a social system. The topics he discusses include law, politics, economics, communication, art, education, epistemology, and even love.

In 30 years, he published 58 books and hundreds of articles (excluding translations), many of which have become classics in various fields. Even after his death, the nearly completed manuscripts left in his office were sorted out, and six or seven more books on various subjects such as religion, education, or politics were published under his signature.

Luhmann realized that an idea, a note, is only valuable in its context, which is not necessarily its source. So he started to think about the idea of ​​how to make notes relevant and useful in different contexts.

Luhmann was able to focus on what was important at hand, pick up work quickly, and maintain control of the process because the structure of his work allowed him to do so.

Isolated focus on the Luhmann card box and neglect of the actual workflow in which it is embedded

Publications were only available in German and were discussed almost exclusively within a small number of sociologists specializing in Luhmann's theory of social systems, making it difficult to attract public attention.

The method is too simple. Most people do not have high expectations for simple methods, and are more willing to believe that people who have achieved outstanding achievements must have used unusually complex methods.

It contains literature and a brief description of the content of the literature;

Primarily the thoughts, comments, and thoughts he collects and generates about what he has read

Taking notes is not the most critical work. Thinking, reading, understanding and proposing ideas are. Notes are only their specific results. Writing is undoubtedly the best catalyst for us to think, read, learn, understand and generate ideas, because the writing process is also a process of transforming our own language

Challenge and strengthen your arguments by reading widely and changing and developing your arguments based on new information you learn

Take lots of notes, develop your ideas further, and see where things are going.

Follow your own interests and always choose the path that promises the most profound insights.

Serves as a key element in the overall workflow without distracting from any important work.

The system provides an external workbench where we can think and help our brains do the work that they are not very good at - storing most of the objective information.

Provides a brain that can concentrate on thinking without distractions and a reliable note-taking system

Paper and pen are also acceptable

Such as Zotero, Citavi

Paper or app form

Word, LaTeX

Zotero

Discuss what you have learned and demonstrate critical thinking skills and the ability to expand your ideas

Not only must you learn to write papers, but you must also know facts, be able to explain your ideas in seminars, and understand lectures

Students do not study to prepare themselves for research

Learning itself is doing research, in order to gain unpredictable insights, make them public, and share them with the scientific research community.

An argument that cannot be reproduced is not an argument at all.

You quickly learn how to differentiate between arguments that sound good and arguments that actually are good, because you have to think through arguments every time you want to write them down and connect them to previous knowledge.

It's just a reminder to collect information, it can be written in any way, and it will end up in the trash within a day or two.

Contains the necessary information in a way that is permanently understandable and can never be thrown away. They are always stored in the same place in the same way, either in a bibliographic management system or written to publication standards in a card box.

They are relevant only to a specific project, are saved in a project-specific folder, and can be discarded or archived after the project is completed.

No idea will be lost, take notes anytime and anywhere, and classify each note into the category of "permanent notes", resulting in excellent notes being submerged by other notes that may only be related to a specific project, or may not actually be that good. Therefore the swarming effect can never be achieved.

The disadvantage of only collecting notes related to a specific project is that you have to start over after each project is completed and cut off other helpful ideas. This also means that any non-project-relevant information you discover, think of, or encounter during a project will be lost.

Treating all your notes as flash notes and collecting only unprocessed flash notes is bound to lead to chaos. Even a small number of unclear and irrelevant notes scattered across your desk will soon make you want to start all over again. .

May fall into a vicious cycle of failure

Only when the work itself is motivating can the dynamic cycle of drive and reward be sustained and drive the entire task forward.

"Growth Mindset"

"Fixed Mindset"

Have a growth mindset

Follow the cycle approach

Example

lack of contrast

exposure effect

While those who multitask feel more productive, they are actually much less productive and significantly lag behind those who do one thing at a time in both quantity and quality.

When we think we are multitasking, what we are really doing is rapidly switching our attention between two or more things. Each shift of attention consumes our ability to shift and prolongs our ability to focus again. The time required for attention. Overall, multitasking can lead to exhaustion and reduce our ability to multitask.

writing stage

Proofreading

"focused attention"

"Floating Attention"

Everything we understand is connected, either through rules, theories, descriptions, or through pure logic, mental models, or explanations.

Zeigarnik effect

Break the indeterminate task of “writing” into different chunks that can be completed in one go

Make sure we always write down the results of our thinking, including any links that may be relevant to further inquiry

The smartest way is to "cheat". Instead of forcing ourselves to do things we don’t enjoy doing, we should find ways to make ourselves feel like doing things that move the project forward.

