They’re designed for storage, not sparking insights.

We’re collecting so much data that you’re almost paralyzed with having to analyze it all

Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place on your computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage, and the text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of alt-tabbing between these and other apps, our ability to build knowledge and draw connections is permanently challenged by what might be our ultimately futile efforts to multitask.

Much of journalism simply involves remembering relevant events from the past. An AI-powered link database has a perfect memory; all it’s missing is a usable chat interface. If it had one, it might be a perfect research assistant.

A significant problem with using AI tools to summarize things is that you can’t trust the summary unless you read all the relevant documents yourself — defeating the point of asking for a summary in the first place.

it seems to me that a database you can talk to might be the next-generation note-taking tool we have been waiting for.

it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough.

thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

Andy Matuschak, a researcher whose spectacular website offers a feast of thinking about notes and note-taking, observes that note-taking apps emphasize displaying and manipulating notes, but never making sense between them.

“The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively,” Matuschak writes. “Better questions are ‘what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?’ [and] ‘how can I shepherd my attention effectively?’”