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I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes.
Any good piece of writing should undertake to present the relevant perspectives, and treat them seriously. But this is where I stumbled to understand Brennan's position. While he presented the counterpoints, or counterarguments to these positions, he didn't seem to treat them in the same manner as his primary arguments and points. That has caused me to think about his article from a different perspective.
What Was the Purpose
There is a statement, or rather a question, that forms the premise of Brennan's argument about Personal Knowledge Management:
Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?
That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. It's taking the idea of a single piece of technology, a single application, and asking what that tool has contributed to the world. How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world?
Take for example a couple of applications that have been around for many more decades than Obsidian: Emacs and vim. Have Emacs and vim contributed to “public-facing” understanding or knowledge? No, they haven't. However, what they have enabled people to do a lot of things: write code, programs, applications, papers, documents, books, poems, and a lot more.
The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. But Brennan goes on to double down:
I think it's safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique values and principles of Obsidian (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, “future-proofing,” etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.
And this is where the wheels come completely off the train. Basically nothing about the linked document supports the statement that Brennan is making. The page in question does not mention: data privacy, portability, or “future-proofing.” What it does suggest is, “We believe in plain text for something as important as your knowledge base. […] When the file system replaces the cloud, you get flexible options to work with your files: you can back them up with Dropbox, use Git to do versioning, or encrypt your disk for security. Whatever works on your file system will work on your Obsidian knowledge base.” There is no hint at the concepts being “higher-brow” or anything to indicate an ascribed “epistemological value.”
Instead, the core argument the Obsidian team makes is nearly the opposite:
Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.
Instead of providing you with an opinionated and assembled product, Obsidian gives you a foundation and numerous functional building blocks to discover and build your own solution.
The foundation is to be able to view files, edit them, and search them. For the minimalist, that's enough.
So where Brennan came up with all of this “future-proofing” and “highbrow” and “epistemological value” is minimally unclear, and maximally misleading. Obsidian is just a tool. A tool that is designed for users to create the system they want or need.
Where I think Brennan has gone wrong with this is reading or watching what others have said about Obsidian as a tool. I have seen this ecosystem that seems to have developed around Obsidian, and honestly it is quite off-putting. But should we judge a tool by its users? Or should it be judged based on what it's developers have provided?
I think I am going to side with the developers on this one.
Brennan then posits his central thesis a second time:
My concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer.
I do wonder what “complex, robust systems” he means at this point. He's only mischaracterized Obsidian, which certainly at its core is not all that complex. It's a personal Wiki with a few extra features. Wikis have existed since 1994 when Ward Cunningham developed the first one (which was installed online in 1995).
Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to the meat of Brennan's article yet. This article is so dense with information that it's going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.
Personal Knowledge Management Systems
After providing a list of PKM's (most notable of which are PARA, Johnny Decimal, Zettelkasten, GTD, and Commonplace Books), Brennan sets out a series of questions for the examination of these systems:
- First, what does it mean to make an important and meaningful contribution to our understanding of the world?
- Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.
- Third, what does the process actually look like for the actual people who write important papers and books?
- Fourth, what is the throughput and output of the people who have dedicated themselves to PKM frameworks?
This series of questions, in itself, is something of a mess. The first question doesn't have any relationship to personal knowledge management. What a person contributes to the world isn't measured by their ability to store or regurgitate information. Making an “important and meaningful contribution” is a highly nebulous concept that is dependent on the audience and the author.
The second question is a complete shift in scope. Making “important, meaningful contributions” to academia and communications is not the same as making a contribution to “our understanding of the world”. And then there's this: “…shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.” To many, academia is quite literally a form of elitism that gate keeps information. (Aside: I could make a long argument here about what happened to Aaron Swartz in his attempt to liberate the information that was being gate kept by academia.)
Third question: surely it looks like whatever works for them, right? I mean, this is what the promise of Obsidian is in the first place: “Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.” If someone wants to use PARA, they use PARA. If they want to invent their own system (spoilers) then they will do so. Again, how is this relevant? Is a person's choice of system indicative or predictive of their ability to perform some task?
The fourth question is, possibly, the most valuable, and yet the most difficult. How do you know what people are choosing to use for their knowledge management? How does someone measure “throughput and output”? Certainly you can perform a quantitative analysis of this, however assessing the qualitative nature of this question is far more difficult.
Next we talk about German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose Zettelkasten system has become widely known, and is frequently cited as a “genius” method for organizing one's notes or information. Brennan here thinks of this as a “Myth” because no one has been able to take Luhmann's notes and create new works based on them. People have realized that his system was idiosyncratic to Luhmann himself. But does that make his methodology a “myth?” I don't think so, it just means his method was specific to him.
