new rabbit hole

I've been holding out against using LLMs, being dubious of their abilities.  Stochastic parrots and all that.  However, many colleagues who I respect having been telling me they can be useful.  One colleague in particular said they could be used to interrogate your own papers before submission, to help find any contradictions or other errors you have overlooked.  That does sound useful.  So I took the plunge, with GeminiNB, which I have access to.  It is a closed system, where you upload the specific documents you want it to examine.

First, of course, I read up on prompt enineering and so on.  I experimented with a prompt to review my papers, to see what I could make it do.  After telling it not to be sycophantic, to write concisely, to be merciless, and more (so much more!) I eventually got it to "reject" one of my own published papers (for a reason that is technically true, but actually unimportant).  So, success.  I then tried it on a paper I've currently nearly finished writing, and it pointed out something as a problem that, again, was technically true, but irrelevant in this context.  So that's working well.  (Although not 100% well: it can also be moronic and infuriating.  In particular, the fact that it gives different answers to the same prompt make prompt debugging and testing an extremely frustrating process.)

Then I heard that GeminiNB can now access your GDrive if you tell it to.  Ooh, I thought. I keep my Obsidian vault, including my Zettelkasten, on my GDrive.  I love Obsidian in general, and the Zettelkasten idea in particular, but I have difficulty remembering all the things I have added and might want to link to.  Maybe I can get GeminiNB to analyse it for linked ideas?  So, of course, I googled around to see if anyone else had done this.  And fell into an enchanting rabbit hole.  I discovered three great techniques.

1. The Idea Compass: Sascha's Zettelkasten post about Vicky Zhao's YouTube video that includes a piece about Fei-Ling Teng's idea compass.  A great way to find conceptually linked notes in my vault.
2. The Knowledge Flower, five petal of analysis, in the same post by Sacsha.  A great way to drill down on an idea.
3. The Feynman technique, to get a very concise, lay explanation of a topic; there are several posts about prompts for this.

All these provide ways of analysing a Zettelkasten note.  The idea compass helps to link to related notes in a way that builds up a good network of concepts at different levels of abstraction.  The flower petals dig deeper into the concept itself.  And the Feynman technique provides a great analysis that picks out aspects I've often overlooked.

I did have to add critique aspects to the flower petal and Feynman prompts (the compass already has this as one of its points) in order to get valuable negative feedback on the idea in a note.

But yes, I now have better links in my vault.

And after I had been experimenting with that for a while, I had a sudden thought:  oh, of course, my Paperpile directory, with over 3000 academic papers, is also in my GDrive...