Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
- Prefer suggestive ontology over hierarchical taxonomy
- The structure is made to emerge organically.
- If you impose structure from the start, you prematurely limit what can be generated and artificially compress the subtle relationships between ideas.
- Our file system, organizational structure, and library are,
- It suggests that hierarchical categories are the natural structure of the world.
- Often, however, items belong in many places.
- Also, items are related to other items in very different hierarchical categories.
- Worse, by placing things into distinct categories, the edges inevitably become fuzzy.
- Things don’t always fit exactly.
- If a lot of new ideas are gathered, a new category could be created…
- However, since everything is already classified, its shape is not visible.
- And since it is already classified, you must undo the Existing Structure to further classify it.
Existing classification needs to be broken and redone, but many people don’t want to do that, so they overlook the emergence of new categories that don’t fit into the existing classification!
- More importantly, a network of related ideas,
- It is better to let them emerge gradually without labels.
- It allows ideas and beliefs to emerge organically.
- Once you see the shape, you can think about its character.
- This is one of the reasons the Evergreen Notebook is a safe place to develop wild ideas.
- But beware. Tags are an inefficient associative structure.
- One result of following this advice. The associative note system makes it difficult to navigate to unlinked “neighbors”.
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