Personal (Knowledge -> Epistemological) Management

My first intentional knowledge management effort was prompted by the book circa 2019 - "how to take smart notes" by Ahrens Sönke - introducing the Zettelkasten.

that was the first sentence that i wrote down and then i was going to present my past with knowledge graphs and how they aren't useful anymore.

came up with a brief dump as follows(part of my writing process):

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knowledge mangamenet 

notebooks before - emergent structure around notes - what helps , what doesn't

knowledge graphs

obsidian , couple of org roam ones, extensions for maintaining multiple roam vaults

why i gave up on emacs is a story for another day

multiple wiki phases over that period of time - nuke the past ones
 - links in footnotes

not of much use - but of some use - pruning was important

LLMs into the mix -  2022

epistemology

## questions

what's useful?

 - connections? - graph - epistemological cartography
 - to be able to update them and make use of them
 - what makes a knowledge graph useful ? - that is the important question
 - what do you do of that knowledge? - when do you really start building knowledge graphs well

that was not supposed to be seen by you but i rally wanted to convey how i'm going about this well.

i maintain a bunch of journals in a handy tmux, nvim popup and this is what i wrote while at this:

 - as i onboard onto a new project - going to spend some time building the epistemology layer around the project so that i can iterate over time - it should be small and shouldn't change a lot over time
 - good time to start doing this - NeSy wise - need to be able to get started with 
 - writing well and to learn feels too grainy on the brain right now - for too long, i've written like a hobo - time to return to my intellectual and rigorous roots
 - i'm just staring at a blank screen - that is kinda hard on my brain
 - alright - i guess it's time to start going on with the destructivist and creativist alternating approach when it comes to writing things down
 - start with a larger dump, cut down and orient and structure and the let the underlying message emerge from the process
 - don't focus on the small stuff first
 - emacs was good - having structure around how i work was good - now that i've worked without it for a while - need to start building my operational muscles again , this time being very deliberate around what i do and what i don't - infinite extensibility is not ideal - i did expose the internals well and would have been a right choice to stay in given the way software engineering in itself hadn't changed so much but now, the terminal is the way to go about this
 - what it means to use a computer in the present day has changed dramatically - the CLI never goes out of fashion i bet - it will probably always remain the most powerful layer of controlling and interacting with a computer i bet
 - the rest will all be layers that build on this one
 - why i gave up on emacs - what software engineering meant changed - spending all of the time in emacs is not a thing anymore - collaboration demands markdown and other tooling - before, when learning solo - i bet that was all fine and all but now, not anymore , need to start thinking about doing things more efficiently
 - tmux and neovim are the native drivers for everything now - honestly - it was lisp that made me go out there - now i don't really care about lisp as much so that is a thing - i would have stayed in tmux and vim if it wasn't for tmux out there - i did learn a lot though
 - as a consultant - domain knowledge when getting on a project needs to be ramped up on quickly - today, i'm going to spend a day sharpening the axe
 - will write on technical things henceforth - along the lines of writing to learn by William Zinsser
 - along the lines of writing to think is what i'll do - teaching and explaining a particular small concept would be nice
 - alright, i need to start being practical about how i do things henceforth - not single one off blog posts of whatever but more larger pieces of content
 - on charting an idea

writing and curating is quite non-linear and involves a bunch of recursive refinement around ideas. My intent around these meditations is to "write to think" (realized during that journal entry) - that involves being a little more transparent and honest around what my brain is really upto when i'm thinking of a particular thing

i don't care about punctuation or grammar or spelling well as much when i think - i understand why i do care about it so muc hwhen i publish

writing for the sake of publishing feels off lately - why do i have to publish in a curated and polished manner - that is not really what i'm going for these days

anyway don't like reading extremely curated stuff adn would just prefer the idea being conveyed as efficiently and rigorously as possible when i do to try that

in the middle of this all , realized that i'm not this person to force myself to write like 1000 words a day and rack my brain around if a sentence sounds right?

i'd rather iterate upon a 1000 essays, run higher order tooling and processing on those (LLM assisted summaries, visualize embeddings, note patterns, etc) to let the ideas emerge , instead of trying to force a conveyance in that one essay.

bear with me while i figure out how does one write to think

i shall get back to the idea of how do i really want to approach knowledge and meta-knowledge and my incentives around it ove rtime - that is somethign that deserves more than an essay and a lot more honesty

i did go and read a wikipedia page on epistemology while going through this and realized that i would rather build my understanding empirically rather than retrofit my thought/thinking into predefined buckets/labels

i'll be spending some more time evolving this process and being a whole lot emore honest aroudn how i like to analyse myt approach to maitnaing my ideas, in a compute assisted manner

this might look ugly at first, but i do expect to converge to something useful soon before i actually get down to something better than i've done before - giving up a local optima in hopes of a global optima that's more natural to me down teh line

i planned on being complete in this unit of conveyance (an essay) but i don't really have a definite answer as to why should i not just let this play out over time

alrgiht, should have a SaaS aroudn "writing to think" as well sometime soon

SaaSes are here - https://www.youtube.com/@CognWare