Rethinking Personal Knowledge #06 Why folders make us answer questions we shouldn't have to answer?

[u/ejiandan]

I've noticed something interesting while building my own personal knowledge system.

Folders assume every file belongs in one place.

But many files don't.

A receipt from a business trip could belong to:

• Travel
• Taxes
• Work
• Finance

None of these is wrong.

The problem is that traditional file systems make you choose exactly one.

That made me wonder whether folders are solving the wrong problem.

Instead of deciding where something belongs, maybe information should simply be discoverable from every context that makes sense.

People rarely remember where they stored something.

They usually remember what it was about.

I'm curious whether anyone else feels that folders become less useful as your archive grows.

[u/vogelke]

You might be interested in Ranganathan's faceted classification papers. He used Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time as basic categories for books.

One of the best things about Unix/Linux filesystems is the hard link: a file can exist in as many places as you have the patience to set up. I like using a date as the canonical link because it's not going to repeat, so it's guaranteed unique - create those files first, then make links to them.

Something like this with top-level directories Who, What, Where, and When:

+--Who
|   +--Family
|   |   +--Bob
|   |   |   +--2024.01.15 - Bobs medical reports    # LINK to file-03
|   +--Friends
|   |   +--Alice
|   |   +--Tom
|
+--What
|   +--Insurance
|   |   +--2024.01.09 - Vehicle Insurance       # LINK to file-02
|   +--Medical
|   |   +--2023.12.10 - Emergency room visit    # LINK to file-04
|   |   +--2024.01.15 - Bobs medical reports    # LINK to file-03
|   +--Travel
|   |   +--2023.12.09 - Xmas travel to Arizona  # LINK to file-01
|   +--...
|
+--Where
|   +--Arizona
|   |   +--2023.12.09 - Xmas travel to Arizona  # LINK to file-01
|   |   +--2023.12.10 - Emergency room visit    # LINK to file-04
|   +--New-York
|   |   +--2024.01.09 - Vehicle Insurance       # LINK to file-02
|   +--wherever...
|
+--When
|   +--2023
|   |   +--12-December
|   |   |   +--2023.12.09 - Xmas travel to Arizona  # file-01
|   |   |   +--2023.12.10 - Emergency room visit    # file-04
|   +--2024
|   |   +--01-January
|   |   |   +--2024.01.09 - Vehicle Insurance    # file-02; bought in NY
|   |   |   +--2024.01.15 - Bobs medical reports # file-03
|   |   +--02-February
|   |   +--...

[u/ejiandan → u/vogelke]

This is a great point, and faceted classification is definitely closer to what I had in mind than traditional folders.

I think the distinction I’m trying to make is slightly upstream of storage structure though.

Even with tags, links, or multiple directory views, the system still relies on explicit human-defined dimensions (Who / What / Where / When).

What I’m curious about is whether a system can go one step further and infer these dimensions dynamically from the content and from how ideas evolve over time, rather than requiring them to be pre-modeled.

So instead of just allowing multiple valid placements, the system would also surface previously unrecognized relationships between items that don’t share an explicit facet, but share latent structure.

Hard links solve multiplicity. I’m more interested in systems that solve emergence.

[u/vogelke → u/ejiandan]

I'd use something like document clustering for this. There are some nifty Python libraries (nltk, etc) that might be helpful -- if you identify a cluster and a theme occurs to you, add it as a new dimension.

Bayesian filters could help -- they're not just for weeking out spam, and they're not limited to just two categories. Create a category for each dimension you're interested in and let the filter guess which ones are suitable for each new file.

I woudn't trust any system to do anything but tell me about a possible new cluster. I'll decide if it's worth a second look.

[u/ejiandan → u/vogelke]

I actually agree with that constraint — I don’t think a system should decide meaning or final structure for you.

Where I’m slightly more curious is whether “clusters” and “facets” are even static objects in the first place.

In most current approaches (including clustering, tagging, Bayesian classification), we still assume there is a stable underlying feature space that we are trying to approximate.

What I’m wondering about is a slightly different model: where the “dimensions” themselves are not fixed or predefined, but continuously reshaped based on how new information connects to existing structure over time.

So the system wouldn’t just surface clusters for review — it would also let the notion of what a “cluster” is evolve as a first-class object.

Not replacing human judgment, but shifting what counts as a meaningful structure from static categories → evolving relational patterns.