Designing Tools for Scientific Thought

https://www.forester-notes.org/tfmt-0001/index.xml

by harperlee • 1 year ago

77 10 1 year ago

lou13062• 1 year ago

The existing tools for scientific thought can be divided into two main categories: interactive proof assistants and textual authoring and publishing tools (including LaTeX, as well as the Gerby software that runs the Stacks Project).

This seems... reductive? At the very least, isn't data collection, storage and retrieval also essential to scientific thought? I really do not think those tools can fit into a "textual authoring and publishing tool"-shaped hole.

abtinf• 1 year ago

Why do people write comments like this?

Pretty much the first thing the article does is define what it’s talking about. But you skip that, pull some other quote out of context, then attack that out of context quote.

And then you subtly change the topic, from “tools for scientific thought” to “[stuff that is] essential to scientific thought.” Are you hoping no one notices?

What do you get out of this?

auggierose• 1 year ago

To be fair, what a tool for scientific thought is comes labelled as a definition, but it reads like a theorem.

lou13062• 1 year ago

What do you get out of this?

Apparently, needlessly aggressive replies from strangers on the Internet. Let me smooth out my first comment. If your field of research is purely theoretical or can do without data you'll be fine with a network of notes, and it is actually really interesting to discuss the UX/UI of those!

But when it comes to the "definition" I am accused of skipping:

A “tool for scientific thought” could be many things, but it must be a tool for the development and interlinking of scientific ideas in a way that facilitates authoring, publishing, teaching, learning, and the maintenance of evergreen notes.

I am very curious to understand how this lessens my point. It starts by saying "could be many things" (the opposite of a definition) and ends up talking about the bespoke concept of "evergreen notes".

It ends up talking about tools for scientific _authoring_ which in many cases is the iceberg tip of scientific _thought_. I stand by my point that the latter needs collecting, retrieving, relating, and interlinking experimental data at least as much as it needs to do the same with snippets of text.

piombisallow• 1 year ago

We must design better note taking software in order to continue improving our note taking software

jdougan• 1 year ago

That is, of course, the essence of Doug Engelbart's bootstrapping approach and the development of NLS. It can work just fine.

jljljl• 1 year ago

Is there a collection of note taking practices (such as they exist) among the great thinkers/scientists in history? Is there an assessment or study of their notebooks somewhere that distills best practices? Are techniques like ZK or spaced repetition based on those practices or studies? Have they been studied for desirable traits?

The science of notetaking so far seems to have a lot of art and opinion, but little science

nobodywillobsrv• 1 year ago

I have landed on journal (ordered by timestamp) + occasional topics ("spatial") pattern of blob notes.

Doing topics is too hard initially and you end up hitting some point where you feel like you need to refactor. Doing "journal" dated entries mean you are allowed to copy the entire entry again and rewrite it without thinking about refactoring.

I would imagine that due to the way paper and pen work, in the old days things must have been a bit like this "no erase/no refactor" method.

chermi• 1 year ago

"...a note should capture just one thing, and if possible, all of that thing.". This just doesn't seem feasible to me for an scientific workflow. I realize his scope is math, where I can picture it being a little easier, but still nearly impossible. How often can you break down a note into something self-contained? I'm probably just taking it too literally.

Maybe this says more about my relatively disorganized thinking patterns. For me, notes are typically thoughts about the current thing I'm processing and it's relation to something else, often in an imprecise way, to be explored further. Maybe the point is that wouldn't qualify yet as a note, and only when you refine the thought into something more concrete with direct reference to precisely the relevant notes on the related thing(s). But where do I start?! How do I make the first atomic note? It seems I wouldn't be able to reference a book. Maybe I could reference a section of a book, hoping it's self-contained. But even then, is have to resolve the references needed for that section into atomic notes themselves. When do you ever have time to actually think?

I hope enjoyed this unedited stream of consciousness that I should probably just delete.

heisenzombie• 1 year ago

No I had the same reaction. This kind of rigid "semantic network" kind of approach just can't work in the absolute case. And the author seems quite "absolute" about it.

It comes down to - what's the point of this? If it's to prove theorems to a computer then it's obviously the wrong approach. If it's to explain concepts to humans then it's _also_ the wrong approach. It's not true in any useful way that one can learn something by just starting at a random "node" and then "tree shaking" some big "knowledge graph" and just learning the specific edges that remain.

That said, no hate for this kind of tool! Interlinked knowledge is obviously great and useful, it's the emphasis on designing a rigid ontology that makes me raise an eyebrow.

Designing Tools for Scientific Thought

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