Obsidian and the PKM Hype: Why the Tool Isn't the Contribution
Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
Brennan Kenneth Brown's critique of personal knowledge management systems (PKMs) misses the mark, conflating the tool with its users and shifting his own questions mid-argument. Obsidian, like Emacs or vim, is just a tool—its value lies in what people create with it, not in some inherent 'epistemological value.' The real problem isn't the systems but the hype around them, and the author's own examples, like Tiago Forte's 'Second Brain,' actually support incubation and creativity rather than refute them.
The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world.
- kepano
Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.
A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, etc. Not dissimilar to how people use Obsidian. The Henry Ford Museum has fifty of these notebooks: https://www.thehenryford.org/search?Query=%22jot+book%22
How should we quantify the impact of Henry Ford's notebooks? How should we quantify the impact of spreadsheets?
Most people who accomplish anything take notes in some form, because writing is a way of thinking. We love to mythologize the tools and methods of accomplished people because we hope it will let us absorb a bit of their genius. But a good camera doesn't make a good photographer. Taking lots of photos helps.
Should you take notes? Probably. Does it matter what your method is? Probably not. Whatever works for you. Obsidian (or any other form of notetaking) is successful if it disappears and lets you accomplish your work.
- udbhavs
I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatever I come across in Obsidian canvases or webs of interlinked notes or making Anki flash cards gives me some comfort about what I'm doing, and of course satisfies the urge of organizing and categorizing things.
But when I relate these activities to learning itself, it becomes difficult to gauge how much of it is necessary. If I don't constantly serialize or test what I'm learning, how do I know I'm learning anything at all? And externalizing so much starts to feel like a burden and gives me less confidence in my own intrinsic ability to just go and do things.
I was going to post an "Ask HN" on this topic to see if other people related to this. If anyone has been in this mindset before and managed to break out of it, I'd be curious to know what helped!
- Ferret7446
These discussions always conflate the different types of "notes".
Broadly, there are two very different kind of notes. First, there are notes whose purpose is to be easy to find when you need to recall some bit of information. Then, there is note taking in service of learning.
These two are very different in goals and thus very different in terms of optimal strategy.
Also, there is note taking in service of creation, where the end goal is neither recall nor learning, but to create notes to share to other people, often for artistic purposes but potentially also for reference or learning. These are also different from note taking for personal reference or learning.
- fasterik
For the purposes of learning something new, I don't find note-taking or the idea of "knowledge management" very useful. I do create sets of notes for certain topics when I'm learning them, but the notes themselves are more or less disposable. It's during the act of creating them that real learning takes place. It forces me to work through problems and identify areas that I assumed I knew but really just had vague notions or misconceptions. Once I've learned a topic to my satisfaction, I'd rather refer back to a textbook than my own notes.
- bauerd
I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.