I really don’t get Obsidian and why HN seems so obsessed with it. Can anyone please enlighten me? Why do they call these notes “a second brain”? How is this “a new way of thinking”? What are you people even writing that requires this? It just seems silly, honestly. What am I missing?
It's decent note-taking software with useful features and a storage medium that's currently in favour. If you have a use for such a thing, it's one of the best options available right now.
But that's all. You can forget all the "second brain"/zettelkasten stuff. It's just marketing gumpf used to build careers prattling about notetaking methods (dressed up as something fancier).
I have my own knowledgebase in my own format and TBH I'd say it's one of the most valuable things I own. I don't think the second brain "marketing grumpf" is false - once you get rolling, you have a personal treasure trove of knowledge without having to dedicate every piece of info to memory.
The value of whatever style of note-taking suits your work and personal style has been well understood for centuries. All the productivity piffle has added nothing to it, though it has earned a few bucks from book sales, youtube ads, and merch.
I had doubts about the second brain stuff as well, but I am seeing that with the connections I make to my notes using links/backlinks tags while hanging out in the graph view allows me to see connections between notes and helps me with idea generation, so I can see why people call it a second brain. It helps you think about writing in a different way. That has been my experience though.
It's the messianic fake novelty and loathsome invented marketing terminology that I'm objecting to. You can unfussily make notes, using your own emergent organisation exactly like people have done for centuries at least. Tech can add searching and organisational niceties, and it makes sense to use them. Obsidian is good at this (I use it).
Or, alternatively, you can do exactly the same thing and get terribly zealous about it as a grift, or a way to mask the fact that your notes are all about notetaking systems and just add nothing to the sum of human (or even your own) capability.
I'm not arguing against the activity of taking notes, nor working with different representations and arrangements of them to discover what emerges, nor against note-taking software, just all the timewasting blather that goes with it. "Second brain" (probably TM'd somewhere) is by the way only a dull grey businessy echo of Andy Clark's (much more interesting) 'extended mind' theme.
I use Obsidian to organize my notes about DIY, cooking, and gardening. For example, I store the recipes I found in a single place. It allows me to adjust them (as opposed to browser bookmarks) and write down my observations or experiments. Some concepts can be applied to multiple recipes, so linking them helps. Over time I memorize the concepts, but I struggle with remembering the ratios of ingredients. Having them written down is handy.
I used to have a local instance of MediaWiki a long time ago, but it was clunky. Then I moved to plaintext notes, which I used for many years. Easy to take, but lack of linking made reviewing them hard.
Localized markdown wiki (Obisdian) is a happy middle ground for me.
I don't think it's terribly special. Second brain seems to value the connections between fragments of thought over the thoughts themselves, that these connections will guide the creation or your outlook on thoughts originating from them, a focus on process rather than output, assuming that the output is the result of the process (oftentimes not true). Alternatively, when you are thinking about something, you can quickly find the related thoughts quickly by this organization that can help you advance it faster or more creatively. This assumes that your past thoughts are relevant to your future thoughts which are oftentimes not the case.
It can work well for technical topics that are not quickly outdated and usually have less transitory interpretations, but not as great for subjective things. If you want to have a consistency in your thinking, it can be helpful, but the value of that is also questionable. The last is more psychological, but if you keep getting distracted by a lot of thoughts, by putting them down there and being able to retrieve them when you want, it lets you focus more on things in the present without being distracted by them. If you are exploring a topic over a long span of time, and need to keep reorienting yourself back to the topic, it can be helpful.
Not trying to evangelize you, but you may not necessarily see the value in gathering random notable ideas somewhere until you put in the effort of documenting them and then see the network effect in action, i.e., new meta-ideas and patterns emerging from linking those ideas in a central location.
> may not necessarily see the value in gathering random notable ideas somewhere until you put in the effort of documenting them and then see the network effect in action
or it could be that correlation doesnt imply causation.
People who have lots of ideas might just generally be better at ideation, have high intelligence, and perhaps also good at evaluating their ideas quickly. Their success is not _due_ to their jotting down of ideas, but that there is a confounding factor that influence both.
People who would copy the actions of successful people may just be cargo culting.
if it's any consolation, I don't get it either. Heard about it a few months ago from someone at a kids birthday party, who said his life was completely transformed by it. He seemed to have the perspective that having a giant waterfall of amazing thoughts with nowhere to put them (until Obsidian!) was like normal for everyone. Whenever I asked him "well what are you writing" he was like, "everything! just download it and start writing!" OK.... Guess I'm just boring?
I wasn't sold on it previously but downloaded it based on this new canvas feature. I'm creating a mind map for my new project and creating notes and organising them in a way that is helpful to me to plan the project.
It allows me to dump thoughts, ideas and things that I need to remember in one searchable and organizable home. Obsidian makes this easy by not getting in the way and it's highly customizable. I find it fun to use.
