Szymon Kaliski

Note Titles Becoming Abstractions

• when thinking with zettelkasten I found that after a while note titles themselves become a shortcut to the ideas noted inside - I no longer have to open the note to have a mental picture of what it's about

• the titles are one step up on the ladder of abstraction

  • this should compound - allowing one to climb up using progressively abstracted concepts

• Andy Matuschak noticed the same thing, calls notes "APIs":

  When Evergreen notes are factored and titled well, those titles become an abstraction for the note itself. The entire note's ideas can then be referenced using that handle. In fact, this property itself functions as a kind of litmus: as you develops ideas in notes over time and improve the "APIs," you’ll be able to write individual notes which abstract over increasingly large subtrees

  — https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3XP5GRmd9z1D2qCE7pxUvbeSVeQuMiqz9x1C ↗

  • another point for the API metaphor is that one can combine APIs to build complex functionalities - same as combining different thoughts should create new (more complex?) thoughts

Backlinks

1. 2021-06-14Cognitive Medium¹