At first you might hit a blank and become impatient, because after all, you think you know. “I’m fine, except for my bad feeling, as usual, about my main relationship, and that other worry.” But this is answering your question yourself. The body doesn’t answer that quickly. It takes about thirty seconds.

Surely you would be willing to accord your body thirty seconds? And yet, oddly, most people never do.

Look at your watch and see how long thirty seconds are. This will make you aware of their surprisingly lengthy span. Take thirty seconds. Try it now […]

[…] someone is afraid of feelings, you might say:

“Feelings and actions aren’t the same thing. You can let yourself feel whatever you do feel. Then you can still decide what you choose to do.

“It’s OK to need. Trying not to have a need that you do in fact have makes a lot of trouble. Even if you can’t get it, don’t fight needing it.

Often, we feel so much wrong that we come to accept those bad feelings as the basic state of things. But it is not. The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be.

Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.

The very existence of bad feelings within you is evidence that your body knows what is wrong and what is right. It must know what it would be like to feel perfect, or it could not evoke a sense of wrong.

It is better to say, “I’m mad,” than to say angry things and let your anger be seen indirectly. Saying your feeling directly lets it be shared.

If the first words that come to you feel hard to say, don’t fight with yourself. Wait a few moments and let another string of words form. Do this till you get words that feel OK to say. Don’t give up whatever needs expressing.

We often work desperately on the surface of what we feel, or how we’ve just reacted, trying to fix it or make it be something else. But it is easy to let the real feeling speak directly.

Examples:

• “That hurts my feelings.”
• “I’m hurt that you’re angry.”
• “That makes me feel pushed away.”
• “I feel outmaneuvered.”
• “I’m stuck.”

If you find it painful to be honest, realize that other people don’t care how good or wise or beautiful you are. Only you care all that much. It is not harmful to the other person if you look stupid or imperfect.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

You can even get very troubled people to talk about (or do) something they happen to be competent in—for example, sewing or music. This helps them feel OK for a while and lets you respond to a competent person —respond positively and for good reason.

It is often after such times, after having been able to just be with you, that a person might feel like taking you into some areas that are disturbing.

If the person talks a lot about strange material you can’t understand and then says one or two things that make sense, stick with those and repeat them many times. They are your point of contact. It is all right to keep returning to these phrases, with silence or other topics in between, for as long as an hour.

If the person says things that can’t be true, respond to the feeling rather than to the distorted facts or untruths. For example, “The Martians took everything I had away from me. . . .” You can get the feeling here. Say, “Somebody took what was yours?”

Let’s say a man asks you for something you can’t give. You may have to refuse the request itself, but you can tell him you’re glad he’s in touch with what he needs. Tell him you’re glad he felt free to ask. This is especially so if the need is in the direction of life and growth for the person, if for the first time he can allow himself to want or ask for closeness or time with you.

You can go from this into what she did and what she is like and why she did it. Or you can go into what you are like and how it upsets you. Don’t do the first. Leave that to the other person. Do the second: move from the bit of interaction into your own feelings. See why it affected you and share this.

It is hard for people to hear you say what’s wrong with them. It is easy to listen to you saying what’s wrong with you, or what is at any rate vulnerable or upsettable or shaky in you. Avoid making comments that start, “I feel that you. . . .” You’re invading the other’s territory and protecting yours.

Sharing what is happening in you makes the interaction more open and personal. The other person can then feel comfortable about sharing inner things with you.

Don’t say: “I have to express my feelings. Can I trust you with it? I feel you bully me.”

Do say: “I get angry and upset when I can’t get to finish what I started to say. I lose track. I get insecure about whether I have any real ideas.” It is essential to be specific in expressing yourself. Avoid generalities. It is still a rebuke to a person to be told he or she made you upset. It is not real sharing when you share only a generality. But if you share some of the specifics actually going on in you—your unique felt sense of the situation—you share yourself. You can find these specifics by focusing at that moment.

When you are being pushed too far, call a halt, set a limit. Do this before you blow up or get mad. Protect the other person from what happens when you don’t take care of your needs. Say what you want or don’t want, while you still have the time and concern to stay and hear what it means to the other person.