If you understand what you read, integrate it into your own thinking system, and then make notes and add them to the card box, you have transformed other people's discoveries and thoughts into new ideas of your own.

specific context

paraphrase

Document notes are meant to be written down into permanent notes in the card box, so it is just a process and you don’t have to distract too much on it. The permanent notes are what really increase the value of the card box.

Surround yourself with people who think like you

①Turn the entire writing process upside down

②Change the motivation from looking for confirming facts to gathering all relevant information, regardless of what argument it supports.

Change the way we discover arguments and ideas from top-down to bottom-up

Include facts that refute the presupposed argument within the scope of inquiry, not on the basis of support or opposition, but on the basis of relevance or irrelevance.

“If you can’t explain it clearly, you don’t understand it either.” (John Searle)

The most important benefit of "writing it down" is that it helps us face our perspective when we don't understand something as well as we thought we did.

Learning requires effort because we have to think to understand knowledge, and we need to actively extract old knowledge to convince our brains to connect it with new ideas as clues.

Knowing how to answer a question before we try to answer it will help us remember the answer better in the future, even if our attempts fail.

If we put effort into our attempts to retrieve information, we are more likely to remember it in the long run, even if retrieval ultimately fails without help.

Elaborating means really thinking about the meaning of what you read, how it can inform different questions and topics, and how it can be combined with other knowledge.

Using card boxes promotes real, long-term learning, which means not cramming isolated facts into your brain—writing, taking notes, and thinking about how to connect ideas are exactly the “elaborations” we need to learn.

Real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing.

Luhmann pointed out very clearly: without writing, it is impossible to think systematically

Only by converting the literature notes into external memory, that is, the card box, and continuing to have a dialogue with the card box, can these literature notes become part of our next idea.

Card boxes force us to do the exact opposite, to elaborate, to understand, to relate, and thus to study seriously. In this way, we can learn knowledge that cannot be learned in learning institutions.

A thinking screen between autonomous consciousness and long-term memory

Storage strength

Extraction intensity

By placing a card behind an existing card and numbering it accordingly, an infinite number of sequences and sub-sequences can be spent internally, with no hierarchical order, by alternating numbers and letters.

Note sequences are the backbone of note development, and they combine the advantages of summarization and sorting by topic.

The Card Box is not a book with just one theme, so we don't need an overview of it. Card boxes are the medium through which we think, not the object of thought. The collection of notes will gradually grow from complex to orderly.

①After adding a note to the card box, we need to ensure that it can be found again;

② You can quickly go from the index notes to the specific notes you are looking for, and then you can quickly transfer the writing arguments from preconceived ideas to the interrelated facts in the card box, and have a fact-based dialogue with the card box.

Keywords should be chosen carefully and not too many, because the card box should not be used as an archive for accessing notes, but as a toolbox to assist thinking, so the reference relationship between notes is greater than the relationship between the table of contents and the content. The index relationship is much more important.

When choosing keywords, be sure to focus on the topics you are researching or are interested in, and never read your notes in isolation.

Selecting keywords is not only a routine procedure, but also an important part of the thinking process. It will allow us to interpret a certain note more deeply and the relationship between a certain note and other notes more deeply.

Cross-referencing is a matter that requires serious thought and is a key part of the development of ideas: Luhmann used four basic types of cross-referencing: only the first and last are related to card boxes in software form, the other two are just for Make up for the limitations of paper and pen. If you're using an app instead of pen and paper, don't pay attention to them.

① Collect links to other notes related to this topic or question and briefly describe what can be found on these notes.

②These notes do not have to be written all at once, links can be added over time, and topics develop naturally.

③ Take seriously what you think is relevant to the topic, because it defines both an idea and the facts on which it is based.

④Change the entry in the index to this new note, and/or indicate on the old note that the new structure is now deemed more appropriate.

① Since Luhmann will insert new notes between the original notes to internally branch out subtopics and more subdivided subtopics, the original idea will often be interrupted by hundreds of different notes.

②The second type of notes is generally used to record original ideas.

③This approach is to make up for the shortcomings of paper notes. If we use application software, we don’t need to worry about this problem.

Only paper notes are needed

①No matter where the notes are in the card box, or what the context is, surprising new ideas can be generated by connecting two related notes.

②The connection between notes is like the "weak connection" in the social relationship between us and acquaintances.

③Although they are usually not our first choice for help, they can often provide us with new and constructive perspectives.

