That is exactly the point I am making (echoing the author of the linked piece). Those tools did change the world. But I do not know how you go about measuring the net effect of it all. I can certainly share many anecdotes but what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes?
> what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes
In someways the problem here is the inverse one might expect. Without photography, the entire modern world does not exist - it's the base technology required to develop optical lithography, without which we never achieve silicon chips. Without the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), the IBM PC likely fails to find product-market fit, and the entire tech and financial worlds are a decade or more behind where they are today. These are technologies with downstream tech trees so deep we can't reasonably put an upper bound on their value.
I don't personally believe that note-taking represents a paradigm change in the same sense - obsidian and friends are really just reifying existing text-based (and even paper-based) note taking workflows, with some hypertext niceties layered in...
We're in agreement. And it's not only the technological advances that came after, it's all the small life moments and personal accomplishments too. That's why I connected this to the Henry Ford example. How can we determine which of his accomplishments would or wouldn't have happened without his notetaking practice? He probably would not be able to answer that question himself.
