Now, I’m not one for ultra-efficiency in life- I think a lot of the actual business of living can be lost in mostly futile attempts to organise your time into precise and regimented blocks of needle-moving activity and obligations. Those diagrams of Benjamin Franklin-like daily routines where life is eked out in accounted-for 15 minute increments fill me with a specific queasy dread.
It's not necessarily like that. A lot of people use it to structure their day, as a sort of guide, a helpful reference, rather than a slave-driver there to beat them into submission.
Over-planning is definitely a trap that I've fallen into, but you can plan like that and still be able to adapt (and not stick to the schedule)
It's just nice to be able to look and say 'okay, this is what I want to be doing now'
Is there anything the old G himself hasn't been proven right about in the end?
Google IQ is another catchy term for the phenomenon you're talking about her - no need to learn or understand anything in depth if you can just Google it - outsourced thinking.
"See, the paradox of the modern world is that the wisest people I encounter are invariably the most ignorant."
Going to use this the next time my parents give out to me for not knowing jack about current events - my internet friend Tom says it means I'm actually wiser than you are.
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive, it blocks out the serendipities that come from just having a go at something, in ignorance, like a child trying to figure out how a toy works."
Leading to the inevitable "paralysis by analysis" of course. I would say the current generation of people is probably the most separated from their instincts than any that have come before it.
Dave Chapelle had a realisation like this about learning things face-to-face - he realised that basically everything he knew was from hearing about someplace or reading about it on the internet, but he really had no idea if it was bs or not.
So he spent a few years travelling around the world and the US, and talking to people and realised basically everything he had read was false, and his mind was stuffed full of pre-conceived notions and prejudices he didn't even know he had.
Makes you think eh?
The majority of people I speak to in Ireland, friends and family included, genuinely believe that America is some sort of hellish dystopia on the verge of civil war at any given moment.
Really? I mean it's probably extremely normal, if not boring in 95% of it. It's a staggeringly big place after all, and despite what the news-cycle shows you, I imagine the average person gives about as much of a shit about politics as you do.
Great post Tom, and great advice too. I'm sure it's a common problem for the curious types that read these articles - myself included.
As someone who has taken your work to heart and outside of work now spends virtually zero time online, posts like this are wonderful reminders of all I've learned from reading your work.
A counter-play on reading: in every propagandistic lie is a truth on what is friend or foe, and in every myth is a truth in human patterns of perception. It is good to engage with conspiracy theories if one finds tomfoolery interesting.
For Google IQ, I would like to conjecture Google EQ, or to not be "autistic" or apathetic in the face of people having blind spots or obscured narratives. There are often "tells" of content being "bad", but not enough tells for subjectivity. https://www.secretorum.life/p/eponymous-laws-part-i-laws-of-the
Question: how would one listen to anecdotal evidence and make up their own mind?
I am giving serious thought to writing a long piece on the Vindication of The G Manifesto. I’m sure it will either a) be a massive flop or b) be my most successful piece ever with an audience that I don’t want.
But I’ll probably do it anyway.
To you point about prejudices and preconceptions and interesting phenomenon- and one of the advantages of spending some time living in a big city- is that you get to see how wrong the media are first hand. In London back in 2011 I lived in a major hotspot for the riots, supposedly. But what my eye saw didn’t match the newspaper fear-mongering at all.
I learned then to disregard it all. A lesson I have had to be reminded of over the years but none that is vitally important to understand.
I’m glad that I’ve had at least some small, but actual, impact on your life Conor. That’s what it’s all about so it means a lot to hear that.
Please do mate, I will be one of the first to read it.
Yes, I've heard you're lucky to make it to the shops and back without getting stabbed in London these days, but I have strange inkling that might be the slightest bit off the mark.
Of course, and I'm absolutely certain I'm not the only one (the thriving discord is evidence enough).
In my experience the people who are most cynical of the news are those who have the best understanding of how statistics work. This in itself is very telling.