For example: “I like it that I’m helpful when you call me up, but now it’s happening too often. So instead of feeling good about it, like I used to, I feel pushed. I’d like to feel good about your calling. If I knew you’d call only twice a week, I know I’d like it again.” You are not trying to get rid of the person

If you are sitting with a silent person, say something like, “I’ll just sit here and keep you company.” Relax. Show that you can maintain yourself on your own without needing to be dealt with

Once in a while, someone shy will want to say something difficult and will ask an individual in the group to listen. It looks odd. I remember Susan standing up at a meeting and saying, “Um . . . Joe, will you listen to me so I can get this out?” Joe nods. She says something and Joe says back the crux of it. She continues and so does Joe. In this way she gets her thoughts said and heard, before anyone else in the group can interrupt or argue […]

• Absolute listening
  • the reasons to speak:
    • Sharing that you understand. Use your own phrasing to re-express what you think they meant to say, so they can correct you
    • Asking for clarification
  • Do not mix in your own ideas. Reuse their words for the touchy main thing at hand.
  • How to know you did it right: they either find more inside themselves: "No, it's not like that—uh—it's more like—", or they relax, like they let go of tension.
    • Don't disturb this peace by speaking

Focusing is not only for serious introspection once in a blue moon – it is useful almost as a state of being.

Like fresh air after being in a stuffy room.

1. Clear a space. Each thing that troubles you—don't go into it—just recognize it, and put it aside.
2. Felt sense. Pick a thing. Without going into it, let a whole felt sense form.
3. Handle. Put a word to the felt sense.
4. Resonate. Is the word right? Once the fit is just right, enjoy for a minute.
5. Ask, unless you already got the answer, "what/why this felt sense?"
6. Receive

• Recipe
• Socratic ducking
• My ADHD signs and symptoms
• Unlocking what the subconscious knows
• 2023-09-12
• Portal: Relationships
• Always-good advice
• My wetware
• Nonfiction I've read
• Urge propagation
• Portal: On my mind
• How to make good conversation while sure you have the correct answer
• Meditation vs introspection
• The most useful knowledge

Just reading correct statistics doesn't stick in memory as well unless you care a lot about the topic. Even then, every it's only a patch for a specific fact. What are some general ways to debias here?

Avoid exposure to selective reporting, or counterweight it somehow.

1. Avoid the news
2. Talk to a broad variety of people?
3. Always put numbers in context
4. Understand why today's world is not like the ancestral environment, when there was at most one layer of selective reporting between you & the event itself. You either saw the event yourself, or you heard it from someone who saw it.
   • Also crucial: you knew everyone. So it was not only less of a game of telephone, there was also a more relevant "sampling frame" for your reference class
   • Echoes how Inferential distance works
5. Get less-filtered info (not info passed thru six successive bloggers)
6. Get in the habit of paying attention to the provenance of the information, since that determines whether or not it is information at all. Concretely:
   • Track what you've been told by a third party vs. what you've been told from the source. 1/5 of the world live on $1 per day, but they don't write 1/5 of blog posts in your feed, so what do you know about them?
   • Track what kind of sampling frame surfaced this information to you
   • Track whether you were looking for the information, or received it unasked-for

Events that have never happened are not recalled, leading to an absurdity bias against those. Flood insurance! People don't buy flood insurance when it hasn't been flooding.

Burton et al. report that when dams and levees are built, they reduce the frequency of floods, and thus apparently create a false sense of security, leading to reduced precautions.2 While building dams decreases the frequency of floods, damage per flood is afterward so much greater that average yearly damage increases.

• Representativeness heuristic
• The same cause underlies both the availability heuristic and the conjunction fallacy
• Human heuristics, biases and fallacies
• Follow blogs by people deep in each field, not news
• Availability

Creativity requires the absence of censors.

When you feel unwilling to edit a page because "that'll mess it up", you have a few options to unlock the freedom to be creative:

• attach a :noexport: tag while you edit, so there's no risk you upload this mess to the web
• make a new page and copy most of the content (You can always write a new page on the exact same topic), then axe content as you please
• work first in a daily-page, and paste the completed work later
• (some people suggest this) learn to trust in version control
  • doesn't really work for me, since even if I can recover work, I'm not confident that I'll remember there was anything good to recover

OK. Let's say you have a portal-page that systematizes a topic. If you realize you want a different kind of systematization… you can ALWAYS write a new page, and keep both.

