The Collector's Fallacy is an informal cognitive bias. It describes our tendency to archive large amounts of information without integrating that knowledge into ourselves.

Storing information and bookmarks gives us rewards. It frees us from the fear of losing access to the information. This makes collecting information addictive. But knowing about something is not the same as knowing something. We must make the knowledge our own for it to provide value and teach us something in the long run. [1]

To counteract this cognitive bias, we need to take notes so we actually learn and change. If we only consume without taking our own notes, we change only in the short term. We need to take notes and integrate the knowledge into a system if we want to change in the long term. Otherwise, we will forget sooner or later. [1] With good, personal notes, the system becomes an extension of ourselves.

When we do research, we should process notes and annotations continuously. Read for an hour, then process. This will quickly give us a sense of how much information we can actually handle. Processing notes and annotations will take time. By shortening the cycle between research and processing, we can continuously adjust the amount of information we think we can retain. [1]

Spending more time interacting with our notes is not a flaw, but a feature. It is this process that ensures we actually learn. It will also help limit the amount of information we can feed into the system, naturally curbing the "Collector's Fallacy." A key success factor is that we should not need to look at a source more than once. This resonates with a concept of good friction which I'm pondering about.

[1] Christian. Collector’s Fallacy. Zettelkasten.de. 20. jan. 2014. url: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy (visited 21.04.2024).