Thanks for a brilliant piece, Tom. I shall admit that I like looking things up although recently I've started doing it less or with a different attitude. Simply speaking of googling things up, I often stumble upon two categories of things - certain (terms, facts, definitions, etc.) and uncertain (e.g. your example of looking up for diet). In the first case, the results are pretty good and it makes sense to look them up. The curiosity is rewarded. But the second case demands to be lucky. Things that are prone to be biased and doesn't have the exact solution are hard to look up correctly if you don't know where to start and have no idea about the topic. If I am not a nutritionist I can't recognise "the best diet ideas for 2021" among the shit load of SEO boosted garbage. That's the exact problem of looking those things up - they aren't optimised to be correct, they are optimised to be seen, convincing for rookies, but they are unusable if you dare to click the second page of google search results (which not many people do).
Going back from "googling thing up" to "looking things up" in general. My writing got better (subjectively) when I stopped trying to verify every single sentence (doubtful decision). I always have an itch to "look a thing up" if I'm not certain about what I'm writing about. But It's easier and *oh my god* more productive to cut uncertain pieces than trying to verify them. So I truly believe that the question is not "to look up, or not to look up" but "what exactly to look up" or "what MUST be looked up". Some things really require this and I learned this not an easy way. But most of the things are just FOMO, impostor syndrome and other psychological anxieties. Identifying them aka navigating in the shit ocean of content is the skill one needs to master.
SEO was a subject I didn’t really get into (as I don’t understand it well enough and have little desire to find out) but it is surely a big part of the problem. It means people write for algorithms rather than writing for an audience of humans. And so the first thing that gets jettisoned for being ‘suboptimal’ is things that appeal or resonate with actual humans- nuance, story and so on.
Perhaps this explains something of the mess we are in. In the same way that you can eat a massive quantity of bland junk food as your body keeps trying in vain to get nutrition from it, perhaps you can consume infinite amount of ‘content’ as this too is your spirit trying to find nourishment in a place that is devoid of it.
Yeah, I agree. I also think that problem could be not in the quality of content per se but in quantity of it. This abundance makes a choice more complicated and potential error higher. And because we “fear” this error, we choose the most obvious / popular / comforting options. But yeah, also just an idea…
Vicious cycle: the internet atrophies you attention span, therefore your memory is very short, therefore creators have to keep churning out stuff so you don’t forget them, therefore the internet rewards those who are prolific, therefore quality goes down as good word takes time, therefore everything becomes flashy and quick and easy to digest, therefore the internet atrophies your attention span...
That's it. I'm not even reading the comments today. Maybe next sunday, after a whole week of not-looking-things up. Only then I may start to dwell on where my interpretation went wrong ...
Haha. Or where it went right. I would be curious if someone tried a ‘refusing to look things up fast’ in the way that people fast from food or social media or whatever. I imagine the results would be surprisingly impressive, mental health wise.
Provocative and timely piece, but I do wonder if you've buried the lede here. Is it a matter of not looking things up or having the discernment to differentiate what is worth looking up and not? Is it about learning from people face to face or about discerning what one can and can't learn from conversation?
It reads to me as a disguised sermon on the virtue of prudence. All it's missing is a diatribe against the common practice of spending more time researching what can opener to buy than the question of how to live one's life.
Of concern though there seems to be a dissonance between the advisement of discernment and the example of diet research as a waste of time. I know plenty of folks who couldn't be bothered to ask questions about diet until it was too late. You seem to flirt with relativism and recommending that any difficult question is not worth bothering with. But what important question isn't difficult?
Man, you make some great points as always. I think the sermonising is unconscious rather than disguised but I’ll admit that the tendency to sermonise is something that I have not quite managed to escape just yet.
I would say that it’s not so much that diet research is a waste of time per se but it can be the mechanism through which people commonly waste time, if you follow that distinction. And yeah, it is all chiefly a question of discernment. I think what happens is that the zeitgeist posits a certain position that is too far one way and I- out of contrarian impulse- overstate the opposing case in the hope that the hypothetical reader will find their own balance somewhere in the middle.
