What is orphan notes?

Orphan notes is a concept in personal epistemology: An idea connected to nothing else is either missing links or not worth keeping.

Example: You open your note vault and find 47 notes with zero incoming or outgoing links. Some are fragments from a conference two years ago. Some are half-formed ideas you never developed. A few are genuinely important concepts you simply forgot to connect. Until you triage them — linking the valuable ones and deleting the rest — they contribute nothing to your thinking. They are cognitive dead weight: consuming attention during searches without producing insight.

This concept is part of Phase 18 (Knowledge Graphs) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for knowledge graphs.