# Converting Information into Knowledge *** **Prev Card**: [[Step Four - Clean as You Go Obsidian]] **Next Card**: *** ## Overview One of the things people are often impressed with is how much information I retain. Most of what I have been sharing in these articles comes from the [[library/Building a Second Brain|book Building a Second Brain]], however that system is MOSTLY about being a productive knowledge worker. There is whole other discipline around actually increasing what you know. As Maya Angelous said, "**When you know better, you do better**." This note is all about knowing better. There is a three part process to learning more: 1. Capture 2. Cultivate 3. Create These three steps mimic the old medical school concept of how to learn something: 1. Watch one 2. Do one 3. Teach one To really increase your knowledge, it seems we humans have to first, be exposed to it. Then work with it. And finally, produce something with it. ## Capture: My System for Knowing Better For me it all started with Ted Talks. I stopped giving my attention to the news because, well, the best way they can hold your attention is to get you upset. Social media is even more insidious. According to [[Stuart Russell]] in his book [[Readwise/Books/Human Compatible]], > **to maximize click-through**, that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. The solution is simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. **The solution is to change the user’s preferences so that they become more predictable**. A more predictable user can be fed items that they are likely to click on, thereby generating more revenue. **People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable** in which items they will click on In his [[library/Factfulness|book Factfulness]] [[Hans Rosling]] says that is not that the media is "evil" (although social media companies might qualify), they are simply responding to human nature. We are by nature, simply more attentive to upsetting or negative information. As I liked to remind my kids: If you are watching something and you get upset, you might have just bought something you don't want to own and you paid for it with your attention. Remember, **if the product is free, _you_ are the product**. My point here, is I stopped looking at Social Media and the news as sources for **useful** information. Their business is to get me to pay attention, not to educate me. I needed other sources of information that I could convert into useful knowledge. All those ours of thoughtless consumption could not be repurposed for intentional acquisition of useful information. Once I knew how the bias worked, I first turned my attention to Ted Talks. I found them uplifting. Here are super smart people trying to solve really hard problems. That, eventually lead me to reading the books these people had written. This, inevitably lead me down a parallel path. I got an Audible subscription so I could "read" while I was walking the Dog or driving (what Zig Zigler called "Auto-University"). However, the major breakthrough for me came when I learned about [Readwise](https://readwise.io/). Readwise.io is a service that can link your kindle highlights and _export them_ into a note taking application. As soon as I learned that, I started to buy BOTH the audible book, and the kindle book. That way, when I hear something I want to remember in the audio book, I pause, switch to the kindle (which syncs up automatically) and I can drop the highlight. This has lead to the following flow: ![[Kindle to Obsidian Flow.png]] In words, Audible and kindle lead to highlighting or marking the most **relevant** information to me. Readwise then automatically sends this information to Obsidian. One the other end, I can use a bibliography manager like Zotero to help me keep track of key sources, which I use in writing. Readwise also connects with Instapaper and a bunch of other digital formats. However, one thing I noticed is that Getting my highlights into Obsidian was awesome, but to cite my sources, I needed more information. That was what lead me to [Zotero](https://www.zotero.org/) which bills itself as your "Your personal research assistant". It is really an amazing bibliography tool. For 98% of people Readwise will be good enough, but I wanted to be able to generate Dan Pink level citations for sources. So I use Zotero plus two plugins to be able to get the book information from Amazon, into Obsidian. The first plugin is the Zotero chrome extension, which pulls information needed to build a useful citation from websites, and from Amazon for books. The other plugin is called mdnote, and it exports the Zotero information into my Obsidian vault. ![[Zotero Plugin.png]] With this flow, I can buy a book, listen to it, mark passages that are relevant, have them "automagically" appear in my PKM and when I'm ready to work with that information, I can gather the bibliography information straight from Amazon and import it into Obsidian. ![[Zotero to Obsidian.png]] > [!note] My Personal Library has more than 550 books and 15,000 highlights > I have been reading weekly for more than a decade. While Tim Ferris can read 3 books in a day! I process about one a week. If I am active and focused I can "take down" a book in a few hours, but that is more about extracting key information than it is about enjoying the books. > [!tip] One reason I love audible > When an author reads their own work, I feel like I am hanging out with a super smart person who is sharing something cool they learned. For me it is the best kind of podcast. ## Cultivate: Working With Your New Knowledge The next part of the process for me, when working with knowledge is both the most fun, and the most frustrating. Consuming lots of new information becomes its own kind of dopamine addictive behavior. You get lots of excitement from new ideas, but if you don't put them into practice what good are they? I was disappointed to discover that in the early years, very little of what I read actually made a difference in my life. Tim Ferriss is very up front about this. When we read non-fiction books, they should make a difference for us. So how do we retain more? Of course there are lots of books to tell you how to do that, but here is the short hand of what I do now. First, I have created my own variation of the Feynman Technique. The Blog Farnum Street (https://fs.blog) is an excellent resource for better thinking, and they do a fantastic job of documenting [The Feynman Technique](https://fs.blog/feynman-technique/), which they call the best way to learn anything. My short synopsis is this: - Describe what you learned to a 12 year old. - If there are holes in your understanding, go back and fix them. Now, you may not be able to find a 12 year old, but the principle is this. Can you summarize, in your own words what you learned? [[Barbara Oakley]] in her [[library/A Mind For Numbers|book A Mind For Numbers]] covers this concept that memory is an act of **reconstruction**, not recollection. That is one reason memory is so malleable. We are constantly reconstructing it every time we access it. This is also why