Evergreen notes and Zettelkasten are good for "frontier thinking", but not for learning a practice or a domain

The fact that Evergreen notes don't reflect the mental maps of one's mind (Zettelkasten notes also don't, for that matter) is at least partially by design. Andy Matuschak writes that "notes should surprise you":

If reading and writing notes doesn’t lead to surprises, what’s the point? If we just wanted to remember things, we have spaced repetition for that. If we just wanted to understand a particular idea thoroughly in some local context, we wouldn’t bother maintaining a system of notes over time.

Quoting the page from the official Zettelkasten website:

If you look something up in your Zettelkasten, you need to get unexpected results in order to form new thoughts. Surprise is the key ingredient here, as I pointed out in my introductory post on this topic. The links between notes make this possible since you’ll generate new ideas by following connections and exploring a part of your web of notes. The non-apparent connections are generally more beneficial to creative thinking than the obvious ones as they generate greater surprise. While your mind usually continues to work with the obvious, your Zettelkasten instead shows you the bizarre. It sparks your imagination and blows your mind as it confronts you with the unexpected.

It's important to note here is that both Andy Matuschak and Niklas Luhmann use their note-taking systems for doing original research, whereas at least 80% of my notes are unoriginal and reflect ideas and concepts I learn from books and elsewhere. I use the evergreen note system for learning a practice or a domain and as my external memory. My main goals are improving and increasing my memory capacity, making thinking and recalling things faster and more reliable (not forgetting things I shouldn't forget about).

Therefore, it seems to me that while evergreen notes and Zettelkasten are good systems for doing original research or "frontier thinking", these note-taking systems are not optimal for training one's mind in fluent and reliable thinking in terms of a certain (professional) practice (for example, deliberating about security threats when considering certain IT solutions: a practice of security engineering) or learning the existing body of knowledge in a certain domain (for example, quantum computing).

The current state-of-the-art idea for a tool that helps one to learn a new practice or a domain is a mnemonic medium, a text which embeds a spaced repetition memory system.

I propose an idea of a new tool for thought, a development of the idea of a spaced repetition system that leverages the preliminary insights about the topology of human memory from Jeff Hawkins's A Thousand Brains theory: The idea for a new tool for thought: "mind gardener", AI assistant that helps to build a topology of reference frames in the mind of a learner.

Next: The actual structure of my evergreen notes: it's a mess