Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit

Tl;dr: I think personal knowledge management, in many cases, is a fruitless effort and there are generally only very few cases (see above) in which note taking actually makes sense.

A Signalling Theory of PKMThe reason Knowledge Graphs and other PKM memes are so trendy is that, by publicizing one’s overwrought Knowledge Management System, people think they are showing off their big brains. Perhaps for some people, it sincerely feels like intellectual progress to externalize one’s overgrown web of ideas and one’s arcane system ... See more

People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt . Every link dou... See more

The concept of the Knowledge Graph deserves the classification of bullshit because its allure derives primarily from the false impression that it can mechanistically deliver—or substitute for—the brute, linear willfulness that defines all non-trivial writing.

A year ago, the idea of networking our notes with bi-directional links became the biggest thing in the tools for thought space since Vannevar Bush described the memex. Top-down hierarchies and tag systems became the pet explanation du jour for everything that was wrong with note-taking. So we all hustled on to the Double-Bracket Express determined ... See more