The Dangerous Effects of Reading

I was doing a fair bit of pair programming and I found that talking to my pair about whatever issue we were facing was helping me clarify the design in my head. When I started working on a few solo projects, I found that taking notes worked almost as well, despite lacking the other side of the conversation.

One of the biggest benefits was that I find it cathartic, where once I've written down all of the arguments for a particular design decision, I am able to move on without revisiting it in my head constantly.

Also, I feel so ashamed listening to podcasts on my way to work now.

I'm trying to be more mindful about what I consume, but also more committed to finishing what I begin consuming. I try to eliminate the meta-think in your head constantly assessing whether the content is worth my time, instead fully committing to exploring the idea being espoused, even if its bullshit. Its much more mindful to dissect the bullshit rather than dismiss it as low thought.

The link-based architecture of the web contributes heavily to the way we bounce from idea to idea. I've been thinking about how to de-emphasize the constantly shifting focus of clicking on a new link to explore an idea (If you've ever got lost in a quora/wikipedia loop, you understand this phenomenon). What if we could anchor an origin (say, this HN page about "The Dangerous Effects of Reading"), and when we explored links from here, we started a new path on a map showing how deep we were surfing from the original page. If we return to this page, we start an adjacent path that we can explore again. At the end of our browsing session, we have an information map showing how different ideas linked to each other. It might provide a meaningful perspective to our browsing experience.