We tend to overestimate (psychologically) the importance of readily available information and skew our thinking toward the most recently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Without external help, we may only consider what we know, but not the information that we have forgotten. There is a lot of such information, but most of us don’t remember it and can’t find it. The card box can continue to It reminds us of information we have long forgotten.

Build a toolbox of useful mental models to help us deal with everyday challenges and make sense of what we learn and encounter.

When we learn something, we not only have to connect it with previous knowledge, but also try to understand its broader meaning, and we have to try to extract it in different times (spaces) and different contexts (changes), Using chance (contextual interference) and deliberate effort (extraction) will allow us to achieve twice the result with half the effort

Not only does the card box provide us with this proven learning opportunity, but whenever we use it, we are guided to do exactly what is recommended.

Note what you want to remember

Appropriate encoding of the information to be saved (this includes considering appropriate prompts)

practice recall

The ability to abstract is equivalent to the ability to find creative, practical, and feasible solutions to technical problems.

Abstraction is also key to analyzing and comparing concepts, making analogies, and combining ideas, especially when working across disciplines

For those of us who have been writing and organizing our notes throughout, we can look directly into our box of cards as we write, eliminating the need for brainstorming at all.

Brainstorming is like predicting which ideas are worth writing about, whereas using a card box is more effective because you can actually see what is worth writing about.

When working with a card box, we no longer have to worry about what to write because we answer that question every day. Whenever we read something, we will judge what is worth writing and then write it down; if it is related to our long-term thinking and helpful for developing existing ideas, we will record it in permanent notes.

If we decide to use the card box from the beginning and regard writing as the means and goal of our entire intellectual activities, then finding a writing topic will not be difficult at all. The key to the problem at this time is no longer finding a topic to write about, but through writing to develop the themes we found.

By using card boxes in our daily work, we can sift through dozens or even hundreds of possible questions to those that can actually be used in writing. The reason why our work can continue to advance does not rely on advance planning, but on trial and error in the process.

Processing, writing, connecting, differentiating, supplementing, and elaborating on questions are all things we have already done when taking notes in a card box.

The process of asking questions, developing themes, and writing through the card box proceeds from the bottom up.

The ideas we use are embedded in rich context and come with materials to work with, rather than being generated out of thin air.

When we become very familiar with an idea, we will no longer mistake it for a new idea and repeat the analysis. Instead, we can have fun revising it and discover new ideas based on it.

Think of old ways of thinking as conventional thinking. If we are not aware of our conventional thinking, we cannot hope to break it.

Ask yourself: "What is interesting about this matter?", "Which of the things related to this matter are worth recording?" In addition to selecting information based on interest, we can also conduct research on problems encountered at work. Explain in detail, discover aspects that we didn't know before, and thus extend our own interests.

Break down the big task of "writing" into specific small tasks, control your own work, and guide our work to develop in directions that we think are interesting and relevant, so that the work itself can become a source of motivation.

"When people can choose what to do independently, they will have more energy to complete subsequent tasks. Whether independent choices will activate or enhance self-regulation ability in subsequent tasks is also worthy of our continued research and attention.

Guiding projects in the most promising direction not only allows us to focus longer, but also allows us to have more fun.

Make sure the text is structured and flexible. Card boxes are great for experimenting with ideas and generating new ideas. We need to organize our ideas into linear text. The key is to visually determine the structure of the draft.

When organizing notes related to a specific project, there should be a separate place dedicated to that project. Outlining software can help us develop a rough structure while maintaining flexibility in the content.

Try working on multiple project manuscripts at the same time so you can unleash the true power of your card box.

When we write down all the writing materials we may need into card notes and collect them in a card box, it will help multiple projects in different states of completion.

The problem with planning is that the actual time it takes is much longer than the estimated time, and even the actual time spent by most students exceeds their estimate of the worst-case scenario.

A general skepticism of planning is needed, especially when the plan focuses solely on results and not on the actual work and steps required to achieve the goals.

Breaking the big challenge of "writing a paper" into small, manageable tasks helps to set goals that are realistic and can be checked regularly.

If the task is "take a note", "collect interesting content from this article" or "integrate this series of notes into a paragraph", it is easy to complete.

Hemingway was asked how many times he would revise a first draft. His answer was: "It depends. I rewrote the end of the book "A Farewell to Arms," ​​which is the last page, 39 times before I was satisfied."

The interviewer asked: "Is there any technical problem? What caused you difficulty?" Hemingway replied: "To find more correct words."

Remember that a draft is just a draft.

The hardest task in revising a draft is to delete things that don't add to the argument, as painful as "kill your loved ones."