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464 lines
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Plaintext
[1]Skip to main content
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[2]The Verge logo.[3]The Verge homepage
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• [4]The Verge homepageThe Verge logo./
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• [12]Platformer/
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• [13]Apps/
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• [14]Tech
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Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter
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Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter
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/
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They’re designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?
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By [15]Casey Newton, a contributing editor who has been writing about tech for
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over 10 years. He founded Platformer, a newsletter about Big Tech and
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democracy.
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Aug 25, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC|
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Share this story
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•
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•
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•
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Screenshots of the note-taking app Obsidian.
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Screenshots of the note-taking app Obsidian. Image: Obsidian
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This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and
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democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. [20]Sign up here.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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Today let’s step outside the news cycle and turn our attention toward a topic
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I’m deeply invested in but only rarely write about: productivity platforms. For
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decades now, software tools have promised to make working life easier. But on
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one critical dimension — their ability to improve our thinking — they don’t
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seem to be making much progress at all.
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Meanwhile, the arrival of generative artificial intelligence could make the
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tools we use more powerful than ever — or they could turn out to be just
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another mirage.
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To understand where things went wrong, I want to focus on the humble
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note-taking app: the place where, for so many of us, thinking begins.
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I.
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Earlier this week I read a story about farmers. “America’s Farmers Are Bogged
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Down by Data,” read the headline on [21]Belle Lin’s story in the Wall Street
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Journal. I thought to myself: You and me both, farmer! And I read the piece.
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Over the past decade, farmers have been offered all manner of software tools to
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analyze and manage their crops. In general, though, the more software that
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farmers use, the more they find themselves overwhelmed by data that the tools
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collect. “We’re collecting so much data that you’re almost paralyzed with
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having to analyze it all,” one farmer told the Journal.
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As a journalist, I’ve never collected as much data as I do now. The collapse of
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Twitter has me browsing four or five text-based social feeds a day, scanning
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for news and thoughtful conversation. The growing popularity of arXiv and
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pre-prints in general has left me with a stack of research that I will never
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get through. Book galleys pile up in my house.
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A screenshot of the app Notion.A screenshot of the app Notion.
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A screenshot of the app Notion.A screenshot of the app Notion.
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A screenshot of the app Notion. Image: Notion
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Meanwhile, all day long I browse the web. Stories that might belong in
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Platformer get saved into a database in the productivity platform Notion. Every
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link that has ever been in this newsletter is stored there, in many cases with
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the full article text.
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Collectively, this material offers me an abundance of riches — far more to work
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with than any beat reporter had such easy access to even 15 years ago.
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And yet most days I find myself with the same problem as the farmer: I have so
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much information at hand that I feel paralyzed.
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II.
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One solution to this data paralysis is to take notes. As a journalist, of
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course, I have always taken notes. A few years ago, I thought we had seen some
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true breakthroughs in note-taking, and increasingly put my faith in those tools
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not just to capture my writing but to improve the quality of my thinking.
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The breakthrough tool was [22]Roam Research. In 2021, I wrote here about [23]my
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first year using the subscription-based software, which had two key insights
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into knowledge work. One was to make professional note-taking feel more like
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journaling. It turns out that a fresh note created each day, labeled with a
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date, is a good canvas for collecting transient thoughts, which can serve as a
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springboard into deeper thinking.
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The second is known to note-taking nerds as “[24]bidirectional linking.”
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Standard links, like the ones you find on the web, go in only one direction —
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from one page to another. In a note-taking app, bidirectional links join two
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pages together. This effectively lets you add backlinks to any concept — a
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company that’s important to you, say, or a concept that’s on your mind — and
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then let you browse everything you’ve collected related to that concept at your
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leisure.
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A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking.A graphic from Roam
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illustrating bidirectional linking.
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A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking.A graphic from Roam
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illustrating bidirectional linking.
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A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking. Image: Roam
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On one level, that’s not so different from adding tags to notes. But tags are
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more about search. Bidirectional links, which some apps show you on pages that
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include snippets of all the other notes that contain the same link, are more
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about browsing and rediscovery.
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Initially, I threw myself into this kind of associative note-taking. I gathered
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links around concepts I wanted to explore (“the internet enables information to
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travel too quickly,” for example, or social networks and polarization). When I
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had an interesting conversation with a person, I would add notes to a personal
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page I had created for them. A few times a week, I would revisit those notes.
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I waited for the insights to come.
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And waited. And waited.