highlighting alone is not enough. Having the information in front of us, gives us a verisimilitude of learning. We see the answer, we understand the answer, so we think we _know_ the answer. But if we have not retrieved it from our own head, we do not really know it. So the next best thing is to tell it someone else. What if you have no one to talk to? Then tell it to yourself **by writing it down**. That's right. Create your own book summary. Tim Ferriss in all of his paper books recommends creating your own index of highlights by writing on the front of a paper book, then from that, making an "action box" where you list the 1-n things you are going to take away from the book and apply in your life as soon as possible. This is great for paper books, but what about Digital books? My process now goes something like this: When I finish, I create a Book Note file in Obsidian. Then, I create an executive summary of the book. This is where I blend the ideas from [[Niklas Luhmann]] and [[Tiago Forte]]. The idea is to curate the information, not simply regurgitate it. Starting with a Feynman like summary, I try to recall as much as I can. After that, I then bring in my hightlights and notes from Readwise. The big idea from Niklas Luhmann is to "link your thinking." What is so powerful about Obsidian and other similar tools is **backlinking**. Back linking means that your notes not only link to other notes in the forward direction (like a hyperlinked webpage), but they also **track what is linked to them**. Using backlinking you can find out what notes link _to_ the one you are looking at. I have summarized Luhmann's approach in my article [[Published/Building a Second Brain|How to Build a Second Brain]], which I have to admit now is a bit of a misnomer. It's really a summary of building a Zettlekasten system. What you need to know is this: - One idea per note. - Link ideas in a sequence like cars in a train. - Branch to new ideas when they hit you. You have seen this system if you have read this far in my notes. The next most powerful idea is what to do with those ideas. You need to link them. When I summarize an article, I not only describe it, I **also link it to other similar content**. That is where Obsidian really shines, and this goes to a concept of anchor points. The human mind, near as we can tell is an associative engine. We see this in music. When you hear a song from your middle school years - the music can transport you back to the time when you first heard it. The emotions, the sensations, all that stuff is connected. The heart of building a second brain _is_ creating connections. When you connect new knowledge to existing knowledge you are in essence anchoring it and making it stickier in your mind. Therefore, if you want to learn something, one of the most effective things you can do is summarize it, and connect it. Creating associations mimics the behavior of the human mind, and this, in my opinion, more than anything is what makes a system like Obsidian a **second brain**. It is the ability to associate any and all notes with each other that begins to shape cultivation. For me what Tiago Forte added was the idea of **Progressive Summarization**. Every time you touch a note, you have the opportunity to improve it by adding: - Bold markings - Highlights. The concept is to never lose the original information, but you can progressively refine what matters. You have already seen an example of what this looks like in my quote from Human Compatible above, but let me make the example a little more refined. > **==to maximize click-through==, that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. ==The solution is==** simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. The solution is **==to change the user’s preferences so that they become more predictable==. A more predictable user can be fed items that they are likely to click on**, thereby generating more revenue. **==People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable== in which items they will click on**... **==the algorithm learns how to modify==** the state of its environment—in this case, **==the user’s mind==—in order to maximize its own reward**. The consequences include the resurgence of fascism, the dissolution of the social contract that underpins democracies around the world, and potentially the end of the European Union and NATO There are three layers of information here. 1. The whole paragraph (captured from the original highlight) 2. The bold which distills a more refined view of the authors argument. 3. The highlight which cuts it down to its essence. In short social media algorithms are designed to create more extreme political views because that in turn makes viewers more predictable which generates more profit. That idea blew my mind. But the process here is one of refinement. I did not get to this in one pass, it took a couple. But in the process of curating my notes, I pulled out the parts that mattered most to me. The essence of "working with knowledge" is relating it things I already know, _and_ curating it to what is more relevant to me. This leads to the final step in making my knowledge more available. As you might imagine, I have templates for all of this. ## Create: Use the information There are several factors in using knowledge. Some knowledge is _immediately_ useful, like working with code snippets. If I'm learning something, I tend to dive and and apply it right away. Other times, it's more abstract. As in the idea of articulating your purpose in life. That can take some work. But the idea is to _use what you have learned in some way._ This is Tim Ferriss action box. Being intentional on how I will apply this information. This entire post is an example of Creation, pulling information from a variety of sources and presenting it in a new way. Basically, how can I most effectively share what I have learned with others? But wait, why go to all the trouble of linking and progressive summarization? Because when it comes time to create, you will have an extraordinarily powerful tool at your finger tips. Every note taking app supports search and tag, but what about associativity? With Obsidian you can open a graph and _see_ the connections between your notes. This is why you only want one idea per note. What you are looking at is a network of ideas. And one way to define innovation is the unexpected connection between disparate ideas. Put another way, any path through your idea graph, has the potential to generate innovation. At a minimum it can generate new insights, new understandings, and potentially new content. This way of note taking exploded in two areas: Content creators, and the medical feel. Medical, because everything in medicine is connected, but content creation because the internet has an unquenchable appetite for content. Using an idea graph can help you create a nearly unlimited flow of new content. This is the real power of a Second Brain. Not simply more efficient storage and retrieval of information, but it can become a tool for better insights, deeper understanding, and new ways of thinking about things.