The Epistemology of Note-Taking Tools
On the bullet+connection style
The data tells a clear story. The top 20 hub notes in this vault are 80% bullets with 26.1 average wikilinks. 15 of those 20 are what structural analysis classified as “index” hubs — essentially connection switchboards. The medium-tier notes are 40% bullets with 6.9 wikilinks. The pattern: the more connected a note becomes, the more bullet-heavy it gets.
Is this good for insight? The answer is yes, but the insight lives in a specific place. As Naval puts it: “Enlightenment is in between your thoughts, in understanding why you are having such thoughts.” The insight isn’t in the prose of any single note — it’s in the decision of which two things to link. When you connect Gresham’s Law to AI or Elden Ring Meets Karl Popper to David Deutsch, that link itself is the creative act. The bullets are scaffolding that makes the linking surface area large. The vault’s most interesting finding isn’t any single cluster — it’s the cross-cluster bridges, notes that appear across 3+ thematic groupings spanning epistemology, Austrian economics, and language/mind.
The potential blind spot: the essays split cleanly into all-bullet versus all-prose. Economics of God sits at 94% bullets; Moat Digitized at 100%. The prose essays — Elden Ring Meets Karl Popper, To Measure or Not To Measure — are the ones that actually develop an argument. The bullet essays read more like idea collections waiting to become arguments. Bullets are great for connecting; prose is where you test whether the connection actually holds up under sustained reasoning.
On retrieval versus creation
There’s a fundamental distinction between two operations a note-taking tool can perform:
- Retrieval — “find the thing I already wrote about X”
- Creation — “generate a new connection between X and Y that didn’t exist before”
This distinction is topologically similar to the proving/verifying asymmetry. Verifying a proof is easy — mechanical, polynomial. Finding the proof is hard — creative, potentially exponential. Retrieval is verification: pattern matching, similarity search, mechanical. Conjecture is proving: generating the candidate that doesn’t exist yet.
Semantic search tools like qmd operate on similarity — embeddings cluster things that talk about related concepts. But a vault like this derives its value from dissimilarity bridged by explanation. The connection between Austrian economics and quantum physics isn’t one a retrieval engine would surface, because they’re semantically distant. That connection was made through conjecture, not retrieval.
For a work knowledge base — “what was the decision on X?” / “find the spec for Y” — retrieval is the task. A semantic search engine would be transformative there because the value is in finding the right document fast. The notes are more easily categorizable, the queries more predictable, the answers more convergent.
For a philosophical vault, the tool is useful as an exhaustiveness check — “are there notes I forgot that relate to this?” — but not as an idea generator. It can surface notes you might have missed, but it can’t tell you why Gresham’s Law applies to AI. That’s a conjecture only a person can make. To use this vault’s own language: connecting ideas is a way to create knowledge — and the creating part is irreducibly human.
The practical implication
A retrieval engine is most valuable for a philosophical vault when you already have a conjecture and want to stress-test it — “what else in my vault relates to this?” It’s a verification tool, not a generation tool. The generation happens in the act of linking, in the decision to place two distant ideas next to each other and see if they illuminate something. The tool can check your work; it can’t do your work.
This maps onto a broader epistemological point: knowledge is unpredictable precisely because creation isn’t retrieval. If you could retrieve an insight, it would already exist. The whole point is that it doesn’t — until someone conjectures it.
The essay as its own proof
This essay was not produced by reading any individual notes. The entire analysis was grounded in two pre-computed files: writing-patterns.json (quantitative style analysis — bullet ratios, wikilink counts, prose vs bullet breakdown by tier) and vault-report.md (synthesized structural report — hub profiles, cross-cluster bridges, style outliers). The specific numbers — 80% bullet ratio for hubs, 26.1 avg wikilinks, 15/20 hubs being “index” type, the essay style split — all came from structural metadata. No semantic search was used. No note bodies were read.
The epistemological reasoning — similarity vs dissimilarity, retrieval vs conjecture — was the AI’s own, but made obvious by what the data showed about how the vault is structured. The most valuable notes aren’t the ones with the best prose; they’re the ones with the most cross-domain links. That’s a structural fact, not something that required searching for.
Note titles did sneak in as a subtle input. A filename like “1-2g2b Humans are significant insofar as we can create knowledge” carries real philosophical content just in its name. Those titles showed up in the structural data and informed the framing — which means even the metadata of a well-constructed vault contains meaning. The notes are good enough that their titles alone can ground an argument.
The irony is recursive: this essay argues that retrieval can’t replace conjecture — and the essay itself was produced by conjecture applied to retrieved structural data, not by retrieving content. The pre-computed analysis was exactly the right tool, not qmd. Which kind of proves the point.
Related:
- 2-2d Gresham’s Law generalized—the bad practice drives out the good
- Gresham’s Law and AI
- Elden Ring Meets Karl Popper
- Economics of God
- To Measure or Not To Measure, That Is The Question
- 1-2g2b Humans are significant insofar as we can create knowledge
- 9-4b2b1 We are free because we can create knowledge, and knowledge is unpredictable
- 2-1a4c We don’t know how we create knowledge yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t
- David Deutsch
- 1-1a2e4b Naval - ‘Enlightenment is in between your thoughts, in understanding why you are having such thoughts’
- The Multiverse Implies Economics