The Future of Search: How Note Taking Can Help You Become an Expert

The Future of Search: How Note Taking Can Help You Become an Expert

Curiosity is a natural desire that drives us to know or learn something. It is a sustained desire that we have inherently. People also have the nature of loss aversion. We don’t want to waste the time we have spent. That may be why people curate. Curate what you have searched for, and search in the future from the curated bucket. This is what I'm doing - (1) generic search from the Internet, (2) curate important parts, and (3) search from the curated bucket.

When it comes to search, the quality and scope of the curated bucket are two important aspects. The quality could be maintained by using social accountability associated with public aspects. The way people organize information is often different from the way they actually search for it. Public highlight could take the good parts of both social accountability and specific important parts, ensuring the quality of the curated bucket.

Another aspect to consider in search is the scope. When we search for something, it may be more effective to separate the scope into vertical or narrow it down because the scope is directly related to the signal-noise ratio. In the case of In-cura-net, you can use an interest graph and social graph to search for information. The future of search may be vertical through high-quality curated buckets, in-cura-net, that make the most use of interest graph and social graph.

Moving on to note-taking, it plays a crucial role in helping individuals become experts in ill-structured domains. In these messy and variable domains, having a system to collect and connect fragments of cases helps accelerate expertise and build an adaptive worldview.

Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT) deals with ill-structured domains, which are domains where concepts are instantiated in highly variable and messy ways. In such domains, cases are as important, if not more important, than concepts themselves. Experts in these domains reason by comparison to previous cases rather than relying on first principles. They construct a temporary schema on the fly by combining fragments of previous cases and have an adaptive worldview that allows them to assemble fragments from a collection of prototypes.

To become an expert in an ill-structured domain, it is recommended to expose oneself to as many cases for each concept as possible. A hypertextual system, where concepts are backlinked to other cases, is suggested for effective learning. This system helps update concepts when encountering new cases, as concepts are only useful when they are known to be instantiated in reality.