Comment by quietthrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quietthrow | Hacker News Reader

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I am big (closet?) fan of Farnam street blog and came across it many years ago as it was connected to munger and buffet (who I still remain a fan of). The funny thing is I know FS has good content and I subscribe to the free newsletters for years now but I have never really read them except for the occasional one here and there. They just go into a special folder with my hopes that I will get to it and I don’t want to lose out (fomo!). What follows may be poorly articulated but will try anyway as I could use help with this.

I don’t read FS cos I feel like I need to spend proper time behind it to read and learn what is has to share. It’s like studying read it and then perhaps take some notes and keep them handy to reference later. Then on top of this it has so many articles I feel I have no strategy to keep up. And then there is the whole when will I really use it if I need to go look it up / reference it In order to use it. This whole approach sounds twisted to me. And as someone on this thread said it’s essentially me learning how to think Which may be subconsciously tells me I am bad at thinking. I can say thst for the last decade i feel like I am on a quest to improve myself so that then I can be “smart”. In a way this had lead for me for the last decade or so to pursue reading / finding content on the web (largely through ask hn and the likes) that is about optimizing or making myself better. And I find that I have consumed a lot but may have not really realized it’s gains from a career or other tangible perspective.

Is anybody else in a similar boat? Sometimes I feel these are all time wasters disguised as things that can be helpful. May be a better approach is to just do things and then when you are stuck on a problem then go consult there types of sites to see if they have a solution to your problem. In that is where real growth might happen. I feel like the approach I current have is the other way around - let me find all the “general solutions” and (become “smarter” ) and then apply it to whatever I do.

Am I wrong here in think thst is whole chasing after self improvement is a real discretion from doing real things thst will actually make me “smarter”?

I'm not going to expand too much on this because I haven't made up my own mind about it either, but you strike me as being in the same position.

I've grown up online, constantly consuming information and thus building up what to me seemed like a large body of useful knowledge on topics from comp. sci, data science, history, psychology, business, marketing and more.

The issue is that just constantly reading articles, books and consuming information has made me think I'm knowledgable, but in reality that knowledge is superficial, shallow, fleeting and hard to act on. Anything I think I know takes way longer to do because of unknown unknowns and a myriad of other factors you just don't get exposed to.

To use knowledge you need to internalize and create mental connections and the only way of doing so is by actually doing - not consuming. You may feel smart when you recall something you read months or years ago and share it in a relevant situation - but that's just a tiny fraction of what you've consumed. People don't learn by reading, they learn by doing.

The question: "why am I spending so much time consuming instead of acting" is an important question to ask oneself and for me the answer is that doing is boring. My brain has been hijacked by easy dopamine from games, forums (like HN and Reddit), YouTube and even Spotify. All of these easy, on-demand sources of digital dopamine have made all other activities harder to do without getting bored out of my mind. For instance I was learning Ansible 20 minute ago, but I got bored and started wasting time on HN instead.

Anyways, while I do enjoy FS, lesswrong, and a handful of other industry bloggers, blogs and aggregators I came to the realization that reading isn't furthering my goals. Only directed attention, effort and completing discrete projects will bring me to where I want to be.

More reading: Deep Work - Cal Newport. "Digital Detox" https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqlfWDyS1Io

Ps. It's easy to waste time reading about this too. My biggest realization has been that using any forms of digital feeds in the morning wrecks my attention span most of the day.

> Only directed attention, effort and completing discrete projects will bring me to where I want to be.

I agree with you here.

But I also want to point out that you have to ends to the spectrum of "using information": * At one end: Pure Consuming * At the other end: Pure Doing

What I'm getting from what you wrote is that if you're not "Pure Doing" (e.g. doing discrete projects), then you might as well not do anything. Is that accurate?

Not at all, of course you need to stay informed about the knowledge, actors and networks you're participating in. I think we agree here, it's a balance. I'd say optimally 5-30% reading, 95-70% doing. But it depends on what you enjoy, want to spend time on, goals, and other personal factors. If you enjoy reading; read.

Also, my post was about my own experiences and observations and was a direct response to quietthrow - he seemed distraught and the emotional angle seemed more fitting than a neutral and balanced response.

I think the problem comes down to: there is no good way to retain the information. And writers don't think about it either.

Most writers will say you need to "practice" and "apply" whatever you read while being very vague on the how. I'm interested in a habit creation system for methodologically allowing you to get good at applying say a mental model, but aside from that I think the best alternative is incremental reading/spaced repetition. (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading)

tl;dr: while it can't give you procedural/neurally honed representations of the models you would get from practice, it gets close by allowing you to memorize declarative info.

I've found it at least partially functional for being able to sort of apply mental models, though there is still a large gap between knowing and applying.

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