While stimulating myself with new information all day long (which I imagine many people do), it can be easy to fool myself into thinking that I’m making progress towards a goal.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
By evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of different sources of information, I can focus on just consuming the information that helps me make forward progress in life.
So within my framework, it sounds like podcasts for you would fall under the Trivia or Mental Masturbation categories, and not Effective Information.
Hm. I was actually assuming in this post that the podcasts in question were actually “Effective Information” as opposed to “Trivia” or “Mental Masturbation”. The issue is that even if they are “Effective Information”, you also need to have solitude in your “diet”, and the benefit of additional “Effective Information” probably isn’t worth the cost of less solitude.
But I’m also realizing now that much of the time podcasts aren’t actually “Effective Information” and are instead something like “Trivia” or “Mental Masturbation”. And I see that as a separate but also relevant problem. And I think that carbs is probably a good analogy for that too. Or maybe something like refined sugar. It’s a quick hedonic hit and probably ok to have in limited doses, but you really don’t want to have too much of it in your diet.
OP may be interested in a framework I created that Evaluates the ROI of Information. In it, I write:
So within my framework, it sounds like podcasts for you would fall under the Trivia or Mental Masturbation categories, and not Effective Information.
I also wrote a post called Mental Masturbation and the Intellectual Comfort Zone which goes more into depth on how our brains convince us to consume more information than we need.
Hm. I was actually assuming in this post that the podcasts in question were actually “Effective Information” as opposed to “Trivia” or “Mental Masturbation”. The issue is that even if they are “Effective Information”, you also need to have solitude in your “diet”, and the benefit of additional “Effective Information” probably isn’t worth the cost of less solitude.
But I’m also realizing now that much of the time podcasts aren’t actually “Effective Information” and are instead something like “Trivia” or “Mental Masturbation”. And I see that as a separate but also relevant problem. And I think that carbs is probably a good analogy for that too. Or maybe something like refined sugar. It’s a quick hedonic hit and probably ok to have in limited doses, but you really don’t want to have too much of it in your diet.