On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

This is some old style blogging.

Our Labrador Retriever puppy is now 9 weeks old. It’s been quite a project onboarding her into our home. I grew up with dogs at home (Pugs) and had a great companion for all too brief a time after moving to Baltimore in the mid 80’s for my Neurology training at Johns Hopkins. That was Cajal, named after the Spanish neuroanatomist. She was a gentle, but enthusiastic Frisbee dog. A Lab and Shepard mix from an accidental litter. So after many years, we’ve brought in this baby animal to be a companion. She comes from a fine line bred at Viklan Labradors in West Chester, PA.

Dog training and management has changed dramatically since I adopted Cajal. Back then, training was largely aversive using negative reinforcement to guide the dog into desired behaviors. Thiebaud is seeing play and reward and is responding quite remarkable. She shows powerful place preference for a red fleece mat that I’ve reinforced her on with food, just dropping kibble on it when she brings all 4 paws onto it. She’s happy in here crate since most of her food is thrown into her crate, door open or closed. She’s already retrieving toys, bringing them back to me just for more play and engagement, not on any command. She comes running on cue as she’s expecting some kibble in my hand.

This dog has enlarged and shrunk the world simultaneously. Enlarged it of course since I have this rapidly developing puppy becoming devoted to her humans. Everything good comes from us- food, water and play. Shrunk it, since it’s a big project taking many hours a day. Learing about training methods, play, management. Fortunately, she settles down quickly after a play session and snoozes, so there’s time for work, cycling training and blogging.

I put in an early preorder of the new Kindle Scribe and it arrived last week. I’ve only had a few days of use, but have only seen review site discussions and no real user comments.

I had thought about buying one of the other e-Paper tablets like the Remarkable 2, but just didn’t see the value for digital handwriting only. I’ve also given the iPad and Apple Pencil approach a try over the last few years, but it never stuck. It’s a combination of not liking the stylus on glass feel and the availability of distraction when reading documents.

Since I’ve been successful with book reading on the Kindle, I wanted to try the Scribe. And as it turns out, the Scribe is a big Kindle with stylus input added.

This means the device is quite modal in use.

Reading Kindle books or any document in the Amazon format provides the standard Kindle experience plus stylus. So you can highlight and add sticky notes. Just the notes can be typed or handwritten. The addition of handwriting is nice as it makes casual use away from a desk much easier. Solving one of my issues of note taking for reading away from the desk.

PDFs get to the Scribe via sharing with the Kindle app or via a website for sharing. But now there is only highlighting and writing on the PDF itself. And since many PDFs have minimal white space for writing, it’s really mostly highlighting and a few words in the margin as guides, not real notes. I’ve already seen that PDF templates are going to be a useful addition. There are already some being created for daily agendas and Bullet Journal layouts.

Finally, there are independent Notebooks which can use a handful of supplied templates. The templates are limited and really not very good. The lines and dots are both too big and too dark to be usable the way a paper notebook is or even nice iPad apps like GoodNotes. For now, it’s not much use for me. I’d rather use fountain pen and paper since I can quickly scan a page with my iPhone and GeniusScan if I want an archive online.

So far for me the value is a large format, distraction free PDF display with easy highlight and margin notes as if I had a paper printout. Exactly the way the Kindle has served as a paperback size book substitute. I’ve also done some reading in books with handwritten notes. We’ll see if the handheld nature of the device is worth giving up a notebook and pen.

In summary, many of the tech site reviews have captured the device quite well. It’s a reading device with supplemental pen input. At least at release. Amazon has tended to just focus and incrementally improve its Kindle software and my expectation here is similar. I’ve got just a few immediate needs for improvements- sticky notes or more room to take notes on PDFs. A more compact export of notes and highlights from PDFs. A quick way to switch from book or PDF to Notebook mode. But overall, a solid start with some refinement needed.

I’ve lamented how much I’ve struggled taking notes while reading. This summer, in part due to injury downtime, I’ve been reading more. A couple of the books really prompted note taking. I now separate reading from note taking and it’s all good.

Ironically, I began rereading Ryan Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method and was moved to buy a notebook with pre-numbered pages. I’ve adopted many of Ryan’s principles in the past, but indexing never reaaly worked since my notebooks have generally been dated, not page numbered. I decided to take some summary notes of the Bullet Journal Method in my new Bullet Journal.

It was a fortunate turn of events because it brought together two factors that unlocked a new approach. First, I had read the book before. Second, I had a notebook and a text. So instead of reading and interrupting to note, it was a pretty quick process to work at a desk and take bullet journal style notes in the style that Ryan calls “rapid logging”. It was a review, not a re-read and served to see the book at a higher level than the first read through and reaction.

So now I’ve done the same with two more books. The first read is a no notes read. I can sit in a chair, stand on line at the store, lay on the couch- no matter, it’s just reading. Now of course I’ll capture an important thought now and then in my usual capture method, but it’s a process completely independent from the notes I’ll take later.

Note taking is then a fast, focused activity once I’ve made a first pass through the book. Then I have a better idea of what I’m after in taking notes. That is if I’ve decided I want to record anything from the reading experience at all. Some books provide a page of brief notes, others many pages with notations.

At this point, I’m making a digital copy of the notes to store in my DEVONthink database. If it’s going to be the subject of analysis or writing, I’ve then been typing up some notes that are searchable on the computer. I’ve been using Genius Scan for many years and agree with this nice summary Paper to Paperless: A Guide to Digitalizing Your Journals with a Scanner App | Mark Koester:

Genius Scan does a great job of automatically detecting document edges while you take photos using the camera or while directly editing static images. The app then resizes and positions the images accordingly to create a flat, document view. You can apply appropriate filters so docs are high contrast and black and white (or alternatively leave them as colored photos). You can also manually edit scans to correct misapplied edge detection, use an alternative color filter, or make other corrections.

The nice thing is that whether the scan is in Apple’s Notes.app or in DEVONthink, the OCR of those apps generally provides good searching capabilities and so the notes are archived and available for future use.

So, now I’ve can take notes on books. My breakthrough was to separate the reading from the note taking summary. More efficient, focused and more useful.

I spent some time editing the manuscript section talking about “Perceptual Decisions”, a terminology that doesn’t really fit in the vocabulary of standard decision theory. This mismatch drives home an idea that while Decision Theory and the brain need to solve the same problem of choosing options under conditions of uncertainty, Decision Theory is described in an abstract language of boolean algebra or set theory. The brain solves the problem in wetware, using networks of excitable cells to model the process in a language we can’t access, let alone understand.

The comparisons are fascinating at a conceptual level, but leave unsolved how to use our semantic tools to improve the functioning of the brain networks. That turns out to be the real challenge of deciding better

It’s almost comical that I forgot that I had completed a full draft of my manuscript last June. I had edited about half to be a more complete, organized draft and got completely distracted. First it was building a PC to run Linux, then explorations of Emacs and LogSeq, which led into organizing and publishing work in progress. Plus delving deeper into the foundations of probability theory, reading Jaynes and standard accounts of the Kolmogorov set theory basis.

Almost all of my real notes have been on paper, so there has been little to publish here anyway other than casual notes and a few photos. I’m not at all concerned about the productivity function, just reeling in and completing some projects.

So I opened up the ODB manuscript folder and read over some of that first draft. My intent now is to finish that first draft and get something out there to call the project done after many years. Which of course frees up some mental energy to think about the next project.

Of all the ideas in my ODB theory of everything, the one I really want to explore is Bateson’s idea of Ecology of Mind. It gets at the root of personal identity, the internal model of the world and the role of conscious perception in brain function. Lets see if I can split off a bit of time to start that exploration.