Sometimes I have a note that's less a true slipbox-note, more an essay or a rant. Then one of two things happens. I may refine it for many months or years, like Nutrition science, or it loses relevance and I no longer want to update it.

I may even find it hard to update because it constructed a narrative that I don't want to disrupt.

If you recognize that, congratulations! You have what I call a "frozen artifact", or what some call "timeful content". The stream in The Garden and the Stream. What to do? Throw it down the stream. Refile it into dailies, so it's out of the main slipbox.

In my experience, it's hard to make good notes weeks or months after reading something. It's best in that piping-hot moment when the insights are fresh in my mind.

Have you ever marked paragraphs in a book to revisit in the future? It feels good, but it's a false feeling of productivity – instead, paraphrase in a separate notebook or device, right away!

In fact, it may be harmful to passively mark paragraphs because Recognition is deceptive: when (if ever) we revisit what we marked, the feeling of recognition makes us think we understand the subject so it's harder to tell just which knowledge it is that we could not regenerate—which insights won't come to mind when we most need them. Reading without writing creates a false sensation of learning.

Another compelling reason:

Eliezer Yudkowsky once tried to re-write the material that went into Book: Rationality: AI to Zombies, but he failed: the test readers said this re-written material lacked the "Yudkowsky charm". I find this concerning to all who want to take good notes, because it appears that even the person who originally wrote an intuitive explanation cannot do it twice!

I guess it's because after too much mulling over the same insight, it'll have become too clarified in our minds and we can no longer see what was so difficult about it (the curse of knowledge). And then we cannot find the most pedagogical way to express the idea.

Best to write when we first encounter the idea, while we're still a bit confused about it.

• Rely on dense linking
• Rely in part on taxonomy in so-called topic-notes or "portals", while accepting that such a taxonomy won't be complete and that's okay
  • In the metaphor of a directed graph, these nodes are the start points
• Rely in part on pseudo-tags: empty pages with titles that start with a hashtag (#). They're the inverse of portals because they link to nothing themselves and contain no text, but lots of pages link to them, so they have massive backlinks
  • In the metaphor of a directed graph, these nodes are the end points
• Use different methods of exploration now and then, for a fresh look at the material
  • Generate a visual graph (with org-roam, there's org-roam-ui)
  • With org-roam, use Delve sometimes
  • Use fulltext search (consult-grep) when title search isn't satisfying

#org-roam

In Emacs Org-mode, tagging is a wild-goose chase. Don't tag just because there is a "tag" system. From what I read, it's different from the "tag" system in most slipbox software, like Roam Research, which have something they call "tags", but they're just a different way to write links. A close Org equivalent would be a page that starts with a hash symbol, i.e. the hash symbol forms part of the title—end of story.

That is what I have done with "topic-tags" like this one: #org-roam.

When you need an actual Org tag, you'll know.

Example: I use Org tags to filter out some notes when I run org-publish to make this website. Tags can also mark org-drill flashcards, or mark stub-pages so I can grey out their links. So, strictly technical purposes, not to do with classifying the content in a way that matters for exploration ("math", "literature", that kind of category, don't use Org tags for that).

A writer says:

I had this problem when I was trying to keep a good mental model of my Semantic Synchrony graph. A surprisingly nice thing about linear (including tree-hierarchical) text that I didn’t notice until I had a knowledge graph is that there’s a natural traversal you can measure your reading progress against. That is, it’s much easier to know “I’ve read 40% of this text file” than “I’ve read 40% of this knowledge graph.” Your knowledge-graph files are likely to reference each other in a circular manner – that’s why they have to be a graph, not a tree.

The most natural solution would be to write code that creates a topological sort of the files, based on something like Kahn’s Algorithm.

But my solution, and it’s the most common one, is to simply not know what’s in the graph very well. The guy who invented Zettelkasten said navigating his knowledge graph was (eventually, after it was quite big) like conversation – it often surprised him.

