zettel should be atomic

Table of Contents

content of a zettel should only address atomic idea, because:

In practice, when made atomic, a zettel often falls in one of 3 common zettel categories

1. references

Backlinks

zettel

basic component of zettelkasten. A zettel is formulated in the following 3 parts:

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unique ID
used to reference a specific zettel in other zettel
content
an idea, a thought.
reference
context, or source.

A functional zettel cannot just be your whole notebook with a unique ID like “notes-in-2024”. For a zettel to be functional in a zettelkasten, it has to follow some principles:

navigation zettel

zettel that have lots of links. Could be specially made as entrance to ideas around a topic, like “Artificial Intelligence” to hold link to “Learning is not necessary for Artificial Intelligence”, when I have a good idea on the latter, and the former only as portal to good ideas like the latter.

This is an exception for zettel should be atomic. Clearly, “Artificial intelligence” can be split in many ways; yet this navigation is still useful

navigation zettels often falls into the following categories:

  • plain navigation for browsing - index
  • incidentally important concept - zettel
  • in the process of decomposing a complex problem - “solving XXX with A and B” “convert XXX into YYY” “solve YYY with A to B-compatible form” until the most simple propositions.
  • compilation of ideas to teach/present (draft/post of tutorial or artical) - “developmental learning tutorial 1: implementing scholarly thinking” “how one actually find out about useful knowledge from raw experience”

Footnotes:

1

if something is only “nice to be mentioned”, make another zettel about it. e.g. don’t mention gausian mixed model in the zettel about distribution. Wikipedia has this problem: to understand one term, one has to go through many unnecessarily referenced terms.

2

don’t resort to technical terms if you can state it in plain words. The word is beaten by a line of formula \(G = R_{t+1} + \gamma R_{t+2} + \gamma^2 R_{t+3} \text{ with } \gamma \in [0,1)\), which contains only primary-school math

Author: Linfeng He

Created: 2024-04-03 Wed 23:22