I have yet to discover a better way to get others (and myself) to be more discerning, though I am sure it exists.
In some sense, what would you consider to be the ultimate stop-gap of such a behavior?
1. Could "auto-archive every webpage but don't read all" be a good way to dodge the FOMO? Are computer mindfulness tools and blockers good as well?
2. Could summarization and aggregation tools help end cramming bloat sites, where everything is clearly the same info rehashed in different ways? Also, is GPT-Neo a good option for indexing and referencing (assuming one has the cash)?
3. Could questioning what is been said between sources in a Socratic (argumentative) or Dialectic (mutual compatible) way be good to sense quality thought? Are there faster way to find article to solid rational foundations or clear narratives rather than a bad form of either?
That distinction is apt, and resonates. And sermoning is no critique (particularly as regards prudence) - I suspect it is a more honest form than much of what passes for discourse.
As always, love reading your work. I wanted to share two things that came to mind from this. First, we naturally seek to trust others and not ourselves, but you have to trust yourself. Second, a quote from the book How to Actually Change Your Mind: “make yourself the source of every thought worth thinking.” Thanks Tom.
There is certainly a big element of fear- or more specifically a lack of confidence- in permanently being stuck in research mode. It is very much a matter of diminishing returns. Research begets further research when what is really needed is feedback. And that can only come through making attempts. Through doing.
Indded. Death by inaction, as a result of information overload. There is a soothing comfort in looking things up, because you naively think you'll be able to eliminate risk from the process. How many times have I looked things up telling myself "just one more tutorial about X subject, and I'll be able to nail it perfectly the first time ! Just one more video on this subject and I'll be able to explain it more clearly". But the truth is, the more you look things up, the more you see things you were not supposed to see so soon in the process. The more you look things up, the more you doubt, and the less you're prone to action. So you never act. But because of this pernicious cycle, you feel good about it, because really, it's not that you're not "doing" anything, you're just "setting yourself up for the win" (clever boï that you are).
You're like Max the taxi driver in Collateral (excellent movie by Michal Mann), who's been driving a cab for 12 years while accumulating business plans and spreadsheets to "someday" open his own limo company... And it's painful to see that he never will. Max probably looked a lot of shit up in those 12 years.
In the days before Internet, you'd just ask an acquaintance who'd vaguely knew something about the subject and that was it; you didn't really have much more room to move past that. So you were forced either to act or to accept that you weren't gonna do it. But thanks to the Internet and the information era, you can easily spend years crafting your little project in your head. 50 years ago, a guy wanting to write a book would just... start, and alea jacta est. Now, he feels the need to subscribe to a few creative writing classes, an online community and probably a few hundred hours of motivational writing videos/advices. But will is a fragile thing, and if you don't act quick enough, it eventually gets diluted amongsts the doubts and new shiny ideas. How many of us know people who are always full of ideas but act upon/finish none of them ?
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive"
And that's the final issue here. Intuition is a good thing. It's a thousand-years old biological weapon created by our brain in order to force us to act. But between the impostor syndrome and the information overload, it gets drowned and like every cognitive funtion, the less we use it, the worst it gets. Spend enough years looking things up and not building things, and you'll end up truly lost. A modern tragedy.
Excellent newsletter Thomas. See you on the Discord ;)
Great insights as always, and the Collateral reference is dead on. A prime example of exactly what I was trying to get at. The risk mitigation take is very true too. And of course past a certain threshold research *adds* risk as it detracts from the thing itself.
Pre Internet you probably couldn’t research enough. The online world has levelled certain information asymmetries which is probably for the best. So the key, I think is to research but in a very targeted way in a very tight timeframe.
Everything online- emails, research, checking investments, entertainment, social media- should be treated like a bank job- get in, grab what you came for, get out, don’t set off the alarms.
This way you can spend more time in screenless reality, which ironically is where most of the information asymmetries are now to be found.
See you in the Discord, mate. But only for a sensible length of time each session...
