reductionism
published on the 2025-01-11
I have a Zettelkasten1.
in its §2025-01-08 14:04 entry, I have written the following:
society's specialisation,
programming2's separation of concerns
linguistic isolativeness3,
and personal knowledge management's atomiticity4
are different concepts regarding one thing:
having each member of a system
have the smallest possible quantity
of functions so that it can be
as reused as possible. 5
when I started writing this article, I only wanted it to be a retranscription of this physical note, but I later started wanting to put links to Wikipedia articles about some of the mentioned concepts. while doing so, I saw that the article Separation of concerns is in the „Reductionism“ category.
with its main article, Reductionism, I realised that all of the concepts I listed in that Zettel can somewhat fit into reductionism.
basically a box, or, for me, two boxes since not long ago, of Zettel (notes), which I personally hand-cut from old notebooks and sheets of paper to be roughly A6-sized, used with the Zettelkasten method
or, more broadly, computer science
I actually meant „isolatingness“; I often accidentally say „isolative language“ instead of „isolating language“ for some reason.
- for some reason, I could not find a dedicated Wikipedia article on this, even when searching the more common term, „atomic notes“.
- I first read about in Andy Matuschak's note Evergreen notes should be atomic.
- it is based on atomic design, introduced by Brad Frost in their blog post „atomic design“ at bradfrost.com, on which they are writing a book, Atomic Design.
I would also add political separation of powers, which is part of what makes a democracry.
