A couple days ago I surveyed readers for deviant beliefs. The results were funny, hateful, boring and bonkers. One of the submissions might even be useful.
If you care a lot about your mind, it is not unreasonable to avoid advertisements like plague rats, up to and including muting your speakers and averting your gaze.
This extremist position caught my eye because humans have a tendency to underestimate the effect advertising[1] has on us. I never realized how much advertising affected me until I got rid of it.
For nearly a year I have been avoiding junk media. I thought this would make me happier, healthier and more productive—which it has—but the most surprising effect is how much the reduction in advertising affects my behavior.
When I give up junk media, I stop thinking about politics, videogames and celebrities. I think less about products in general. Important things eventually expand to fill this void. But for the first week or so, my head just feels empty.
Tim Ferris doesn't just avoid news, television and social media. He even avoids reading books—especially nonfiction. When I first read that, I thought he was an Eloi. Having blogged regularly for the past year myself, I now sympathize with him.
If you are young then you should read lots of books because you need to amass information. Eventually you hit diminishing returns. Reading more books fills fewer conceptual holes per unit time invested.
You cannot discover new knowledge for humanity by reading a book written by a human.
But there is a bigger problem. It is easy to look up answers to common questions in a book. It is harder to look up answers to esoteric questions. It is impossible to look up answers to open problems. The difficulty of looking up important things you don't know answers to increases the more low-hanging fruit you pick from the Tree of Knowledge.
As your power waxes, it becomes easier to invent answers to your own questions. Eventually the trajectories cross. It becomes easier to figure things out yourself than to look up the answer. The comparative value of reading books goes negative. Books, once guides, become reference material. It is more efficient to write your own book than to read someone else's.
I used to read a lot of books. I finished 18 books in the first 4.5 months of 2020.
| Date | Title | Author | Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 1 | The Trouble with Physics | Lee Smolin | 392 |
| January 17 | My Side of the Street | Jason DeSena Trennert | 224 |
| January 19 | Saints & Sinners | William L. Hamilton | 145 |
| January 20 | The Quants | Scott Patterson | 352 |
| February 21 | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | Eliezer Yudkowsky | N/A |
| February 22 | The Vital Question | Nick Lane | 368 |
| February 24 | The Last Leonardo | Ben Lewis | 384 |
| March 4 | Mastering Manga with Mark Crilley | Mark Crilley | 128 |
| March 22 | World War Z | Max Brooks | 342 |
| March 29 | The Nature of Plants | Craig Huegel | 228 |
| March 31 | Built not Born | Tom Golisano, Mike Wicks | 224 |
| April 13 | A First-Class Catastrophe | Diana B. Henriques | 416 |
| April 21 | The Plant Messiah | Carlos Magdalena | 238 |
| April 22 | The 4-Hour Workweek | Tim Ferris | 308 |
| April 27 | The War on Normal People | Andrew Yang | 304 |
| May 1 | Seeing Like a State | James C. Scott | 445 |
| May 5 | Botany for Gardeners 3rd Edition | Brian Capon | 240 |
| May 15 | The $12 Million Stuffed Shark | Don Thompson | 272 |
Then I…stopped. In the 6.3 months since mid-May I finished only 3 books.
| Date | Title | Author | Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 2 | Human Diversity | Charles Murray | 528 |
| August 4 | The Actor's Life | Jeanna Fischer | 252 |
| November 2 | Lost Connections | Johann Hari | 322 |
May of this year appears to be when I hit my inflection point where writing became more useful than reading.
When I started writing, I thought it was a substitute for socializing. I now realize it is a substitute for reading. Writing is to reading what entrepreneurship is to having a job. Reading too much (compared to what you write) turns you into a sheep.
In this sense, "advertising" includes not only paid adverts like banner ads but also self-replicating propaganda ("we should raise awareness of…"), grassroots advertising (videogame streamers, artificial communities) and all information derived from a press release. I care about whether an interest group is getting a message into my head. Neither I nor the interest group cares how it gets there. ↩︎
It sounds like you have hit a stale point in your journey. Your book list is not very stark. It generally trends into a certain sort of person, the sort of person you do not want to learn from. I would guess because you already agree with most of it, and so you'd rather just write it yourself.
That's reasonable, I understand, and I have written a good volume of work that will never see day because of this. However, I do have a solution if you will try it.
Take a specific belief you have. Ethical, political, scientific, you name it- something you think is true- and go prove it wrong. Do your best. Not the 'oh hah look at all these dumb posts' but really dig for the reasons that your interests/ideals/ethics may be wrong. Take one of your favorite books and rip it apart. Be fair; always check sourcing, cite yourself. Steelman the target, or counter-strawman, however it can be described.
Play devil's advocate for something you should never consider and then realize that there are so many better ways to criticize your opponents, and that they're really doing it quite poorly.
It's worth noting somewhat apprehensively that you are in fact the sheep here; most of the world already stopped reading books. Some just read more earlier, and some will keep reading until later. Reading or not doesn't help you integrate knowledge, reflection does. Hence why reading and writing is the best way to do it.
The problem with this new era of information is no one really made sure the information was any good, and so we're all loaded up with a lot of inputs and no insurance on the output. As we can see from this latest election, it is quite easy to flood the internet with incorrect data and convince a lot of people who think they are 'doing the research'.
Above all, stay cozy.
This feedback makes sense in the context of what I wrote. I'm going to provide broader context which didn't make it into the original post.
My reading is cyclical. The books I read in any given year indeed tend to be quite narrow. Some years I read lots of science fiction. Another year was about spirituality. In previous years I've read Heart of Darkness, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1984, Ancillary Justice, The Little Prince, The Wealth of Nations, Goodbye Darkness, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, Steal ... (read more)