The Questions
At this point Brennan starts going through the questions that he outlined (as quoted above), only there's a bit of goal shifting here. For example, question one is now stated as “What counts as a meaningful contribution to understanding?” Before it had to be both “important and meaningful” and it had to apply to “our understanding of the world”. But, nonetheless, let's continue. Brennan states:
The empirical literature on insight and creativity centers on incubation, the act of stepping away from a problem, unconscious restructuring, working memory offloading. This is not the act of browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.
Incubation is, quite literally, a portion of the process that systems like PARA (Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Vol. 1. Simon and Schuster, 2022.) actually supports. In Chapter 3, he quite clearly states:
There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us:
- Making our ideas concrete
- Revealing new associations between ideas.
- Incubating our ideas over time.
- Sharpening our unique perspectives.
(Emphasis added.)
The understanding is that this is very much in line with the ideas that works about insight and creativity have suggested. This isn't just spending time “browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.” It's storing information such that it can be found when it is needed and additional information might surface during the process that allows intuitive leaps in problem-solving. This whole concept is completely in line with the papers being cited.
And then Brennan disproves his whole point by pointing to a paper: Scholars ARE Collectors: A Proposal for Re-thinking Research Support which makes the point that academics are “hoarders” of information. And they organize and interact with this information in their own way. In other words: they make intuitive leaps through use of hoarded information.
The next question, “Are PKM frameworks used by people making real contributions, or mostly by people selling PKM?” is completely different from the one listed in the beginning of the article: “Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains, so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.”
Seriously? How does the literal questions keep changing this much? The first question mostly in scope. But now, the second question doesn't even match between statements of the question. I think I know why this happening, which I will explain towards the end of this article. For now, we'll talk about the revised question.
Brennan notes that there is a whole market of people selling books, courses, and other materials about PKM. And, makes note that it is likely that those who are writing and doing training about it are not likely applying their teachings.
Honestly, I don't know that this is really an issue. There are people that get into many lines of work, including things like life trainers, gym trainers, motivational speaking, etc. What works for one person may not work for another person. Listing off a bunch of people that don't use a system doesn't disprove the system, it only shows that there are other methods that can be used.
The part that I think was hilarious about this section was the “gotcha” Brennan tries to make of this post on the Obsidian forum. The way the original poster made his post, it's obvious that he was trying to promote his own book, and his website. But then one respondent posts a literal bibliography of at least fifty works the original poster didn't reference. The clear implication of this post: the original poster is unqualified in the field, he hasn't done his research. And yet, here we are, using this post where someone is debunking the original poster as an example.
Okay, on to the third question:”What does the process actually look like for people who write important books?” Hey, what do you know: this time the questions actually match!
Now, while I love to examine the processes of others when possible to glean any insights I can from them, and possibly integrate some of their concepts into my own, I don't see how this proves anything. Just because people that are highly successful, or are high functioning in their field don't adopt a PKM methodology or specific tool is no reflection on the methodology or the tool. It's just a matter of the person having found the tools and methods that work for them.
So, let's look at this statement from Brennan:
The analogue systems used by demonstrably prolific working writers are project-bounded and disposable. The digital PKM ideology sells the opposite promise of a permanent, ever-growing, cross-project system that gets more valuable the longer you maintain it.
Are the analogue systems always project-bounded? There are many times when fiction writers have started developing some idea or concept for a work, but found that it didn't fit the story they wanted to tell. So, do they just throw it away? No. They put it aside someplace only to be retrieved when it fits in the story they are writing.
The PKM system, on the whole, is about building a knowledge base, basically a library of knowledge that you can pull from. When you have a specific project, you pull the information that fits specifically within the scope of the project you are working on. This is basically no different from going to a library and gathering research materials. Just because a library has hundreds of thousands of books that don't apply to your field doesn't mean those books don't have value. There are likely books that don't fit in your field of study that still have value to you for other reasons.
Singling out three or four people that have processes that are completely different from PKM method doesn't disprove anything about PKM methods. It just shows that those methods don't work for them.
Okay, on to the last question: “What is the actual throughput of people dedicated to PKM?” Originally this was stated as “throughput and output” but now the scope is narrowed to “throughput”. And, what exactly is “throughput?” Is that quantifiable or measurable? Output could be quantified or measured: X number of articles, Y number of books, Z number of videos… More importantly, one could consider the potential impact based of their work product based on their relevance as measured by following.
The example given in this section is of Theo Stowell, someone who has been writing about PKM and using Obsidian for several years, and now is supposedly developing a new tool. How relevant is he? Well, the highest number of followers for Theo I could find was on Medium, where he has 1.8K followers. Everywhere else I looked (YouTube, Instagram, Substack) he had well below 1K followers, and in many cases well below 500 followers.
