#postrox

With regards to recent events surrounding Scott P. Scheper's controversial handling of the mistake in his print book and his excited emails, I thought now would be the time to publish my review of said book.

For context, I purchased the book and the four bonus products in about November 2022 and got the book myself in December 2022. I thought they were alright; spending the extra premium is an investment in my own attention, too. After reading the book and aligning it with my own principles surrounding the Zettelkasten method, I began work on my hybrid (paper and computer) slipbox, Hemera. This slipbox is particularly significant because it is focused on my education major: cognitive science.

Unfortunately, in February 2023 this year...

Apparently, Scheper, rather than simply sending a note to those who purchased his book, and clarifying the error, has decided to use the opportunity to promote not only a second edition of his book, but also a tangentially-related $40/mo. marketing newsletter. // Actual Email 59 here: https://scottscheper.com/letter/59/

...and the subsequent "apology" in Email 60...

...and the final Email 61 finally clearing up the deal with the erratum.

Ay yai yai. What a whirlwind! It was too much -- and I had thought Scott was becoming more reasonable up to and after his interviews with Nick Milo @ Linking Your Thinking and Bob Doto @ The High Pony. So I've decided to pull away from the community. I suppose my final contribution to the Antinet community rests under the next line; but for this year, I am done.

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Begin review. Four stars out of five.

My one tip: Treat it like a textbook!

Drawing from experience in marketing, copywriting, and managing a cryptocurrency business, Scott P. Scheper's first book makes a splash onto the niche Zettelkasten scene -- and himself.

This book is something of an inverse to Sonke Ahrens' "How to Take Smart Notes", which has been the unofficial canon text of digital Zettelkasten since it's English translation in 2017. That book is concise, specific, and spirals inward to the impersonal problem of taking better notes.

Meanwhile, late 2022's "Antinet Zettelkasten" is long, tangential, and spirals outward from the method to also reveal Scheper's deeper thoughts, judgements, and experiences. Even the first few introductory chapters are about him and his journey across personal knowledge management scene. It becomes clear early on, and through his tapestry of meandering trails of thought, that Scheper is trying to find his voice. And it's not just a game anymore. His audience now are people who may have not fallen to PKM's wayside, watched his videos, or read a single newsletter; and stretches across a timespan of a fringe note-taking culture (Zettelkastens in general) that could pop at any time.

So I'm not being cheeky when I say to treat it like a reference textbook. If you're after the impersonal task of developing knowledge and pumping out publications, by all means, eat this book through and throw the bones over! Each section is somewhat self-contained and you can skip sections or jump back and forth between them. Your only barrier might be the lack of an index, which I think is a hilariously ironic for a book whose method involve -- and validates -- indexing by hand. Whether this was an actual choice or an accident to be remedied in the 2nd edition, I don't know. Still: hilarious and frustrating.

But if you have the time and the care to connect with another person developing their mind, read the book all the way through. The book is it's own work of art. Is it any surprise that personal nonfiction, the nonfiction that plays with narratives and experience, resonates with us more than non-narrative nonfiction? Probably not.

End review.

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According to this source, Luhmann's most practical method of communicating with his slipbox involves an interesting constraint through the index. For every question or query he had, he would compress it into a single keyword. Then, he would search through his alphabetized index for that keyword, and dive into the network of notes with that higher-bandwidth question in mind.

This kind of mechanical serendipity is presumably what Eva Thomas means by "finding something you were not looking for, but something you can still use". Given that the Zettelkasten is a network of different perspectives across time and fields of study, it makes sense that any kind of semi-contextual exploration would irrigate that said context. Through a neurodivergent lens, using the Zettelkasten is akin to "constructive ADHD":

But over the years I’ve learned to see that it [ADHD] takes me to interesting places. Thing is to non-judgementally go along for the ride, and report your findings.

Therefore, as intelligences, Luhmann and the slipbox could approximate great exchanges with a sufficiently advanced bilateral midpoint (the index) even if the two did not necessarily unite at a shared context. I suspect that PKM culture will invent similar midpoints for the purpose of communication.

The index itself is not magical. However, it is very useful and highly extensible on multiple axis. The quality of the index also goes up if it is hand-curated by the individual, whose salience filter is far more selective than any (digital) full-text searching or filtering features. Perhaps such constraints like these--compressing ideas so tightly to fit into a temporary conversing space--is at the heart of dynamic communication and processing.

Conversely, a lack of a higher-order or secondary index may be detrimental to a body of notes. Even with perfect organic or digital recall, the user must start at "square one" and constantly have to rederive the terrain of their notes. This may be perfectly fine if the user has a sufficiently advanced mental context to navigate their knowledge, but having such mental strength diminishes the value of taking prolific notes in the first place anyway.