Note titles should advertise insights

• Andy Matuschak’s notes on Evergreen Notes were a good starting point for me to get into a note taking habit.
• Especially viewing note titles as APIs, preferring statements to sharpen claims, the technique to create stubs via backlings (from Taxonomy of note types) were valuable pointers.
• Having titles advertise insights or core concepts of my mental models help me surprise myself while writing notes. Writing notes should lead to surprising connections. Effectively, I am building a web of truth-claims.
  • Relevant David Deutsch quote
• Having a high standard for note titles (preferring statements over single-noun titles) forces me to engage more with what I wrote about. Note that single-noun titles are up-for-grabs when it comes to “what does this tell you?” and thus there is no explanatory value behind single-noun titles. Good Explanations are hard to vary
  • Backlinks also tend to be more meaningful for statements. Instead of just linking a single word as a neutral definition, I have to engage with the statement and see where it fits into the context of the page.
• If a concept is actually a Theory (thus containing statements/encoding understanding), having a concept note is fine.
  • Example:
    • Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory
    • Every system has a bottleneck on which efforts should be focused when trying to improve the system could equally well be called Theory of Constraints. If in doubt, I still prefer the statement.