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Note-taking apps are up against a much stronger foe
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My gusto for concept-based, link-heavy note-taking diminished. Roam’s
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development slowed to a crawl, and I spent a season with the lightweight,
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mostly free alternative known as [25]Obsidian. Obsidian’s brutalist design wore
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on me, though, and eventually I decamped for the more polished user interface
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of [26]Mem. (These apps all enable the exporting of your notes in Markdown,
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making switching relatively painless.)
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I continue to journal most days, and occasionally find myself working to refine
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one concept or another among those notes.
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But the original promise of Roam — that it would improve my thinking by helping
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me to build a knowledge base and discover new ideas — fizzled completely.
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III.
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One interpretation of these events is that the software failed: that journaling
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and souped-up links simply don’t have the power some of us once hoped they did.
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Another view, though, is that they are up against a much stronger foe — the
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infinite daily distractions of the internet.
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Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place on your
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computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage, and the
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text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of alt-tabbing between
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these and other apps, our ability to build knowledge and draw connections is
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permanently challenged by what might be our ultimately futile efforts to
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multitask.
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Ezra Klein wrote beautifully about this situation this week [27]in the New York
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Times:
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Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of
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California, Irvine, and the author of “[28]Attention Span,” started
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researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people
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spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me.
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“That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just
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the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a
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single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.
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This is an acid bath for human cognition. Multitasking is mostly a myth. We
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can focus on one thing at a time. “It’s like we have an internal whiteboard
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in our minds,” Mark said. “If I’m working on one task, I have all the info
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I need on that mental whiteboard. Then I switch to email. I have to
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mentally erase that whiteboard and write all the information I need to do
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email. And just like on a real whiteboard, there can be a residue in our
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minds. We may still be thinking of something from three tasks ago.”
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My first thought upon reading this was that it seems rare for me to spend even
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47 seconds looking at one screen on my computer without at least glancing at
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another. (I bought a 38-inch widescreen monitor for the express purpose of
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being able to glance at many windows simultaneously. At the time I understood
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this as a tool for enhancing my productivity.)
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My second thought is that if you want to take good notes, you have to first
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extract your mind from the acid bath.
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IV.
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Klein’s piece starts from the observation that productivity growth is now about
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half of what it was in the 1950s and ‘60s. The internet’s arrival briefly
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speeded it up, he writes, but the more we stared at our screens the slower our
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productivity improved. He worries that AI will have a similar effect on the
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economy — promising to make us more productive, while simultaneously inventing
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so many new distractions and entertainments that they overwhelm and paralyze
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us.
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The piece stuck with me, because there is one specific way I am counting on AI
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to make me more productive. It goes back to that database of links I’ve been
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building in Notion, and the insights I was hoping to get out of Roam.
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Saving an article in Mem.Saving an article in Mem.
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Saving an article in Mem.Saving an article in Mem.
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Saving an article in Mem. Image: Mem
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Earlier this year, like many productivity tools, Notion added a handful of AI
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features. I use two of them in my links database. One extracts the names of any
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companies mentioned in an article, creating a kind of automatic tagging system.
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The other provides a two- or three-sentence summary of the article I’m saving.
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Neither of these, in practice, is particularly useful. Tags might theoretically
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be useful for revisiting old material, but databases are not designed to be
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browsed. And while we publish summaries of news articles in each edition of
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Platformer, we wouldn’t use AI-written summaries: among other reasons, they
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often miss important details and context.
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At the same time, the database contains nearly three years of links to every
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subject I cover here, along with the complete text of thousands of articles. It
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is here, and not in a note-taking app, that knowledge of my beat has been
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accreting over the past few years. If only I could access that knowledge in
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some way that went beyond my memory.
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It’s here that AI should be able to help. Within some reasonable period of
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time, I expect that I will be able to talk to my Notion database as if it’s
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ChatGPT. If I could, I imagine I would talk to it all the time.
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Much of journalism simply involves remembering relevant events from the past.
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An AI-powered link database has a perfect memory; all it’s missing is a usable
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chat interface. If it had one, it might be a perfect research assistant.
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Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard
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I imagine using it to generate little briefing documents to help me when I
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return to a subject after some time away. Catch me up on Canada’s fight with
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Meta over news, I might say. Make me a timeline of events at Twitter since Elon
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Musk bought it. Show me coverage of deepfakes over the past three months.
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Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard. The training
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data often stops in 2021, for one thing. The bots continue to make stuff up,
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and struggle to cite their sources.
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But if I could chat in natural language with a massive archive, built from
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hand-picked trustworthy sources? That seems powerful to me, at least in the
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abstract.
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Of course, the output from this kind of AI tool has to be trustworthy. A
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significant problem with using AI tools to summarize things is that you can’t
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trust the summary unless you read all the relevant documents yourself —
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defeating the point of asking for a summary in the first place.
