Memo #11: 3 Lessons from my Intellectual-Keto Experiment
Hi there,
Last week, I sent out a memo declaring a 10 day Intellectual Keto diet experiment. During this period, I have refrained as much as possible from consuming any content that was produced less than a few decades ago.
This has meant not checking Twitter, news, other social-media, and even my favorite Economics podcast. Instead, I’ve taken this time to read old books, papers, and essays. If you’ve been reading my recent memos, you already know that I turned to reading 20th century political philosophy.
I cannot emphasize enough just how big of a difference there is between the two medium, so I made a meme (that semi-blew-up on my Twitter!)
Lesson #1
The Forever Now media is built on a giant illusion.
The Forever Now media is any media that brings you the news of the moment. It’s the current news cycle with a memory-span of about two days. It’s your Twitter feed with a memory-span of 15 mins, cycling through repetitive contentious topics, tempting you to jump into the latest pile-on.
All of this is built on a giant illusion – that you need to keep up with every single thing that’s going on out there. Being the upstanding political citizen that you are, of course you want to “stay informed” so you can “make better choices”.
But if you actually take a step back, you quickly realize that is really not what the Forever Now media is in the business of. Instead, this is their business model 👇
A somewhat funny example I see that illustrates my point – young Indian teenagers debating latest bouts of US political topics. I suspect many of these kids have no clue what’s going on in their own locality, yet they apparently know everything about the implications of the latest SCOTUS hearings. Surely, they must be highly informed!
To break the giant illusion that keeps the Forever Now media going, Nassim Taleb suggests a fantastic cure –
Lesson #2
The Forever Now media is predictable and repetitive.
Here’s a simple exercise I’d like you to do. If you’re active on Twitter or regularly watch national news, I want you to identify 3-5 meta-stories that form the backbone of our news cycle. These meta-stories are the formulas for writing any news story.
For example, “President Trump did [X] and group [Y] is mad about it.”
Or, if you’re on Twitter, “this famously crazy person [X] said yet another crazy thing [Y] about topic [Z] and you won’t believe the backlash. Come pile-on while you still have the chance to score a viral dunk-tweet.”
Once you start noticing these meta-stories, you realize just how much of the news must be contorted daily to fit this mold just to keep serving you fresh “outrage on tap”.
If you can reliably predict what the story is going to be, it’s not information, it’s just noise.
Lesson #3
My biggest learning in switching out Twitter for reading philosophy has been this – the level of depth, insight, and nuance that is possible in debating political issues is way higher than what Twitter would have you believe.
Twitterism eventually convinces you that these political topics you’re thinking about really can be resolved via 140 character back and forth of straw-manning and dunking. Even further, it makes you think you’ve already thought your ideas through just because you tweeted something about it, and now your sole job is to get other people to believe in it as you go about dunking on the disbelievers.
This is where I’d suggest every single of you to pick up a good philosophy book and read at least one chapter. Turns out, many of the political issues we see as “completely new and unique to our times” have already been discussed at length in the past. All you have to do is to put down the phone and pick up that book.
How to use social-media
Look, I’m not bashing Twitter and social media wholesale. I think they have their place in our content-consumption-stack. But I’m coming to the realization of how to better leverage the abundant digital information available to us without completely loosing grip of reality.
Here’s one mental model on using social-media/news/podcasts – Breadth-First Search (BFS) vs Depth-First Search (DFS).
A Forever Now medium like Twitter is really fantastic at BFS as it exposes you to a bunch of new topics. However, once you’ve done the BFS, you must follow it up with a DFS by going deep into a select few of those topics.
Finally, never confuse doing a BFS for DFS. The Forever Now media gives you this illusion that you’ve done DFS when you’ve barely done 2 levels of BFS on some topic. Never fall for that. There’s always a lot more learn.
To conclude, use social media for BFS, but always follow it up with DFS on a select few topics that you care about. As I wrap up my experiment, this is the big change I’ll be making in my approach and I suggest you try the same.
Writing these daily memos has been a genuinely rewarding experience so far, and I’m thankful to everyone who’s reading these. Going forward, I’ll be switching to a weekly cadence. While I may switch the topics around, what will remain the same is the person behind these memos. So if you’ve been enjoying these, stick around!
See you next week,
Ayush