A couple days ago I surveyed readers for deviant beliefs. The results were funny, hateful, boring and bonkers. One of the submissions might even be useful.
If you care a lot about your mind, it is not unreasonable to avoid advertisements like plague rats, up to and including muting your speakers and averting your gaze.
This extremist position caught my eye because humans have a tendency to underestimate the effect advertising[1] has on us. I never realized how much advertising affected me until I got rid of it.
For nearly a year I have been avoiding junk media. I thought this would make me happier, healthier and more productive—which it has—but the most surprising effect is how much the reduction in advertising affects my behavior.
When I give up junk media, I stop thinking about politics, videogames and celebrities. I think less about products in general. Important things eventually expand to fill this void. But for the first week or so, my head just feels empty.
Tim Ferris doesn’t just avoid news, television and social media. He even avoids reading books—especially nonfiction. When I first read that, I thought he was an Eloi. Having blogged regularly for the past year myself, I now sympathize with him.
If you are young then you should read lots of books because you need to amass information. Eventually you hit diminishing returns. Reading more books fills fewer conceptual holes per unit time invested.
You cannot discover new knowledge for humanity by reading a book written by a human.
But there is a bigger problem. It is easy to look up answers to common questions in a book. It is harder to look up answers to esoteric questions. It is impossible to look up answers to open problems. The difficulty of looking up important things you don’t know answers to increases the more low-hanging fruit you pick from the Tree of Knowledge.
As your power waxes, it becomes easier to invent answers to your own questions. Eventually the trajectories cross. It becomes easier to figure things out yourself than to look up the answer. The comparative value of reading books goes negative. Books, once guides, become reference material. It is more efficient to write your own book than to read someone else’s.
I used to read a lot of books. I finished 18 books in the first 4.5 months of 2020.
Date
Title
Author
Page Count
January 1
The Trouble with Physics
Lee Smolin
392
January 17
My Side of the Street
Jason DeSena Trennert
224
January 19
Saints & Sinners
William L. Hamilton
145
January 20
The Quants
Scott Patterson
352
February 21
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Eliezer Yudkowsky
N/A
February 22
The Vital Question
Nick Lane
368
February 24
The Last Leonardo
Ben Lewis
384
March 4
Mastering Manga with Mark Crilley
Mark Crilley
128
March 22
World War Z
Max Brooks
342
March 29
The Nature of Plants
Craig Huegel
228
March 31
Built not Born
Tom Golisano, Mike Wicks
224
April 13
A First-Class Catastrophe
Diana B. Henriques
416
April 21
The Plant Messiah
Carlos Magdalena
238
April 22
The 4-Hour Workweek
Tim Ferris
308
April 27
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
304
May 1
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott
445
May 5
Botany for Gardeners 3rd Edition
Brian Capon
240
May 15
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark
Don Thompson
272
Then I…stopped. In the 6.3 months since mid-May I finished only 3 books.
Date
Title
Author
Page Count
July 2
Human Diversity
Charles Murray
528
August 4
The Actor’s Life
Jeanna Fischer
252
November 2
Lost Connections
Johann Hari
322
May of this year appears to be when I hit my inflection point where writing became more useful than reading.
When I started writing, I thought it was a substitute for socializing. I now realize it is a substitute for reading. Writing is to reading what entrepreneurship is to having a job. Reading too much (compared to what you write) turns you into a sheep.
In this sense, “advertising” includes not only paid adverts like banner ads but also self-replicating propaganda (“we should raise awareness of…”), grassroots advertising (videogame streamers, artificial communities) and all information derived from a press release. I care about whether an interest group is getting a message into my head. Neither I nor the interest group cares how it gets there.
Evading Mind Control
A couple days ago I surveyed readers for deviant beliefs. The results were funny, hateful, boring and bonkers. One of the submissions might even be useful.
This extremist position caught my eye because humans have a tendency to underestimate the effect advertising[1] has on us. I never realized how much advertising affected me until I got rid of it.
For nearly a year I have been avoiding junk media. I thought this would make me happier, healthier and more productive—which it has—but the most surprising effect is how much the reduction in advertising affects my behavior.
When I give up junk media, I stop thinking about politics, videogames and celebrities. I think less about products in general. Important things eventually expand to fill this void. But for the first week or so, my head just feels empty.
Tim Ferris doesn’t just avoid news, television and social media. He even avoids reading books—especially nonfiction. When I first read that, I thought he was an Eloi. Having blogged regularly for the past year myself, I now sympathize with him.
If you are young then you should read lots of books because you need to amass information. Eventually you hit diminishing returns. Reading more books fills fewer conceptual holes per unit time invested.
You cannot discover new knowledge for humanity by reading a book written by a human.
But there is a bigger problem. It is easy to look up answers to common questions in a book. It is harder to look up answers to esoteric questions. It is impossible to look up answers to open problems. The difficulty of looking up important things you don’t know answers to increases the more low-hanging fruit you pick from the Tree of Knowledge.
As your power waxes, it becomes easier to invent answers to your own questions. Eventually the trajectories cross. It becomes easier to figure things out yourself than to look up the answer. The comparative value of reading books goes negative. Books, once guides, become reference material. It is more efficient to write your own book than to read someone else’s.
I used to read a lot of books. I finished 18 books in the first 4.5 months of 2020.
Then I…stopped. In the 6.3 months since mid-May I finished only 3 books.
May of this year appears to be when I hit my inflection point where writing became more useful than reading.
When I started writing, I thought it was a substitute for socializing. I now realize it is a substitute for reading. Writing is to reading what entrepreneurship is to having a job. Reading too much (compared to what you write) turns you into a sheep.
In this sense, “advertising” includes not only paid adverts like banner ads but also self-replicating propaganda (“we should raise awareness of…”), grassroots advertising (videogame streamers, artificial communities) and all information derived from a press release. I care about whether an interest group is getting a message into my head. Neither I nor the interest group cares how it gets there.