When you are working with lots of information, you want to make sense of that information - to synthesise it.
The new modern note-taking apps call themselves tools for thought. They have introduced some new concepts like backlinks, block-references and inline-view of other notes. A lot of them claim that by doing backlinks, you’ll get this emergent structure. Categories and tags and ideas emerge. That there is this sort of unconscious synthesis going on.
I don’t think that is happening. We still need to work on making the systems that elicit synthesis.
So I think we need tools to actively work on synthesis - to make sense of the information in these notes.
Right now the best they offer is a simple fulltext search, or quering based on tags or text (like inline quering in Roam and Obsidian).
Id’ like to power up these tools by:
- view it all in the same page, move things around, draw, filter, highlight. Add some connections. And make some new notes.
- quering and filtering with metadata; like when a note is created or updated, view only a date-range, who wrote (if multiplayer), what the note contains, if there are images/attachments, etc..
- view notes created on a timeline - with these filters applied.
- mass-edit tags, categories and text, to combine notes and split notes.
- view related notes. But I may not know what that means. Perhaps some good search-engine or a GPT-3 model could scan my notes and show me related notes.
- discover notes. Perhaps with an initial search, then the app would recommend something that did not entirely fit the search.
- discover related information, not nessecarily contained in my notes-app. Perhaps with some kind of google search. (or maybe this is possible with GPT3 now?)
- Have different views: canvases, groups, lists, tables, etc.. Imagine having a canvas where you can apply the filters above, and then group them. For example group notes by tag. Or move notes together to form a new tag, category or note.
- List notes together to form a new comprehensive text - like Scrivener does.
- And being able to save all of the above for easy access.
Having all these tools to work on your current notes, projects, files, etc would give you more power to synthezise.
Tools for thought is good, now let’s make powertools for thought.