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Still, if you are the sort of productivity-tool optimist who will try any to-do
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list or calendar app on the off chance it makes you even a little happier at
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work, it seems to me that a database you can talk to might be the
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next-generation note-taking tool we have been waiting for.
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V.
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I’ve learned something else about note-taking apps, though, since my mania for
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them began in 2020.
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In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our
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thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the
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internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations
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into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time
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— this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying.
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I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple years
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The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is
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an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches
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of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a
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bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are
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formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.
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Which is not to say that software can’t help. Andy Matuschak, a researcher
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whose [29]spectacular website offers a feast of thinking about notes and
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note-taking, observes [30]that note-taking apps emphasize displaying and
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manipulating notes, but never making sense between them. Before I totally
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resign myself to the idea that a note-taking app can’t solve my problems, I
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will admit that on some fundamental level no one has really tried.
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“The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively,” [31]
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Matuschak writes. “Better questions are ‘what practices can help me reliably
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develop insights over time?’ [and] ‘how can I shepherd my attention
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effectively?’”
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I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple years as I
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kept filling up documents with transient strings of text inside expensive
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software. And I accept that to be a better thinker, I’ll have to devote more
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time and attention to wrestling with what I find.
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If there’s a friendly AI to help me do that, though, I’ll be first in line to
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try it.
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References:
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[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian#content
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[2] https://www.theverge.com/
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[3] https://www.theverge.com/
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[4] https://www.theverge.com/
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[5] https://www.theverge.com/tech
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[6] https://www.theverge.com/reviews
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[7] https://www.theverge.com/science
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[8] https://www.theverge.com/entertainment
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[10] https://www.theverge.com/
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[12] https://www.theverge.com/platformer
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[13] https://www.theverge.com/apps
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[14] https://www.theverge.com/tech
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[15] https://www.theverge.com/authors/casey-newton
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[20] https://www.platformer.news/
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[21] https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-farmers-are-bogged-down-by-data-524f0a4d
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[22] https://roamresearch.com/
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[23] https://www.platformer.news/p/notes-on-a-year-using-roam-research
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[24] https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
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[25] https://obsidian.md/
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[26] https://get.mem.ai/
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[27] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/artificial-intelligence-thinking-minds-concentration.html
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[28] https://www.harpercollins.com/products/attention-span-gloria-mark?variant=40346590117922
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[29] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/%C2%A7Note-writing_systems
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[30] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/%C2%A7Note-writing_systems?stackedNotes=zsRuFxYgckGS81tr2eiBAP
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[31] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/%C2%A7Note-writing_systems?stackedNotes=z8V2q398qu89vdJ73N2BEYCgevMqux3yxQUAC&stackedNotes=z7kEFe6NfUSgtaDuUjST1oczKKzQQeQWk4Dbc
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[33] https://www.theverge.com/24040075/apple-vision-pro-hands-on-virtual-reality
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[34] https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24040093/google-layoffs-ad-sales-team
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[35] https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24040562/samsung-unpacked-galaxy-ai-s24
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[36] https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24039883/google-incognito-mode-tracking-lawsuit-notice-change
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[37] https://www.theverge.com/24039832/nvidia-rtx-4070-super-review-gpu-graphics-card-benchmark-test
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[40] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/terms-of-use
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[41] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/privacy-notice
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[42] https://policies.google.com/privacy
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[43] https://policies.google.com/terms
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[44] http://theverge.com/
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[45] http://theverge.com/
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[46] https://www.theverge.com/apps
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[47] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23923648/whatsapp-view-once-voice-messages-notes-beta-test
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[48] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23923113/whatsapp-stay-logged-in-two-accounts-meta
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[49] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/18/23922707/pixel-pals-language-widget-christian-selig-apollo
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[50] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/18/23922150/irs-direct-file-pilot-available-13-states-income-tax-2024
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[51] http://theverge.com/
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[52] http://theverge.com/
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[53] https://www.theverge.com/
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[54] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/terms-of-use
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[55] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/privacy-notice
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[56] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/cookie-policy
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[58] https://www.voxmedia.com/pages/licensing
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[59] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/accessibility
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[60] https://status.voxmedia.com/
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[61] https://www.theverge.com/pages/how-we-rate
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[62] https://www.theverge.com/contact-the-verge
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[63] https://www.theverge.com/a/tip-us-secure-contact-email
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[65] https://www.theverge.com/about-the-verge
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[66] https://www.theverge.com/ethics-statement
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[67] https://www.voxmedia.com/vox-advertising
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[68] https://jobs.voxmedia.com/
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[69] https://www.voxmedia.com/
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