The above quote prompted me to make the counter, which you can see, in the top bar of my website.

Anyway.

Some software, including org-roam v2, org-node,and Logseq, have the wonderful property that notes need not be tied to disk files in the sense of one-note-per-file. This means you get to have hierarchy when you want to: you can write a very large note without needing to treat it as an indivisible chunk – any section therein can be "registered" as a complete note of its own, while staying part of the large document also.

Of course, if you didn't have such software, you could just have notes that are a hierarchical list of links to atomic notes, a kind of meta-note, but sometimes it feels more natural to write a linear document without linkifying every last thing.

As mentioned in gwern.net/design, hyperlinks aren't such an amazing thing that everything should split up and connected by hyperlinks. On the contrary! Try to need as few hyperlinks as possible.

Imagine you want to print out your notes. Maybe for your future amnesic 70-year old self. Before it's possible to sort them to easily read in sequence, they have to be acyclic, meaning that the whole network of hyperlinks form a DAG (directed acyclic graph).

I think it's silly to put in a lot of effort just to enable a sequential printout, but I'm wondering whether imposing acyclicity can also help the sense of logical structure, and help whoever walks the notes to not walk in circles.

Of course a knowledge base worth anything must be circular, but it may be possible to impose that it only be circular when you count backlinks, and fully acyclic when counting forward-links only.

Maybe it'd also result in more distinct structures when the graph is plotted visually. Even better, maybe you'd find yourself hashing out more clearly what ideas depend on (are enabled by) as opposed to what they enable (are dependencies for).

I am concerned it could obscure connections. Because backlinks are automated, you can't add info to them, but you may really want to write "this idea enables X, Y, Z because…" as well as "it depends on A, B, C because…"

Anyway, might be easy. Write some command to find the minimum en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_arc_set, then snip those links if it makes sense to. If it doesn't, consult a different feedback arc set (there are many sets, for any given graph). Or instead of snipping, move some links so that instead of A -> B, you have B -> A. Bam, the cyclic becomes acyclic!

Repeat the process every few months as a kind of quality-control routine.

In other words, write not persuasion pieces, just explain your process.

LW user johnswentworth claims that this habit promotes better epistemics than the high-school habit of researching everything you want to say because you fear saying anything shaky: www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Psr9tnQFuEXiuqGcR/how-to-write-quickly-while-maintaining-epistemic-rigor

You don't need to do any research! Just explain how you got to where you are. And the nice, sweet, crucial benefit is that you're freed to just publish, publish and publish. Less time-sinks blocking your way.

As a side-effect, it's better for the audience:

Point is: the amount of uncertainty I should assign depends on the details of my process. It depends on the path by which I reached the conclusion.

This carries over to my writing: if I want to accurately convey my uncertainty, then I need to accurately convey my process. Those details are relevant to how much certainty my readers should put in the conclusion.

Luhmann didn't necessarily title notes, he just numbered them. So titles are not necessary, only links are. (Mandatory titles clash with Luhmann)

Compressed titles can make great concept handles (see Why publish?), but I cannot title a note well until after I've written most of the body. Try to start with an untitled note, and title it later.

We could use a workflow for developing untitled notes. The digital medium has some drawbacks compared to paper if we don't carefully program in equivalent functionalities.

Benefits of paper:

• Locality. Newer notes tend to come later, in chronological order, so it's very quick to look up the IDs of what you were just working on.
  • ☑ my-next-file-in-dir
  • ☐ some way to insert link to a "nearby" file
    • an Embark action for inserting a link to the file under point, for use in consult-buffer
      • consult-buffer even has previews: essential when the title means nothing
  • ☐ Linking back to a file you were just working on, for when you didn't have so much foresight as to use org-roam-node-insert to create a node and insert it at the same time
• Note-sequences. Sometimes you want to refer to a note that's not at all "nearby" in terms of date created, only nearby in terms of relevance. It must be enough that you've visited a note, for you to easily link to it.
  • (The Embark solution above looks good).
• Easy peeking at notes as you leaf through them
  • ☐ org-roam-node-{insert,find} should preview contents as you go like consult-buffer does

Although:

Not every insight is expressible in few words. So while I might've favored handwriting because it forces me to find better words, it would be wrong-headed to regard an idea unimportant just because I can't find a succinct way to express it.

