So we have two problems: books which have laid out all their facts in a row but not connected them, and books which have entwined their facts too roughly for them to be disentangled. These feel very similar to me but when I write it out the descriptions sure sound like two completely different problems.
Possible unifying viewpoint: the problem is a lack of gears.
Two key properties of gears:
they give us a factorization of the system: each gear’ behavior can be viewed in isolation (i.e. locally)
they tell us how the gears connect: the whole (i.e. global) system’s behavior is defined by the (local) behavior of individual gears, plus their connection structure
Disconnected facts fail the latter; “facts too roughly entangled” fail the former.
This is on to something. I would like each bullet point in my notes to be one gear, and I feel unhappy when it’s either a mishmash of several undifferentiated gears, or when the gears don’t connect to anything and thus are their own kind of undifferentiated.
Possible unifying viewpoint: the problem is a lack of gears.
Two key properties of gears:
they give us a factorization of the system: each gear’ behavior can be viewed in isolation (i.e. locally)
they tell us how the gears connect: the whole (i.e. global) system’s behavior is defined by the (local) behavior of individual gears, plus their connection structure
Disconnected facts fail the latter; “facts too roughly entangled” fail the former.
This is on to something. I would like each bullet point in my notes to be one gear, and I feel unhappy when it’s either a mishmash of several undifferentiated gears, or when the gears don’t connect to anything and thus are their own kind of undifferentiated.