Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter

Note-taking apps are "designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?".

Casey's info overload is worse then ever: "As a journalist, I’ve never collected as much data as I do now ... browsing four or five social feeds ... arXiv and pre-prints ... [leaves] a stack of research that I will never get through. Book galleys pile up ... all day long I browse the web", storing articles in Notion... I have so much information at hand that I feel paralyzed."

Note-taking was the obvious solution, with new tools like Roam giving him faith that they could "not just capture my writing but to improve the quality of my thinking", particularly daily notes coupled with bidirectional links. So he invested a lot of time into it and "waited for the insights to come".

They didn't. He moved to Obsidian, then Mem. "But the original promise ... fizzled completely". Was it the software? Maybe "journaling and souped-up links simply don’t have the power some of us once hoped they did."

Or is it that they can't compete with "the infinite daily distractions of the internet. Note-taking... does not take place in a vacuum". Quoting New York Times (Ezra Klein) on the work of "Gloria Mark... the author of “Attention Span"... in 2004... people spent on a single screen [on average] 2.5 minutes... By 2012... the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47. This is an acid bath for human cognition. Multitasking is mostly a myth... if you want to take good notes, you have to first extract your mind from the acid bath"

Klein is worried that while AI promises to make us more productive, it might just be another rerun of the internet itself, which briefly boosted productivity growth, but then "the more we stared at our screens the slower our productivity improved... AI [could] invent so many new distractions and entertainments that they overwhelm and paralyze us."

He uses some of Notion's new AI features in his links database for summarising each article and autotagging them by company. "Neither of these, in practice, is particularly useful... Tags might theoretically be useful for revisiting old material, but databases are not designed to be browsed... AI-written summaries... often miss important details and context."

If only he could "talk to my Notion database as if it’s ChatGPT... it might be a perfect research assistant". While this is precisely what I have with integrating ChatGPT into myhub, he seems to have foreseen that it is not as powerful as it initially looks: "it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking... thinking takes place in your brain... an active pursuit that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space ... a process that stubbornly resists automation".

Perhaps Andy Matuschak is right: "note-taking apps emphasize displaying and manipulating notes, but never making sense between them... [maybe] no one has really tried" to get that to work (that does sound like the noone's really tried it justification for communism).