2019 reflection question

Posted by jaslar
Jul 13, 2020 at 03:20 PM

Thanks for these last responses, which get at the substance of my original question.

I was fooling around with old software (KAMAS under DOSBox-X) and realized that all of this use of outliners through the years has had a profound and enduring effect on my thinking. It’s much like the research concerning learning to read. People who read (and, I’m extrapolating, people who use outliners and no doubt other kinds of thinking tools) have been found to use the skill as an armature, leveraging linguistic building blocks to climb a little farther and faster than the same person would without those skills.

Personally, I think the effect is based on at least two things:

* the persistence of categories. I’ve been using outliners since 1982, across journals, correspondence, hobbies, and work projects. Some of those headers/tags/subject headings keep showing up, year after year. They change in emphasis, or cluster with sometimes changing additional categories. But this helps me to figure out which things matter to me. Or also to discover that some recurrent notions have their own biases and flaws, and have to change.

* the philosophies inherent in hierarchy: main headings, at least two supporting subheadings, a flow and balance in the development of ideas.

It’s that pleasure of thinking better, more comprehensively, and in ways that patterns may reveal themselves, that keep me CRIMPing.