This was a fantastic article and beautifully captured something I had been circling but hadn't quite put into words:

> The notetaking people—and I say this with all the love in the world—are never, like, a researcher at the cutting edge of their field, building this vast cathedral of knowledge, note-by-note, so they can derive new insights. Never a historian who has to read tens of millions of words across thousands of sources to synthesize the life of some historical person. It’s never someone doing something hard. It’s always some blogger. Their “digital garden” is about how to keep a digital garden. It’s very solipsistic: there’s no output, no deliverables. The deliverable is you take a screenshot of your Obsidian graph and tweet about it to show off how much it looks like an incomprehensible ball of twine.

> Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.

It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."

This likewise is a basic fact I encounter over and over:

> Knowledge is another limiting factor. I find that even very educated people tend to underrate the importance of knowledge. A lot of people have this attitude that you can just Google everything just-in-time as it comes up. Like Babbage, I can’t rightly apprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead someone to think this.