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

103 点作者 Matrixik超过 1 年前

38 条评论

kiba超过 1 年前
I think this is a shallow article.<p>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.<p>Second, it is assuming that knowledge that&#x27;s not being &#x27;used&#x27; right now in production environment is useless.<p>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&#x27;s probably scammy. I don&#x27;t need to know much about virology to understand that drinking bleach is probably a bad idea for fighting viral infection.<p>Third, most of what he&#x27;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?<p>What I think is helpful, however, is to cultivate curiosity about the world, in all things that you can. It&#x27;s probably helpful to your career if you focus your curiosity on specific things you need to do, but that&#x27;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.<p>Edit: added a missing no as pointed out by someone.
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ants_everywhere超过 1 年前
&gt; 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.<p>Self-help books in general (and entrepreneur porn books in particular) are notoriously thin on substance. It&#x27;s no wonder that most of this was a waste of time. It&#x27;s like saying that eating is a waste of time because once I ate nothing but peanut m&amp;ms for a whole month and found that most of the calories were unnecessary for survival.
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2devnull超过 1 年前
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).
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briga超过 1 年前
Does reading have to be &quot;productive&quot; in order to be worthwhile? I would argue that reading is an enjoyable activity regardless of whether there are any tangible benefits. Similar to how it&#x27;s enjoyable to go on a meandering walk. Even though there are more efficient forms of cardio and you could get to where your going faster by driving, that doesn&#x27;t keep the activity from being enjoyable in and of itself.<p>I&#x27;ve probably forgotten 95% of everything I&#x27;ve ever read. But I certainly don&#x27;t feel like all that time was wasted.
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runeofdoom超过 1 年前
I&#x27;m going to repeat a comment I made a few weeks ago:<p>George Dyson has what I found to be an enlightening metaphor for how our relationship with information has changed. It is repeated here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edu.blogs.com&#x2F;edublogs&#x2F;2010&#x2F;01&#x2F;george-dyson-media-li" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edu.blogs.com&#x2F;edublogs&#x2F;2010&#x2F;01&#x2F;george-dyson-media-li</a>...
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blitz_skull超过 1 年前
I was nodding along right until the rule… it allows for “entertainment” as part of your informational consumption. That’s a bit strange to me as I’d classify all of my “just in case” reading as entertainment.
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ffitch超过 1 年前
I started the article and it touches an interesting topic, but I feel guilty finishing it because it’s within those wasteful 80% that it talks anout
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operatingthetan超过 1 年前
I&#x27;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&#x27;s like every book copied Malcolm Gladwell&#x27;s style and it&#x27;s too much for me. Am I just reading the wrong books?
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calvinmorrison超过 1 年前
I snagged a cheap bench press and squat rack and a huge set of weights on Craigslist. I decided I would get back into a basic lifting routine I did in high school and asked some friends who do that. I quickly was engulfed with endless articles and information.<p>I have decided to eschew any learning and stick with &quot;Me big caveman. lift big rock get stronger&quot; approach and it&#x27;s working fine. Taking it easy, enjoying it, and not worrying too much about anything else.<p>It&#x27;s more refreshing to REFUSE information than to consume it.<p>&quot;Thats a whole lotta words, to bad I ain&#x27;t reading them&quot;
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vonwoodson超过 1 年前
Now, I&#x27;m certain that this article is about frustration at self-improvement&#x2F;fitness buzz-feed &quot;listicles&quot; and the author may have had a passing glance about Deming&#x27;s Management Cycle and connected these two ideas. Good for him, it&#x27;s this kind of creative thinking that I want to talk about.<p>Though there are several reasons to agree and disagree with the author, the thing that&#x27;s been left out of the comments so far is that: making connections between ideas is absolutely essential. It&#x27;s not that I strictly <i>need</i> to know the things I know, but the ability to draw on a variety of mental resources from a variety of fields is what makes me useful and exceptional at my job. Given that the author readily admits to only having interned at a major company once and is now looking to start their own business is the big giveaway that they lack the life experience to be able to apricate the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. This is not shocking, most young folks are eager to rise up in the world and are sick of school, but, if I could give some unsolicited advice: keep learning. When you stop moving, you&#x27;ll notice that the world stops moving around you too. It&#x27;s the ability to draw connections between unrelated ideas that makes creativity and innovation possible. If you only have a few ideas in your head, then you are absolutely impairing your ability to think. Similarly, if you become too fixated on, well, anything... than you&#x27;re going to miss the big picture. Outsourcing your mind to Teh Internets reduces your mind to only that which can be google&#x27;d, and even if that&#x27;s acceptable to you than you still have to know what to put into that search-box.
davidivadavid超过 1 年前
It&#x27;s a balance. If you only read what you think you should read, you&#x27;re exposed to &quot;you don&#x27;t know what you don&#x27;t know&quot;-effect. If all you do is read stuff (an albeit fun activity), you risk not doing much with the knowledge you acquired.<p>If you <i>feel</i> like 80% of what you read is a waste of time, just, erm, don&#x27;t do it.
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bsnnkv超过 1 年前
Reminds me of my own approach of RINORIN (read it now or read it never) which I&#x27;ve written about on HN before and led me to cancel all my RIL app subscriptions and create <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notado.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notado.app</a> for my own personal needs instead.
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npunt超过 1 年前
Agree on the idea of &#x27;infomania&#x27; that overtakes us at certain times. But everything requires balance; read too much and you spend too little time <i>thinking</i> and building a base of experience <i>doing</i>. 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.<p>The biggest issue with leaning into just in time reading is you absolutely miss out on knowing whether to pay attention to something.
