Andy Matuschak

Evergreen notes

A way of writing notes influenced by Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten but rebuilt on the assumption of a digital environment. In contrast to temporary memos that are thrown away after each meeting or reading, its distinguishing feature is that notes are treated as things to be cultivated over the long term. It sets principles such as writing only one concept per note, titling notes by concept rather than by content, and linking notes densely to one another, aiming for a state in which knowledge accumulates and connects over time.

Matuschak's own working notes are published at notes.andymatuschak.org, and are referred to both as a worked example of this method and as a representative example of the "Digital garden" format, in which an individual's thinking is made public while still unfinished.

"Why books don't work"

An essay published in 2019. To the question of why so little remains after reading a book to the end, it answered that books fail to work for the same reason lectures fail to work. That is, both media rest on the naive premise that "reading or listening is enough for it to get across", without any explicit theory of how people actually acquire things. This essay became the starting point of his subsequent research.

The mnemonic medium and Quantum Country

Out of the concern above came a form of writing he calls the "mnemonic medium". It is based on the idea of inserting spaced-repetition questions into the text as the reader proceeds, building the act of recalling the content into the reading itself.

The representative implementation of this format is Quantum Country (2019), an introduction to quantum computing written jointly with the physicist Michael Nielsen. He has further developed Orbit, a system that lets ordinary writers, not only the two of them, use this mechanism in their own content.

Work as an independent researcher

Since 2019 he has funded his research through continuing support from patrons via Patreon, working as an independent researcher who belongs to neither a university nor a company. He treats this arrangement itself as an experiment, and each year publishes on his site a reflection on that year's research progress and on the realities of working as an independent researcher.