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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)

#71

Post by mewpmewp2 »

hintymad wrote: post #59

I buy the author's point that we should minimize the time on tactical knowledge, but the following particular point seems over generalized: > The school model focuses on just in case knowledge. Take my math education, for instance, I may have wasted a bit time on all kinds of trigonometry tricks and way too much time on conic sections in the analytic geometry classes before learning calculus. But "focuses on just in…

I'm pretty sure 95% - 99% of my school education was useless. Most of it went from one ear to the other as well, because I had no interest in something I couldn't apply.

If I needed to do something I was much more effective when I learnt "just in time".

But I had no problems building a web/full stack application when I was 13, despite nothing really preparing me for it.

For most things especially in times today, all you have to do is Google and/or combine Google with GPT.

I've learned much more coding and actual real life problem solving than I learned in school, because it's much more stimulating as an exercise.

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

#72

Post by npunt »

Agree on the idea of 'infomania' that overtakes us at certain times. But everything requires balance; read too much and you spend too little time thinking and building a base of experience doing. Not a great way to get knowledge OR wisdom. To understand things you have spending time cultivating your own understanding, and that involves writing and doing.

The biggest issue with leaning into just in time reading is you absolutely miss out on knowing whether to pay attention to something.

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

#73

Post by anonymouskimmer »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #58
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What helped me: Glycine + Tryptophane + no coffee after noon + absolutely no devices after 10pm.

Consistent sleep schedule (+/- 15 minutes morning and evening) Get your room cool, dark, and quiet No caffeine after morning. No alcohol in the evening. Cleanup your diet. Quiet your mind. This isn't just an "at night" thing. In my experience people who lose sleep worrying are the same people worrying all day. Try therapy as needed. Screen time hasn't really impacted my sleep, but I don't have any social apps on my p…

What worked for me was having two part time jobs and college at the same time in my 20s. Prior to that I had occasional difficulty with insomnia. After almost 6 months averaging 3.5 hours of sleep per day (except Sundays) I've only rarely had difficulty sleeping since, and am now in my 40s.

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

#75

Post by mewpmewp2 »

davidivadavid wrote: post #48

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.

In a lot of cases you can get what you don't know by doing a consultation with an expert/specialist. The older I've got the more I value such consultations, maybe because I also have more money to dish out.

So if you have a project, then first consult with different people, I would also consider that "just in time".

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

#76

Post by xondono »

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…

It’s a problem of how book publishing works.

Most of these self-help books are made because publishers can sell them, mostly on the name of the author.

At the same time, most authors could condense their “insights” into a 3-4 page article. The issue is publishing a 4 page article is not profitable, there’s too much fixed cost, and too little market price to absorb it.

The logical result is publishers that insist that a book must be extended to ~300 pages to be really profitable, and authors that pad their books with cherry-picked examples, anecdotes, “case studies”, and whatever else they can to get the book published.

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

#77

Post by 331c8c71 »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #23
2devnull wrote: post #9

Read “infomania” as insomnia and skimmed the whole damn thing (or 80% if it) before figuring out this didn’t have the cure for insomnia (unless it’s caused by infomania, which is plausible).

What helped me: Glycine + Tryptophane + no coffee after noon + absolutely no devices after 10pm.

Weightlifting routine with full-body exercises is my poison of choice.

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

#78

Post by photochemsyn »

There is a hole in this argument:

> "Anything you could possibly want to learn you could figure out the basics of in an afternoon with a WiFi connection. You don’t have to worry about front loading everything because you’ll hardly ever be in a situation where you can’t look up the answers."

Once you get past the educational phase, in which teachers present you with problems to which they have answers written down somewhere, you enter the real-world phase, in which you have to come up with and test the solutions yourself, as nobody has them written down anywhere. That's when already having a working knowledge of similar problems and situations will be of great benefit, particularly time-wise.

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