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Yeah, that always bugged me about Holmes. He specifically restricted his fields of knowledge to things that could help him solve cases - so how did he know this in advance? He had encyclopedic knowledge of the muds of England, for example, but Watson was shocked to find he had never heard of the Copernican system of cosmology. So it's damn fortunate he was never engaged to investigate anything involving an astronomer, right?

That was just A Study in Scarlet. Which a lot of scholars think Holmes was more-or-less trolling Watson. In the Valley of Fear Holmes remarked that all knowledge was useful to him

source: I distinctly recalled using this as an argument against my dad when he told me to focus :P

I think that's what makes the character so intriguing. 90% impossible arguments of why he does the things he does but still you don't fail to be amazed.

Well the first one only works if you balance it with some variety. My point isn't to stop reading different stuff, but consciously choose what you want to read.

Yeah, "fall in love" isn't that concrete, I know. But again, it works for me if I manage to rotate the types of content I consume.

About the last topic, I give you that. But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.

Anyway thanks for taking to time to deconstruct some of the ideas I wrote. I think this topic has too few people writing and thinking about it.

> My point isn't to stop reading different stuff, but consciously choose what you want to read.

Thanks – the first point is the important one, the latter ideally should be a no-brainer. :)[0]

> But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.

Of course, the heuristics that icebraining mentioned come into play here, in a validity to the extent that it is generally safe to assume little to no information on trash TV.

However, heuristics are still heuristics and there are – in my experience – always sufficiently many borderline cases where heuristics will fail and the love-it-or-leave-it attitude makes you stick to one particular newspaper[1], leading you to become uninformed about the arguments of the ‘other side’.

[0] If someone could make a rule please about the relative position of emoticons and punctuation…

[1] Granted, the internet alleviated that issue somewhat, but just the choosing of news Google delivers to you based on your past reading might act somewhat like that, recreating the bubble that was formerly built by newspapers.

True. That's my issue with online filters, anyway. It kinda gets philosophical too because filters only act according to what we choose to filter. So a filter for the other side would be kind of a never-ending journey (but a very important one to achieve, regardless).

About emoticons and punctuation, I deal with that on a daily basis too. Ugh.

> I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually new things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.

On the face of it yes, on the other hand, there's a ton of crap out there, and the fact that someone wrote a book about something is on it's own a poor indicator for wether it's going to teach you something meaningful. Reading some of it seems to be a better indicator.

Also, abandoning a book doesn't mean abandoning the subject. Sometimes you need a different author and angle and sometimes a more basic primer on the subject before tackling the main work.

But how to decide whether a given datum is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ information before consuming said datum and linking it up with the rest of your memory? Maybe it looks utterly senseless at the time you first read it, but it might well be missing piece linking two large and so far separate areas together.

That applies to any decision; you rarely or never have complete information. The solution is to apply heuristics to make a preliminary judgment. For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).

Hence the filter bubble issue. When are we really open-minded if we always choose to what our minds are open for? I for instance can't deal with Zite's logic, trust me I've tried.

> For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).

Actually, I spent most of the time I spent here on /newest, where this is guaranteed to a smaller degree[0], offering a relatively diverse random subset of whatever someone wrote on the internet.

[0] Maybe apart from ‘X married Y but held hands with Z!!!!’.

I think you overestimate the diversity of /newest. It's still an extremely thin slice of the breadth of the Internet, which itself contains only a fraction of all content (there are still plenty of articles being printed and not put online).

We're all heavily filtering what we consume, it's effectively impossible to do otherwise.

Sounds like making excuses for ADD. Only paying attention to things that seem interesting is an obvious failure mode. You will wind up only paying attention to things that have been optimized for attention grabbing.

I will not exclude the first sentence as a justification. Being as honest as I can get here. :)

But can you give me an example of the opposite? Say, an article or book which did not grab you at first but you found quite interesting. (being the keyword "interesting", a subjective concept to each and everyone of us, of course - myself included)

Freakonomics. Utterly boring (to me) at first, but the more I read the more fascinated I became. So much that I read the second one.

I found it quite entertaining from the very beginning. Still haven't read the second one but it's on the list.

Mostly everything that ended up changing the way I saw the world. Proust, for instance.

Ok, thanks.

And that's understandable. I got the impression that author enjoys the chewing-gum-for-the-mind kind of read, which tastes good enough for the first 30 pages to finish it, but a little is left afterwards. For something to change the way you see the world it must make you think, and thinking requires some effort. Anything requiring an effrot may not be as pleasant but has more chances to leave a lasting impact.

> Say, an article or book which did not grab you at first but you found quite interesting.

Faust II, though you might not want to learn German just to read it – written 20 years after Faust I, with the knowledge accumulated during the lifetime of one of the world’s greatest authors poured into it; while definitely not attention-grabbing in any way and taking some time to get into, the hours I spent reading it were certainly one of the best spent hours so far.

Every textbook ever? Anything difficult to study? Math?