Comment by jhartikainen
15 hours ago
There seems to be two schools of thought for "second brain" stuff:
1. Those who kind of semi-obsessively write down every little thought, semi-obsessively catalogue everything, etc.
2. Those who use the idea of "writing helps you think", where the second brain functions in support of this
Personally I find 2 quite valuable, and although I could "think about programming all the time" (or one of my other interests), I find it helpful to have f.ex. exact quotes from some book at hand (and various other Obsidian-related things)
Writing does help you think... but only if you write. Dumping a bunch of stuff into a "second brain" is not you writing. Keeping a journal is you writing. Those serve similar functions, but keeping a journal is more intentional and requires you to think critically about your inputs and decide what to record and how, which is the thinking part that comes with writing. That summarization that LLMs are doing for people is removing a significant portion of the thinking, which results in a loss of capability and soundness of mind.
100%. The term "second brain" is getting kind of a bad rep because of people using the dump+AI method. I don't think Tiago Forte who, as far as I know, coined the term meant doing that, at least based on his book on the subject.