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

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

#41

Post by ants_everywhere »

> Over the next 6 months, I read 30+ books on entrepreneurship, startups, marketing, “growth hacking,” and everything tangentially related I could find. And that doesn’t include the countless blog posts, articles, reddit threads, and whatever else I could get my hands on.

Self-help books in general (and entrepreneur porn books in particular) are notoriously thin on substance. It's no wonder that most of this was a waste of time. It's like saying that eating is a waste of time because once I ate nothing but peanut m&ms for a whole month and found that most of the calories were unnecessary for survival.

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

#43

Post by Yujf »

great_wubwub wrote: post #34
kiba wrote: post #16

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 e…

> just in time manufacturing has the noted weakness of having slack or resilience in the system Did you mean 'having no slack or resilience'? Assuming you did and I understand your point, I disagree with it insofar as it applies to knowledge. Yes, JIT manufacturing of real things can be easily tripped up and it screwed us during the pandemic, but does that apply here? The author is saying "when you figure out what yo…

If you read just in time, you will miss many ideas because you do not know you need them.

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

#44

Post by alexjplant »

tofuziggy wrote: post #28

So the article basically tells me not to read hackernews... :/

Yeah, I generally disagree with this article. I stumbled upon HN in my mid-20s and I absorbed a _lot_ of industry knowledge by osmosis through reading it. I can say confidently that I'd be working a much less interesting job, living someplace much more milquetoast, and making way less money than I do now if I'd followed the advice in the article. Sometimes you need to go out on a limb to see what you're missing.

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

#45

Post by antisthenes »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #41

> Over the next 6 months, I read 30+ books on entrepreneurship, startups, marketing, “growth hacking,” and everything tangentially related I could find. And that doesn’t include the countless blog posts, articles, reddit threads, and whatever else I could get my hands on. Self-help books in general (and entrepreneur porn books in particular) are notoriously thin on substance. It's no wonder that most of this was a wa…

Yeah it seems like the author of this article just has piss-poor pre-selection mechanisms for deciding what to read.

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

#48

Post by davidivadavid »

It's a balance. If you only read what you think you should read, you're exposed to "you don't know what you don't know"-effect. If all you do is read stuff (an albeit fun activity), you risk not doing much with the knowledge you acquired.

If you feel like 80% of what you read is a waste of time, just, erm, don't do it.

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