I tend to think that the ease of access to information and answers is as convenient as it is overwhelming. It’s an intellectual equivalent to the problem my kids face: when faced with too many choices (toys/ activities), the easiest and quickest choice is the obvious one (probably screens instead of toys). When you’re bombarded by choice and information you tend to either become distracted or give up.
This is very much at the heart of the matter. Choice of that magnitude inevitably favours breadth over depth. Which is in many ways the opposite of mastery. And the human lifespan being finite a big part of the process of living has to be the letting go of certain possibilities. Multiple language proficiency, for example, is not on the cards for me. Because I don’t care about it *enough*
Self-knowledge should lead to prioritisation and the letting go of certain things should therefore be a relief. It’s all a question of time really.
Brilliant, Tom. Here is an issue I'm faced with: knowing that I can access some knowledge I come across (not seeking) at a later date, I cease to capture the essence of that knowledge. As such my mind is so much a series of approximations. I know that Johnson said something about...I know that Thoreau writes about, around this time, in reference to this group of people...but I couldn't tell you more detail than this (sometimes). I have too often severed, cut short, my own immediate experience. We cannot, must not, outsource our own minds to the internet. We cannot, must not, trade our capability of present knowledge acquired with difficulty to the possibility of future knowledge acquired with ease. "Let your real world experience be your teacher." In other words, not your Google search power, not your note-taking app proficiency, not your growing stream of Twitter likes. Yes.
The outsourcing your brain to the internet is a real problem. As with all things Web 2.0 I rail against them primarily because I know I am ultra-susceptible to their charms.
Not to sound like one of those ‘x is a superpower’ platitude peddlers but rote memorisation, discernment and self-knowledge of your own learning style are all indeed superpowers. And the Batman utility belt equivalent is a well-thumbed shelf of physical reference books..l
Now, I’m not one for ultra-efficiency in life- I think a lot of the actual business of living can be lost in mostly futile attempts to organise your time into precise and regimented blocks of needle-moving activity and obligations. Those diagrams of Benjamin Franklin-like daily routines where life is eked out in accounted-for 15 minute increments fill me with a specific queasy dread.
It's not necessarily like that. A lot of people use it to structure their day, as a sort of guide, a helpful reference, rather than a slave-driver there to beat them into submission.
Over-planning is definitely a trap that I've fallen into, but you can plan like that and still be able to adapt (and not stick to the schedule)
It's just nice to be able to look and say 'okay, this is what I want to be doing now'
Just wanted to give a more nuanced view of it.
Is there anything the old G himself hasn't been proven right about in the end?
Google IQ is another catchy term for the phenomenon you're talking about her - no need to learn or understand anything in depth if you can just Google it - outsourced thinking.
"See, the paradox of the modern world is that the wisest people I encounter are invariably the most ignorant."
Going to use this the next time my parents give out to me for not knowing jack about current events - my internet friend Tom says it means I'm actually wiser than you are.
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive, it blocks out the serendipities that come from just having a go at something, in ignorance, like a child trying to figure out how a toy works."
Leading to the inevitable "paralysis by analysis" of course. I would say the current generation of people is probably the most separated from their instincts than any that have come before it.
Dave Chapelle had a realisation like this about learning things face-to-face - he realised that basically everything he knew was from hearing about someplace or reading about it on the internet, but he really had no idea if it was bs or not.
So he spent a few years travelling around the world and the US, and talking to people and realised basically everything he had read was false, and his mind was stuffed full of pre-conceived notions and prejudices he didn't even know he had.
Makes you think eh?
The majority of people I speak to in Ireland, friends and family included, genuinely believe that America is some sort of hellish dystopia on the verge of civil war at any given moment.
Really? I mean it's probably extremely normal, if not boring in 95% of it. It's a staggeringly big place after all, and despite what the news-cycle shows you, I imagine the average person gives about as much of a shit about politics as you do.
Great post Tom, and great advice too. I'm sure it's a common problem for the curious types that read these articles - myself included.
