Introduction#
“What I Know About: The Series” (WIKA for short) is a set of post sequences which tackle some subject in textbook-like fashion. It’s different from “Research” category, since it doesn’t revolve about any specific research questions and doesn’t aim to create any new knowledge.
Even during my high school years I have noticed that I don’t like taking notes. I thought the reason was my bad handwriting, but the issue remained the same both when I studied at the university and when I left it. I could spend hours making these notes, and I never re-read them. In some cases I didn’t even read the material before writing it in my notebook or copy-pasting it in Word, Typst, Obsidian…
Much later I have realized that I don’t like notes for the same reason why I didn’t like playing with dolls in kindergarten and why speaking to a rubber ducky toy doesn’t work for me as good as it reportedly does for other.
Neither dolls, rubber ducks nor notes talk to me. While I can imagine some response, I’m restricted by my own life experiences and boundaries of what is even imaginable to me. Talking to others allows me to learn more break these boundaries and get at least a glimpse of what not-my life might look like; what kinds of questions, expectations and answers can non-my experiences provide. And while I know I’m not obliged to publish my notes, having a particular audience in mind significantly affects both my motivation and writing style.
Therefore, the primary goal of WIKA is to make learning from textbooks more enjoyable via enabling me to share the results of my studies and improve them during discussions with my readers. I’m going to compare different textbooks & other sources and their explanation approaches, while trying to create comprehensive, yet multi-faceted notes.
An unexpected side-effect of this approach is that now I’m way more willing to try study techniques that, I thought, required “too much effort”.
For example, there’s an active recall technique that requires to take an empty piece of paper, write down everything you remember about the topic and then compare your notes with the original source of that knowledge (textbook, lecture, video, etc.) It turned out that I already have very similar workflow when writing my blog posts: I write down everything I want to say and then I check whether I cited the source correctly (and sometimes even discarding the idea of the post in the process because misunderstanding was too huge and the whole argumentation fell apart because of it!).
What I Know About: The List#
[empty for now]