Tagging Is Broken
Source: https://fortelabs.co/blog/tagging-is-broken/
-
using tags as a primary source of organization means you have to decide for every note which tag(s) you want to use.
- You are relying on memorizing all the tags you have made.
- This a lot of up-front cost.
-
We offload some of our cognitive processing onto our environment, and this is much more capable of storing information than our brain does.
- e.g.) method of loci, memory palace.
-
This concept is called stigmergy (stigmergic cognition)
-
Tags ignore stigmergy and force us to think about notes in abstract ways.
-
In PKM, a constant temptation is to overorganize
- too many categories
- too many subdivisions
-
As number of tags grew arithmetically, complexity grows geometrically.
- A system that encourages tags is giving you explicit affordance to increase complexity.
-
Tags were good when the cost of running a search was costly.
- In these days, running a search is not a costly operation.
- Thus the cost of tagging is almost completely wasted because almost the entire body of text could be broken into indexable, searchable "tags" that can be retrieved almost instantaniously.
Backlinks