As someone who has taken your work to heart and outside of work now spends virtually zero time online, posts like this are wonderful reminders of all I've learned from reading your work.
Conor
A counter-play on reading: in every propagandistic lie is a truth on what is friend or foe, and in every myth is a truth in human patterns of perception. It is good to engage with conspiracy theories if one finds tomfoolery interesting.
For Google IQ, I would like to conjecture Google EQ, or to not be "autistic" or apathetic in the face of people having blind spots or obscured narratives. There are often "tells" of content being "bad", but not enough tells for subjectivity. https://www.secretorum.life/p/eponymous-laws-part-i-laws-of-the
Question: how would one listen to anecdotal evidence and make up their own mind?
I am giving serious thought to writing a long piece on the Vindication of The G Manifesto. I’m sure it will either a) be a massive flop or b) be my most successful piece ever with an audience that I don’t want.
But I’ll probably do it anyway.
To you point about prejudices and preconceptions and interesting phenomenon- and one of the advantages of spending some time living in a big city- is that you get to see how wrong the media are first hand. In London back in 2011 I lived in a major hotspot for the riots, supposedly. But what my eye saw didn’t match the newspaper fear-mongering at all.
I learned then to disregard it all. A lesson I have had to be reminded of over the years but none that is vitally important to understand.
I’m glad that I’ve had at least some small, but actual, impact on your life Conor. That’s what it’s all about so it means a lot to hear that.
Cheers.
Please do mate, I will be one of the first to read it.
Yes, I've heard you're lucky to make it to the shops and back without getting stabbed in London these days, but I have strange inkling that might be the slightest bit off the mark.
Of course, and I'm absolutely certain I'm not the only one (the thriving discord is evidence enough).
In my experience the people who are most cynical of the news are those who have the best understanding of how statistics work. This in itself is very telling.
Thanks for a brilliant piece, Tom. I shall admit that I like looking things up although recently I've started doing it less or with a different attitude. Simply speaking of googling things up, I often stumble upon two categories of things - certain (terms, facts, definitions, etc.) and uncertain (e.g. your example of looking up for diet). In the first case, the results are pretty good and it makes sense to look them up. The curiosity is rewarded. But the second case demands to be lucky. Things that are prone to be biased and doesn't have the exact solution are hard to look up correctly if you don't know where to start and have no idea about the topic. If I am not a nutritionist I can't recognise "the best diet ideas for 2021" among the shit load of SEO boosted garbage. That's the exact problem of looking those things up - they aren't optimised to be correct, they are optimised to be seen, convincing for rookies, but they are unusable if you dare to click the second page of google search results (which not many people do).
Going back from "googling thing up" to "looking things up" in general. My writing got better (subjectively) when I stopped trying to verify every single sentence (doubtful decision). I always have an itch to "look a thing up" if I'm not certain about what I'm writing about. But It's easier and *oh my god* more productive to cut uncertain pieces than trying to verify them. So I truly believe that the question is not "to look up, or not to look up" but "what exactly to look up" or "what MUST be looked up". Some things really require this and I learned this not an easy way. But most of the things are just FOMO, impostor syndrome and other psychological anxieties. Identifying them aka navigating in the shit ocean of content is the skill one needs to master.
Cheers,
John
SEO was a subject I didn’t really get into (as I don’t understand it well enough and have little desire to find out) but it is surely a big part of the problem. It means people write for algorithms rather than writing for an audience of humans. And so the first thing that gets jettisoned for being ‘suboptimal’ is things that appeal or resonate with actual humans- nuance, story and so on.
Perhaps this explains something of the mess we are in. In the same way that you can eat a massive quantity of bland junk food as your body keeps trying in vain to get nutrition from it, perhaps you can consume infinite amount of ‘content’ as this too is your spirit trying to find nourishment in a place that is devoid of it.
Just an idea.