This would limit my room-to-learn on top of the universal human limitation that only ideas within a short inferential distance will make sense. On a laptop I can write verbosely, and doing so is also a way to talk to myself, generate examples & learn, perhaps important when there's a lot to unpack at once.

from www.nateliason.com/blog/roam

A wiki does not enforce discipline in keeping ideas atomic. Imagine a hybrid between twitter and a wiki, where there's a character limit on wiki pages – that would be closer to Zettelkasten. It forces you to break things up, which can result in reifying concepts which otherwise would be a forgettable paragraph in a longer text.

[…] but what really freaks me out is seeing the dentist. […] Now as a mature, psychoanalyzed adult I STILL get weird, compulsive, emotionally distant, and rigid. In waiting a day to deal with fear of pain (denied) I decided to create template in Roam. A card template a patient could use to prepare for a new, emergent, medical or dental contact. I titled it Good to Go and worked on it a couple of hours. Made a provisional outline and sketches of examples of what pt. need to collect, know, tell the MD, etc and also some sketches of a "manual" what the risky points a patient might expect in a new setting.

The whole effort was about two pages, and three hours of work and writing. Went to bed, slept and had a dream (significant as in this type of situation I usually would have disturbed sleep.)

Incidental Finding: Remarkably when I went to the Oral Surgeon to have tooth pulled I was relaxed, had good questions, remembered all I was told, and after leaving realized that something at a deep level of consciousness had occurred. I attribute this to Roam.

On Roam Research:

Since you start in the Daily Notes, every day becomes its own page and you can “pre-create” those pages with the Date Picker. So when I have a thought about something on a future day, or want to assign a to-do for myself for the future, I can just tag that date.

i.e. you should have a command, which in org-roam we might call org-roam-dailies-insert-date, so that when you want to schedule something for the future, it'll autocreate the daily page for that date and link to it. Then on that day, the backlink will be visible. However, that presumes three things:

• that you're on the computer every day
• that you start every day in a day-note
• that your backlinks buffer are visible by default

• No longer believe in extracting book highlights. At least per Three kinds of slipbox notes, highlights can be considered transient notes, which means you must take care of them within a day or two while your thoughts are still fresh. This I will not do – I know myself.
  • The problem with revisiting highlights later is that I'll recognize the reasoning in front of me, and this recognition is deceptive: I feel like I already possess this insight and don't have to write a note. Even though the truth is I don't possess the insight in such a way that I'll ever use it in other situations – I never wrote in my own words, I was never tested. And if I try anyway, I don't remember why it was novel to me the first time I read it, making it harder to figure out what's worth writing. Always read with pen in hand! Taking notes is never a detour!
  • So, I no longer need to sync highlights from my #e-reader. Thank God, because that was a complicated tech stack. I just need an e-reader, of any sort. (Bonus if I install KOReader on it to easily jump from bookmark to bookmark if needed, although perhaps even bookmarks are evil.) Then, write notes in any way possible while reading.
  • Perhaps a "book cover" for the e-reader, that has a paper block on the facing page, since I've now ascertained I must take notes while reading, not after reading, and paper doesn't need me to bring a second device that must be kept charged. Paper is additionally great for Write, then edit, training brevity/getting the gist, and the well-known better recall due to the interaction with a physical object.
    • Maybe the reMarkable's default app (xochitl) also lets me take these transient notes acceptably. The important takeaway is that I cannot just highlight as I have been doing – and onscreen keyboards suck, so I must use either a stylus or a Bluetooth keyboard.

• maggieappleton.com/programmatic-notes
• Slipbox pitfalls
• Unpacking beliefs
• How to put in your own words something the source expressed perfectly?
• notes.alexkehayias.com/don-t-use-deductive-arguments-to-connect-key-lines-use-inductive/

• Custom org-roam-extract-subtree
• Using the reMarkable, my unsophisticated way
• Portal: Slipbox
• Website writing tips

• For every postulate, provide at least one gear
• To think complex thoughts, you must write
• Book: How to Take Smart Notes
• Potential of slipboxes