[HN Gopher] Designing Tools for Scientific Thought
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Designing Tools for Scientific Thought
Author : harperlee
Score : 62 points
Date : 2025-05-25 14:51 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forester-notes.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forester-notes.org)
| lou1306 wrote:
| > The existing tools for scientific thought can be divided into
| two main categories: interactive proof assistants and textual
| authoring and publishing tools (including LaTeX, as well as the
| Gerby software that runs the Stacks Project).
|
| This seems... reductive? At the very least, isn't data
| collection, storage and retrieval also essential to scientific
| thought? I really do not think those tools can fit into a
| "textual authoring and publishing tool"-shaped hole.
| abtinf wrote:
| Why do people write comments like this?
|
| Pretty much the first thing the article does is define what
| it's talking about. But you skip that, pull some other quote
| out of context, then attack that out of context quote.
|
| And then you subtly change the topic, from "tools for
| scientific thought" to "[stuff that is] essential to scientific
| thought." Are you hoping no one notices?
|
| What do you get out of this?
| auggierose wrote:
| To be fair, what a tool for scientific thought is comes
| labelled as a definition, but it reads like a theorem.
| piombisallow wrote:
| We must design better note taking software in order to continue
| improving our note taking software
| jdougan wrote:
| That is, of course, the essence of Doug Engelbart's
| bootstrapping approach and the development of NLS. It can work
| just fine.
| jljljl wrote:
| Is there a collection of note taking practices (such as they
| exist) among the great thinkers/scientists in history? Is there
| an assessment or study of their notebooks somewhere that distills
| best practices? Are techniques like ZK or spaced repetition based
| on those practices or studies? Have they been studied for
| desirable traits?
|
| The science of notetaking so far seems to have a lot of art and
| opinion, but little science
| chermi wrote:
| "...a note should capture just one thing, and if possible, all of
| that thing.". This just doesn't seem feasible to me for an
| scientific workflow. I realize his scope is math, where I can
| picture it being a little easier, but still nearly impossible.
| How often can you break down a note into something self-
| contained? I'm probably just taking it too literally.
|
| Maybe this says more about my relatively disorganized thinking
| patterns. For me, notes are typically thoughts about the current
| thing I'm processing and it's relation to something else, often
| in an imprecise way, to be explored further. Maybe the point is
| that wouldn't qualify yet as a note, and only when you refine the
| thought into something more concrete with direct reference to
| precisely the relevant notes on the related thing(s). But where
| do I start?! How do I make the first atomic note? It seems I
| wouldn't be able to reference a book. Maybe I could reference a
| section of a book, hoping it's self-contained. But even then, is
| have to resolve the references needed for that section into
| atomic notes themselves. When do you ever have time to actually
| think?
|
| I hope enjoyed this unedited stream of consciousness that I
| should probably just delete.
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