About, Chow Yong Han

Thank you for visiting.

The closest people know me as Yong Han while the public know me as Alvin. I decided to name this website after the former because it is a glimpse into my thoughts, something that is intimate to me.

I am a keen learner and I mainly learn through reading and reflections. Occasionally through talks and conversations. I believe we largely learn from others and very few of our thoughts are truly original. It would be an advantage if we studied their wisdom as much as possible to further ourselves in today’s world.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Isaac Newton

The modern era poses a new problem: overwhelming information. I used Evernote, Google Keep, Notion, Google Drive and many other softwares to safe keep my digital notes. But I found it hard to refer to when I needed the information. Collecting information isn’t sufficient and application of knowledge is difficult if we cannot access information easily.

We need to organise information. Charlie Munger called it a latticework.

“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience – both vicarious and direct – on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and fail in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
Charlie Munger

This realisation convinced me of the importance of personal knowledge management (PKM) and gave birth to this website. PKM has three stages

Collecting. This is the part that I have been doing for years. I subscribe to noteworthy people via emails. I clip online articles using Evernote and Notion. I read and save my highlights on Amazon and Play Book Notes. I save papers, letters and presentations on Google Drive. I keep short notes on Google Keep. YouTube is also a good source of information and Netflix documentaries are great.
Organising. Curating the information was very minimal in the past. I merely group the articles and book highlights by categories. I went one step further with this website to synthesise information by grouping information quoted from multiple sources into specific topics. This provided more viewpoints when I refer to them.
Applying. Knowledge is only power when it is applied. I would reflect about my experiences and share insights I have gained through in my life. This would be my personal writings on this website.

Ultimately I aim to be wiser and make better decisions to achieve better outcomes in life as a result of this exercise. It is definitely more selfish than anything else. But if you can gain something out of this open sharing, why not?

I have deliberately broken down the information into nuggets and I would categorise and tag each of them on this site. I find that modularising information helps me find them easier. Just like how the entire internet breaks down information into packets before reassembling them.

I have implemented two ways to structure the information. One is the hierarchical approach – think of Yahoo! having a directory of links. You are using this structure if you are navigating with the menu bar.

The second way is to use a network of tags – think Google where information is scattered and put together based on your intended search. It is more disordered but has the advantage of bringing the most relevant nuggets of information to you. You can start by using the tag cloud below or the tags shown at the bottom of each post. You can use the search function too.

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