Yeah, I agree. I also think that problem could be not in the quality of content per se but in quantity of it. This abundance makes a choice more complicated and potential error higher. And because we “fear” this error, we choose the most obvious / popular / comforting options. But yeah, also just an idea…
Vicious cycle: the internet atrophies you attention span, therefore your memory is very short, therefore creators have to keep churning out stuff so you don’t forget them, therefore the internet rewards those who are prolific, therefore quality goes down as good word takes time, therefore everything becomes flashy and quick and easy to digest, therefore the internet atrophies your attention span...
And on and on.
I attempted to write about this in a tweet earlier today and nobody got what I meant. This sums it up perfectly. Excellent as always.
Cheers Craig. Twitter isn’t the medium for thoughts. Let alone ideas. But people don’t want to hear that.
That's it. I'm not even reading the comments today. Maybe next sunday, after a whole week of not-looking-things up. Only then I may start to dwell on where my interpretation went wrong ...
Haha. Or where it went right. I would be curious if someone tried a ‘refusing to look things up fast’ in the way that people fast from food or social media or whatever. I imagine the results would be surprisingly impressive, mental health wise.
Hey Tom,
Provocative and timely piece, but I do wonder if you've buried the lede here. Is it a matter of not looking things up or having the discernment to differentiate what is worth looking up and not? Is it about learning from people face to face or about discerning what one can and can't learn from conversation?
It reads to me as a disguised sermon on the virtue of prudence. All it's missing is a diatribe against the common practice of spending more time researching what can opener to buy than the question of how to live one's life.
Of concern though there seems to be a dissonance between the advisement of discernment and the example of diet research as a waste of time. I know plenty of folks who couldn't be bothered to ask questions about diet until it was too late. You seem to flirt with relativism and recommending that any difficult question is not worth bothering with. But what important question isn't difficult?
Man, you make some great points as always. I think the sermonising is unconscious rather than disguised but I’ll admit that the tendency to sermonise is something that I have not quite managed to escape just yet.
I would say that it’s not so much that diet research is a waste of time per se but it can be the mechanism through which people commonly waste time, if you follow that distinction. And yeah, it is all chiefly a question of discernment. I think what happens is that the zeitgeist posits a certain position that is too far one way and I- out of contrarian impulse- overstate the opposing case in the hope that the hypothetical reader will find their own balance somewhere in the middle.
I have yet to discover a better way to get others (and myself) to be more discerning, though I am sure it exists.
Thanks as always.
In some sense, what would you consider to be the ultimate stop-gap of such a behavior?
1. Could "auto-archive every webpage but don't read all" be a good way to dodge the FOMO? Are computer mindfulness tools and blockers good as well?
2. Could summarization and aggregation tools help end cramming bloat sites, where everything is clearly the same info rehashed in different ways? Also, is GPT-Neo a good option for indexing and referencing (assuming one has the cash)?
3. Could questioning what is been said between sources in a Socratic (argumentative) or Dialectic (mutual compatible) way be good to sense quality thought? Are there faster way to find article to solid rational foundations or clear narratives rather than a bad form of either?
That distinction is apt, and resonates. And sermoning is no critique (particularly as regards prudence) - I suspect it is a more honest form than much of what passes for discourse.
I guess I must’ve been drawn to publishing these things on a Sunday for a reason!
As always, love reading your work. I wanted to share two things that came to mind from this. First, we naturally seek to trust others and not ourselves, but you have to trust yourself. Second, a quote from the book How to Actually Change Your Mind: “make yourself the source of every thought worth thinking.” Thanks Tom.
There is certainly a big element of fear- or more specifically a lack of confidence- in permanently being stuck in research mode. It is very much a matter of diminishing returns. Research begets further research when what is really needed is feedback. And that can only come through making attempts. Through doing.
Indded. Death by inaction, as a result of information overload. There is a soothing comfort in looking things up, because you naively think you'll be able to eliminate risk from the process. How many times have I looked things up telling myself "just one more tutorial about X subject, and I'll be able to nail it perfectly the first time ! Just one more video on this subject and I'll be able to explain it more clearly". But the truth is, the more you look things up, the more you see things you were not supposed to see so soon in the process. The more you look things up, the more you doubt, and the less you're prone to action. So you never act. But because of this pernicious cycle, you feel good about it, because really, it's not that you're not "doing" anything, you're just "setting yourself up for the win" (clever boï that you are).
