Managing an Antilibrary in a network of notes

Nassim Taleb often says crazy things (like saying that mathematics is bad because economists misuse it), but sometimes he says something useful. One such thing is the Antilibrary: the collection of books in your library that you haven’t read. He values these books more than the read books because they are a reminder of how much you don’t know, a form of intellectual humility before the copious amount of knowledge in the world (Taleb 2008). (sidenote: Something Taleb himself would benefit from having more of honestly.¹ )

For me, this concept also has a very practical utility. I write my notes in a very networked manner, short paragraphs about something I had been thinking about for a while or about an interesting concept from a book I read. These notes are then linked together such that notes that I think are relevant to each other are close to each other, forming a network over everything I’ve written. Organizing my writings in this way has been very helpful since I can fit so much stuff; notes about movies, books, philosophy, politics, computer science, and history can live in the same system without interfering with each other, while related notes are still findable thanks to the linking, even across subject borders (since there are no subject borders).

In other words, it is useful as a library of my knowledge, but it’s also useful in the Antilibrary sense. Often I’ll find an interesting resource on a subject I care about, but which I won’t read right now for whatever reason. I could put them in some form of list, or maybe in a Zotero database, but I suspect that wouldn’t be very useful since a list is hard to take in. There is a tendency where the larger a list is the less likely it is that I actually look at it, which is a bad property to have for an Antilibrary. With my current system I instead put it as an Antilibrary node in my network of notes, meaning that books in my Antilibrary are filed close to notes they are relevant to, they become the frontier of my knowledge, where I can expand on my existing knowledge. An example of this can be seen in Figure 1.

On a technical level this is done using the software org-roam, together with the graph visualisation program org-roam-ui. In org-roam-ui I use the theme ayu-light theme because it has very distinctive colors. Under the “Visual” menu I set the node colors to use only the grey-scale images, and under “Filter” I set the tag color of Antilibrary notes to be red.

Addendum 🔗︎

2023-11-07: You can also set colors for reference nodes and citation nodes. I’m not entirely sure what org-roam-ui means with those two terms, but it seems like citation nodes are added to the graph when you cite something without creating an org-roam node with notes. When you create an org-roam node for a citation node, it gets transformed into a reference node. Basically, setting different colors for the two allows you to differentiate between things you’ve just cited and things you actually have notes on.

These settings (under Visual > Citations)

produces the following graph:

This is a project I’ve been working on for a while. The central black node is the master file that I keep a bunch of working notes in, such as which papers are interesting. Those would be the pink colored ones. The yellow ones are things I’ve actually read, and have taken some notes on.

References 🔗︎