Piper Haywood wrote one of those very good posts last week — a cross-section of personal interests that manages to be both minutely specific and widely resonant.

Understanding requires effortful engagement; you are not likely to draw much understanding from a folder of barely-skimmed PDFs.

But seeing the shape of your ideas is not the same as having new ideas, and in fact — as with the ossification of keywords — creating a too-comprehensive portrait of your own thoughts can amount to locking yourself into a labyrinth of your own preconceptions. ​ Instead my notes were beginning to depress me. They were a visible testament of fruitless effort. ​ To my horror, it turned out to be a chaotic mess that would never have passed muster under my own dissertation director. It read, in my opinion, like something written by a sentient library catalog, full of disordered and tangential insights, loosely related to one another — very interesting, but hardly a model for my own academic work. ​ but I had to admit that once again my attempts to disrupt thinking with a technology of note-taking had only resulted in an enormous, useless accumulation of busywork. ​ I finally had to acknowledge that something had been wrong about the advice I received so many years before: a scholar’s notes were not a life’s work, but only a tool.

it can be a difficult transition from essential to adjacent. ​ This transition requires learning to deliberately create space for the team around you, and comes down to actively involving them in discussions, decisions, and ultimately substituting sponsorship for repeating the successes that got you to Staff in the first place. ​ When you make a key contribution, feel good about it, and then think about what needs to happen for someone else to make that contribution next time. ​ Be the one to take notes, this helps destigmatize note taking as “low status” and also frees up an alternative would-be notetaker to contribute more instead. ​ If you need a rule of thumb, keep a sponsorship journal and ensure you’re sponsoring others at least a few times a month – if you find yourself sponsoring less frequently than that, dig into what’s stopping you.

Maybe talking to ourselves in the mirror works after all – I don’t talk to myself in the mirror, but I talk to myself a lot in my journals. We talk about long-term responsibility to the natural eco-system and to society, but my suspicion is that till we learn to undertake long-term responsibility for ourselves, we will not be in the position to undertake that on a societal level. It didn’t matter what I achieved professionally, or how many people told me how good my work was. I felt empty, fragile and exhausted. I felt like I had to keep up that relentless pursuit just so I can be continually validated so I can continually exist. Can you imagine asking anyone these days how long their project would take, and how your response would be if they reply, “30 years”? We would be shocked if they said something like 3 years.

I am not convinced as Andy suggests that reading retention and note-taking are fundamental skills of knowledge work. What's more I have a suspicion that many knowledge workers over-rely on the act of collecting notes. Too much note taking is pernicious: it feels like doing something, while also giving you an excuse to endlessly delay putting forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Rather than collecting and storing thoughts, the deliberate practice of knowledge, the expression of creativity that comes from play, necessitates sharing nascent and feeble ideas.

An idea for iOS and Android

Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/iwpaq4k8xxue3rp/Knots_Notes.pdf?dl=0

Slides for the course on category theory. Contribute to TallCats/CategoryTheory development by creating an account on GitHub.

These notes were originally developed as lecture notes for a category theory course. They should be well-suited to anyone that wants to learn category theory from scratch and has a scientific...

I love functional programming, […] and developing intuition behind complex topics. Thus G [some group] is a category with one object, in which every arrow is an isomorphism.

relearning the pleasures of reading for myself, which was part of learning how to be in my own company. ​ To most readers the notes would be nothing more than an eyesore, but to put them in circulation would somehow manifest versions of myself that no longer felt familiar, and seemed to risk preceding me.

“I also sketched an app called Broadway in 2009, which became the first iOS app we ever wrote at @lickability, when it was just me and @bcapps as high-schoolers. https://t.co/xBHwasiXjz”

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated

All of my math stuff from grad school. Contribute to mbrandonw/my-math-notes development by creating an account on GitHub.