[sigbottle]

This is really true. People love to say, "Just don't make the same mistake twice" or whatever, but part of the necessity of ingesting truly novel information is that you're gonna weave back and trip over yourself a ton of times before you get to that clean refined mental model.

For me, note-taking is a godsend - I don't know how I would live without it. Anywhere from hyper specific detailed notes to just unstructured rants. It's the equivalent of storing things in memory - that alone makes algorithms far more powerful.

It doesn't help with real-time tasks like talking though... but I've noticed I have gotten a bit better at talking ever since I started note taking.

I think the "learn instinctually by doing stuff a lot" approach definitely is useful but note-taking is a healthy balance between that and getting perma-stuck in research mode.