You're like Max the taxi driver in Collateral (excellent movie by Michal Mann), who's been driving a cab for 12 years while accumulating business plans and spreadsheets to "someday" open his own limo company... And it's painful to see that he never will. Max probably looked a lot of shit up in those 12 years.
In the days before Internet, you'd just ask an acquaintance who'd vaguely knew something about the subject and that was it; you didn't really have much more room to move past that. So you were forced either to act or to accept that you weren't gonna do it. But thanks to the Internet and the information era, you can easily spend years crafting your little project in your head. 50 years ago, a guy wanting to write a book would just... start, and alea jacta est. Now, he feels the need to subscribe to a few creative writing classes, an online community and probably a few hundred hours of motivational writing videos/advices. But will is a fragile thing, and if you don't act quick enough, it eventually gets diluted amongsts the doubts and new shiny ideas. How many of us know people who are always full of ideas but act upon/finish none of them ?
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive"
And that's the final issue here. Intuition is a good thing. It's a thousand-years old biological weapon created by our brain in order to force us to act. But between the impostor syndrome and the information overload, it gets drowned and like every cognitive funtion, the less we use it, the worst it gets. Spend enough years looking things up and not building things, and you'll end up truly lost. A modern tragedy.
Excellent newsletter Thomas. See you on the Discord ;)
Great insights as always, and the Collateral reference is dead on. A prime example of exactly what I was trying to get at. The risk mitigation take is very true too. And of course past a certain threshold research *adds* risk as it detracts from the thing itself.
Pre Internet you probably couldn’t research enough. The online world has levelled certain information asymmetries which is probably for the best. So the key, I think is to research but in a very targeted way in a very tight timeframe.
Everything online- emails, research, checking investments, entertainment, social media- should be treated like a bank job- get in, grab what you came for, get out, don’t set off the alarms.
This way you can spend more time in screenless reality, which ironically is where most of the information asymmetries are now to be found.
See you in the Discord, mate. But only for a sensible length of time each session...
I tend to think that the ease of access to information and answers is as convenient as it is overwhelming. It’s an intellectual equivalent to the problem my kids face: when faced with too many choices (toys/ activities), the easiest and quickest choice is the obvious one (probably screens instead of toys). When you’re bombarded by choice and information you tend to either become distracted or give up.
This is very much at the heart of the matter. Choice of that magnitude inevitably favours breadth over depth. Which is in many ways the opposite of mastery. And the human lifespan being finite a big part of the process of living has to be the letting go of certain possibilities. Multiple language proficiency, for example, is not on the cards for me. Because I don’t care about it *enough*
Self-knowledge should lead to prioritisation and the letting go of certain things should therefore be a relief. It’s all a question of time really.
Brilliant, Tom. Here is an issue I'm faced with: knowing that I can access some knowledge I come across (not seeking) at a later date, I cease to capture the essence of that knowledge. As such my mind is so much a series of approximations. I know that Johnson said something about...I know that Thoreau writes about, around this time, in reference to this group of people...but I couldn't tell you more detail than this (sometimes). I have too often severed, cut short, my own immediate experience. We cannot, must not, outsource our own minds to the internet. We cannot, must not, trade our capability of present knowledge acquired with difficulty to the possibility of future knowledge acquired with ease. "Let your real world experience be your teacher." In other words, not your Google search power, not your note-taking app proficiency, not your growing stream of Twitter likes. Yes.
The outsourcing your brain to the internet is a real problem. As with all things Web 2.0 I rail against them primarily because I know I am ultra-susceptible to their charms.
Not to sound like one of those ‘x is a superpower’ platitude peddlers but rote memorisation, discernment and self-knowledge of your own learning style are all indeed superpowers. And the Batman utility belt equivalent is a well-thumbed shelf of physical reference books..l