We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.
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Popular science articles need clickbate titles and one category focuses on interesting sounding pardoxes like:
- Why an apple a day may not keep the doctor away.
- Why cardio is bad for fat loss; you wanna drop some pounds, drop the cardio.
- Why faking the moon landing is harder than going to the moon.
If the article doesn’t actually contain an interesting paradox, you can always fake it by playing with the meaning of words. I feel that this is the case in this article.
Letting go and forgetting can be used as synonyms in the meaning of not focussing on it anymore, but in that usage of these words it doesn’t mean erasing from memory. Making notes allows for short term memory to be transfered to long term memory (both external on paper or on the computer, or in the brain as writing thing down helps with creating long term memory). If you have reliably stored information in your long term memory, you can focus on other things. That seems to be pretty much what note taking is all about and what seems to me common knowledge.
“The response to losses is stronger than the response to gains.”
This is a very general statement, that in my view isn’t even true in many cases. Finding for example a 1 euro coin on the street is more fun than losing that same coin is terrible, at least in my experience.
Next sentence:
We’d fear losing $100 from our bank account more than we’d value gaining $150 out of the blue.
This in my opinion is a complete mess of a comparison. How much you fear something (how would you even measure that) depends among other things on the perceived probability of the occurence of the event at hand; if you think your money is safe at the bank, there may be no fear at all. I don’t understand why the writer doesn’t simply compare (negative) value to (positive) value of repectively losing or gaining an x amount of something.
We fear losing our ideas the same.
No we don’t. Here’s one example.: many former highschool students have spent many hours learning one or multiple foreign languages (because they are forced to do that more or less) and after they graduate many of them make no effort to prevent that knowledge from fading away. In many cases learning a completely new language (like Chinese if you are from an English speaking country) is more fun than trying to maintain the foreign language skills you already have.
It’s biological, naturally selected into our DNA: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”
This is in my humble opinion is complete and utter hogwash.
The amount of effort put towards (or urgency attributed to) an oppurtunity vs the prevention of threats depends completely on the circumstances. Or to put it in another way:
- Some threats are more urgent than some opportunities.
- Some opportunities are more urgent than some threats.
Time and thoughts have value, to us anyway, so we’re averse to losing them, too. Enough that we fear losing the things we’ve already found out more than we favor gaining new ideas.
Again, looks like an argument, but there is absolutely nothing providing logic or evidence to support the conclusion.
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Interesting
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I partially agree with you @Josh. From my personal experience writing never helped me remember. Writing did not helpe me to forget either. I am using Obsidian Note. I have not forgotten what I have written there. 
Again writing did not made me a memory expert.
There is an Indian youtuber Ankur Warikoo who is giving advice to his audience “ Don’t remember anything , write everything down”.
His advice is dangerous though.
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I’m convinced now that the extrinsic cognitive load of detailed note taking means that you’re better off not taking any notes if you want to remember more of what you’re studying. For ideas and exploration though, I think those apps (and paper) are fine. Especially if you read your notes more than zero times…
I use Tiddlywiki with Stroll, which has pretty good facilities for searching, linking, backlinking and tagging, so notes don’t just get buried into the ether…
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This is why I skipped the note stage and went straight to a anki to record what I need to revise
Better might be putting it all in a memory palace though!
Better still might be doing progressive summerisation where you write marginella to summerise the paragraph and link it to the previous paragraph summary.
Then, I suppose, put any keywords into a memory palace, perhaps just keeping the book as the start of a palace (?) or drawing a journey along the top of the page perhaps?
What I found is that it’s just a lot of work and I get lazy! So I don’t actually do this!
But printing off a book, writing marginella could be better than anki challenge cards, even if those cards are carried with me and revised mobile, adding mnemonics later
Just the grind of the process just feels slow. It feels more rewarding to just get through the book more quickly. Need to fix that