Show HN: Create mind maps to learn new things using AI

The point of making mind maps by hand is that they help you memorize and study by synthesizing a topic.

If this is done by AI it's pretty much pointless.

One of the reasons I think LLMs should not be in most parts of education. There is a huge body of research about the importance of deliberate practice. High quality learning needs effort. A lot of these tools perform the ostensible ritual of learning - note taking, mind mapping, etc - and make them frictionless, thus rendering them worthless.

Exactly. If anything we should build LLM powered apps that ask questions, test understanding and create that friction necessary to build deep comprehension and memory.

Agreed. I wouldn't be opposed to a (local) LLM inside my Obsidian vault; but not for writing notes, but rather for discovering connections between notes. That's something that would actually help me. Generating mind maps like this? Not so much.

Came here to say this. Also, most mind map implementations are actually spider diagrams which (while useful) are not mind maps, the point of a mind map is the label the line and not the node.

Huh, I've been doing it wrong my whole life.

Use Your Head by Tony Buzan is totally worth a read and is how I learned mind mapping 22 years ago. I can still remember the rough layout and shape of many of the mind maps I made for GCSE and A-level revision. I’m 100% certain that reading that book and sticking to his methodologies added one or two letter grades to my exams at that age.

It's not quite pointless. A prepared outline/mind-map gives you a roadmap for learning beforehand; it can function like a good index.

It's better to memorize domain knowledge upon paths that are clearly understood (thus you are memorizing well-worn, acceptable paths), rather than synthesizing your understanding of a topic as you go along. The second is prone to mistakes and mistaken understanding, unless you're a subject matter expert or charting new domains of knowledge.

That is IMO already done by domain experts in the form of textbooks, courses, university classes etc. And with formal, tested relationships between various islands of knowledge. I'm not too sure how much I would trust an LLM to do this

That’s an advance organizer (again, Joseph Novak). But it needs to be created by an expert, not by an LLM.

Making the index is part of the learning.