Now, how big is Obsidian? On Obsidian's own website, they indicated there were around 750K downloads by 2022. The most recent estimate I could find of Obsidian's distribution was in this Fueler article, which states there are between 1-1.5 million copies of Obsidian out there.
So, I don't understand the example of Theo Stowell, he doesn't seem to represent a significant presence in the Obsidian community considering there are plugins with well over 1 million downloads (23 as of this writing).
Now, we know that there is a big market around self-help, personal-development market. And organization systems, methods, and tools is a part of this market. But, honestly, it's not as big as it might seem. Tiago Forte, the most notable name in the PKM had a revenue of about $2.4M from his “Building a Second Brain” book. But when all the expenses were factored in, he netted approximately $1.26M. That is on the sale of 500K books.
Sure that sounds like a decent chunk of change, but in a market worth somewhere around $46 Billion in 2025, $2.4M is a fairly small amount compared to the potential. Obsidian is very difficult to estimate, but based on the referenced Fueler article, its revenue is somewhere between $5M and $25M annually. And even that is still a fairly small amount when compared to the overall industry.
Where Did Brennan's Article Go Wrong?
When I started the first draft of this response, I was stymied by how so much of the article had gone so wrong. I was thinking, “I don't know how I can ever explain this.” But, then, just when I thought I was going to have to say “I don't know” an article popped up on Bubbles that provided some insight: People and Blogs: Brennan Kenneth Brown. In particular, there is a segment about Brennan's writing process where he points to a post on his own site: My Blogging Workflow: A routine for nearly a post a day for 4 months straight., wherein he talks about how he handles the research parts of his posts:
Regardless of my focus or topic, I go as fast as possible, as I want to reach 750 words in around 20 minutes, though sometimes it takes much longer.
How do I have articles heavy with links and stats and quotes from others if I'm writing so quickly? When I'm writing a research-heavy essay or commentary, I'll put something in brackets with TK and return back to it in the editing process so I don't slow down with the writing.
Rightly, he points out, this is a practice from journalism, as journalists are frequently writing in the field and don't have access to the research materials. But, there is a pitfall to this process: in trying to write and edit articles quickly, it can lead to poorly done research. And that is what appears to have happened with this article. Many of the cited (aka linked) articles, papers, and websites are inconclusive in relationship to their supposed point. In some cases they don't support the arguments that are being made at all.
This response post has been a two-day slog for me through all of this, and trying to do some quick research of my own to correct the misleading information in the original article. Indeed, a lot of this is my opinion or my interpretation of the materials that Brennan has placed before his audience. However, it's pretty simple to see that there is a substantial portion of his article that just was not well considered.
Conclusion
And this is where I get to point to a substantial irony in this story. Much of Brennan's issue with PKMs and tools like Obsidian is that we don't see a lot more output from people. That instead, we see quite a few people that have gone the route of trying to become influential in the PKM field, and writing their own books about it (with or without appropriate levels of research).
Brennan himself, has documented that his approach is to write a post every day. He makes it a process by which is tries to write 750 words in 20 minutes. He also notes that he has written quite a few novels, all of which are self-published works.
Personally, all of this is sounding completely backwards from what I was taught to do when writing a research paper. I was always told: come up with a thesis, do the research, and only when the research is complete write the paper. In fact, I was called out several times in school for not having done my research well, and trying to use sources in a narrow manner to prove points that they didn't support. Sound familiar?
I always had the excuse that I was working on a deadline, and I didn't realize the complications that I was going to run into, so I did the best with the materials that I had. But the fact was that I hadn't done the research properly, and I hadn't based my writing on the research. Instead, I went into the writing process trying to prove my thesis correct, even when it was weak or incorrect.
And that's the issue with Brennan's article. There is just a lot of the research that doesn't completely support the underlying statements. And even Brennan knew that he couldn't make the information fit the narrative that he had in his mind when he sat down and started writing. That's why we see things like restatements of questions that have substantial shifts in scope.
In the end, I think Brennan went into his post with good intention. But he became over-ambitious and let the whole thing creep out of his control. However, there is one thing that we both agree on: AI. As he states in his article:
I promise there is a deep debt to be paid if you attempt to offload cognitive labour to a non-deterministic machine, especially if you care about objectivity and facts.
Indeed, AI is no replacement for the labor of actually committing one's own cognitive processes to the page or screen.
Categories: #Essays
Tags: #response, #pkm, #knowledge, #management, #research, #writing, #notes, #notetaking
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