Fighting Infomania: Why 80% of Your Reading Is a Waste of Time (2016)

Reminds me of my own approach of RINORIN (read it now or read it never) which I've written about on HN before and led me to cancel all my RIL app subscriptions and create https://notado.app for my own personal needs instead.

I did the same, thinking it was an article about how reading late at night isn't retained or something.

I think this is a shallow article.

First, just in time manufacturing has the noted weakness of having no slack or resilience in the system. This is part of why we experienced supply chain disruption during the pandemic.

Second, it is assuming that knowledge that's not being 'used' right now in production environment is useless.

For example, the way people avoid scam and snake-oil medicine is not by directly knowing every single piece of science but having a broad knowledge enough of the world to know that it's probably scammy. I don't need to know much about virology to understand that drinking bleach is probably a bad idea for fighting viral infection.

Third, most of what he's going to read is probably not real knowledge, or difficult to obtain unless experienced or acquired directly. Some things you can only learn via doing. Some things you can only learn through systemized research. How many of these books about entrepeneurship only apply to their specific situation, or specific context? How many are simply scam?

What I think is helpful, however, is to cultivate curiosity about the world, in all things that you can. It's probably helpful to your career if you focus your curiosity on specific things you need to do, but that's not the only thing worth learning. I think I want to focus on things that make me a better engineer and build a successful business, so maybe 60-70% for that, and the rest for play and passion and just love of learning.

Edit: added a missing no as pointed out by someone.

I've been struggling to read nonfiction lately because so much of the content seems to be rehashed from other sources and leans heavily into persuasion of some greater point that gets bashed into your brain for 400 pages. It's like every book copied Malcolm Gladwell's style and it's too much for me. Am I just reading the wrong books?

There's a fundamental challenge in simply not knowing at the reading point in time whether this knowledge will be valuable in the future.

The reason read-it-later apps exist is because we want to buy the insurance policy that IF there is a future situation in which the information is useful, we have it saved somewhere to access it.

The reality is, even if you have saved it at some point, there's no guarantee you'll be able to remember the knowledge when you need it.

This is precisely the problem I'm building a solution for.