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A review by stephenmeansme
How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens
1.0
The perfect negative review of this book would start by introducing it, HOW TO TAKE SMART NOTES, and contextualize it as being about the Zettelkasten, or "slip-box," method of note-taking. In fact, not merely "note-taking" as the common Anglophone school usage might have it, but a system of knowledge-gardening habits that centers the production of lots and lots of note items.
The review would then digress, for paragraphs and paragraphs unto whole ass chapters, about the theory of book reviews, about how somebody studied book reviews and found that most people only read the first and last sentences (cf. Bullshytte 2024), and only occasion would this digression touch back on HOW TO TAKE SMART NOTES.
But I have only so much energy for clever Goodreads review games, so that's enough of that.
HTTSN is ultimately a tedious exercise in enduring Ahrens' citations of psychology and learning-theory studies. And you know, I wouldn't have had so much of a problem with it if he bothered to give a bit more detail about the results. It would help to know the effect size, for example, or the base rates, or whatever. I am not going to chase down the dozens of reference papers just to confirm that they're saying what Ahrens claims.
As to the Zettelkasten method, I don't think this book really convinced me that it's "How to Take Smart Notes" - in fact, it gave me a more jaundiced view of the "Personal Knowledge Management" scene. You see, they might talk about Zettelkasten as this special technique of this guy Luhmann, except it wasn't unique to Luhmann, he was just a weird nerd with a bespoke inter-note reference scheme and a whole fuckton of notes. It's not even clear that he was an especially influential or insightful social scientist, for all the notes he took and all the books and articles he produced out of them.
Long on pop-psych justifications and short on technique, I can't give more than 1.5 stars, rounded down.
The review would then digress, for paragraphs and paragraphs unto whole ass chapters, about the theory of book reviews, about how somebody studied book reviews and found that most people only read the first and last sentences (cf. Bullshytte 2024), and only occasion would this digression touch back on HOW TO TAKE SMART NOTES.
But I have only so much energy for clever Goodreads review games, so that's enough of that.
HTTSN is ultimately a tedious exercise in enduring Ahrens' citations of psychology and learning-theory studies. And you know, I wouldn't have had so much of a problem with it if he bothered to give a bit more detail about the results. It would help to know the effect size, for example, or the base rates, or whatever. I am not going to chase down the dozens of reference papers just to confirm that they're saying what Ahrens claims.
As to the Zettelkasten method, I don't think this book really convinced me that it's "How to Take Smart Notes" - in fact, it gave me a more jaundiced view of the "Personal Knowledge Management" scene. You see, they might talk about Zettelkasten as this special technique of this guy Luhmann, except it wasn't unique to Luhmann, he was just a weird nerd with a bespoke inter-note reference scheme and a whole fuckton of notes. It's not even clear that he was an especially influential or insightful social scientist, for all the notes he took and all the books and articles he produced out of them.
Long on pop-psych justifications and short on technique, I can't give more than 1.5 stars, rounded down.