Reading source material, taking notes, then transcribing and rearranging those notes, and finding connections between them are all central to thinking, according to Sönke Ahrens. Legendary note-taker Niklas Luhman argued that it was impossible to think without writing.
Now of course you could very easily feed a LLM a big stack of research papers and ask it to create perfect Zettelkasten-style notes and save yourself a lot of trouble. But to Ahrens’ and Luhman’s point, you wouldn’t learn anything in the process. You wouldn’t be thinking.
David Millard , professor of computer science at University of Southhampton, used Anthropic’s Claude to construct a thought-provoking system of notes by using a concept known as hypertextual friction. Claude would read a research paper and then propose notes, but Millard had to accept them, reject them, or take them with reservations. The same was true with links and with interstitial objects such as Maps of Content. In all instances the AI put Millard firmly in the driver’s seat.
Millard discovered something unexpected in the process. Instead of leaving him feeling overwhelmed, on the point of cognitive overload as you might expect with hypertextual friction, he found the friction to be enjoyable.
The most striking experiential finding for me is that hypertextual friction (the moments of pause, decision, and interpretive effort described in Section 6) is not experienced as cognitive tax. It is experienced as the rewarding part of the work.
I suspect that this has to do with creating a living structure, where the smallest parts are working together to build a coherent whole.
This is fascinating, although not to the point where I’m going to turn over my knowledge base to Claude. But it demonstrates that AI does not, in and of itself generate “AI drift”. It all depends on how you use it.
Via Mark Bernstein,
SEE ALSO
Using your notes to think through issues and discover surprises Ask Your Notes, Not ChatGPT
Impossible to Think Without Writing
Is Your Zettelkasten Alive? How Structure Impacts the Life of Your Notes