karaterobot超过 1 年前
To misquote John Wanamaker, 80% of my reading is a waste of time, but I don&#x27;t know which 80%.
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mkoubaa超过 1 年前
Training the neural network in your skull is worth it, even if a lot of information that&#x27;s ingested isn&#x27;t immediately actionable.
Scubabear68超过 1 年前
I completely disagree with the article’s core premise. I have read voraciously for my entire life since I was a little kid. Maybe much of it wasted, yet tidbits of knowledge I have gained over the years of reading come up constantly, and give me a bit of a leg up in conversations.<p>HN is a big part of that, I can read about a wide array of technologies and processes and science that I normally would never encounter. And without fail, some number of those topics will come up in work conversations and I can speak somewhat intelligently on the topic.<p>The same is true even for fiction. Having read some semi-obscure book long ago may be a connection I have with a new acquaintance.<p>Again, a lot of it is wasted, it there’s no way to know exactly which bits will never come up, and which will.
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photochemsyn超过 1 年前
There is a hole in this argument:<p>&gt; &quot;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.&quot;<p>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&#x27;s when already having a working knowledge of similar problems and situations will be of great benefit, particularly time-wise.
hintymad超过 1 年前
I buy the author&#x27;s point that we should minimize the time on tactical knowledge, but the following particular point seems over generalized:<p>&gt; The school model focuses on just in case knowledge.<p>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 &quot;focuses on just in case knowledge&quot;? Really? What else is really wasted? Most of my math concepts are inter-connected and I used them directly or indirectly on a daily basis. Given range and depth of our education, we really just learn the minimum concepts.
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kingkongjaffa超过 1 年前
This is extremely weird because today I was reading about how the US military is upping its logistics power in asia to counter China invading Taiwan.<p>And the phrase they used was a shift from “just in time” logistics to “just in case” logistics.<p>So this is the first time I’m seeing this phrase and now this article uses it again.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;china&#x2F;logistics-war-how-washington-is-preparing-chinese-invasion-taiwan-2024-01-31&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;china&#x2F;logistics-war-how-washin...</a>
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gabev超过 1 年前
There&#x27;s a fundamental challenge in simply not knowing at the reading point in time whether this knowledge will be valuable in the future.<p>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.<p>The reality is, even if you have saved it at some point, there&#x27;s no guarantee you&#x27;ll be able to remember the knowledge when you need it.<p>This is precisely the problem I&#x27;m building a solution for.
tofuziggy超过 1 年前
So the article basically tells me not to read hackernews... :&#x2F;
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656845457345超过 1 年前
&gt; When you have a specific question (e.g. how do I grow my Instagram following) that’s when you start digging through the blogs and industry material.<p>The problem with this is that having information that you don&#x27;t necessarily need can actually help inspire you and increase creativity. If you always rely on having a specific question first, then you are limiting what you are exposed to. Not necessarily bad, but not good for more open-ended work.
chankstein38超过 1 年前
I think the 80% number is accurate. Especially due to the fact that every &quot;author&quot; thinks they have to start everything with some unrelatable personal story or something. How many times have you clicked on a recipe and had to scroll through 8 paragraphs of garbage about the author&#x27;s childhood to get to the recipe?<p>Interestingly, this author follows that.
intrasight超过 1 年前
I&#x27;ll shorten to:<p>&quot;If it doesn’t answer a specific question you’re currently asking, then don’t read it.&quot;<p>I almost never read for entertainment. Audiobooks are better because I can multi-task. And most everything could be considered &quot;philosophical knowledge&quot;, so it doesn&#x27;t filter stuff.<p>Of course, the rule doesn&#x27;t apply to HackerNews ;)
npilk超过 1 年前
One rebuttal I&#x27;d add is that &quot;just in case&quot; reading increases the amount of knowledge you can reference when faced with a new problem.<p>E.g., if you only try to learn things once you know you need them, you miss out on things you didn&#x27;t know you could know.
josefresco超过 1 年前
&gt; If it doesn’t answer a specific question you’re currently asking, cover philosophical knowledge, or entertain you, then don’t read it.<p>That&#x27;s a BIG loophole. He could have stopped after &quot;If it doesn’t answer a specific question you’re currently asking&quot;.
borroka超过 1 年前
It is interesting that an article about the uselessness of reading (of certain books&#x2F;articles) leads to wasting more time discussing exactly how useless certain books&#x2F;articles are. It happens frequently across contexts.
ideamotor超过 1 年前
I saved this for reading later.
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Tycho超过 1 年前
It&#x27;s interesting to consider that being &#x27;well read&#x27; may always be a function of, say, the last 10 books you read (or the number of books your read in the last 3 years, or something like that).
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galaxyLogic超过 1 年前
Hey we could be reading or we could be watching football
dustingetz超过 1 年前
read university textbooks, i.e. undergraduate books outside your field.<p>Also see supplementary material such as Cambridge&#x27;s &quot;A Student&#x27;s Guide To ...&quot; : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cambridge.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;series&#x2F;students-guides&#x2F;DE92BAAE79DC05E3E353080483FF05A0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cambridge.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;series&#x2F;students-guides&#x2F;DE92BA...</a>
m3kw9超过 1 年前
Right on, I just skimmed over it and got the main points: if you don’t need it dont read it. I use titles and first lines as a guide
fodkodrasz超过 1 年前
I start fighting it by not reading the article, only the title, but I can honestly relate to the problem.<p>(joke aside: will read it later, just couldn&#x27;t stand making the silly comment. sry.)
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starstripe超过 1 年前
It&#x27;s not a waste of time if you&#x27;re enjoying it.
thenerdhead超过 1 年前
Is that not the point of reading? To waste one’s time?
slothtrop超过 1 年前
Sometimes, wasting time is the point.
SebFender超过 1 年前
Please don&#x27;t fall for this crap...
ChrisArchitect超过 1 年前
(2016)