On reading less, and reading with intent

Update (28/02/2022): The conversation I recorded with Tom has now been published here.

Yesterday I had a conversation with Tom Jesson (website, Twitter, newsletter). Tom and I have been emailing each other over the past few months, touching lightly on topics that fall within overlapping spheres of interest, and finally had enough space in our calendars (and heads) into which we might slip a conversation.

We talked about reading, writing, productivity, attention, tools, and systems for thinking about these things. Tom has also written and self-published a book for physiotherapists on sciatica and I encourage anyone reading this to go and check that out. Because of a technical mistake on my part we ended up recording only part of the conversation, and will therefore need to schedule a follow-up to cover some of what was missed. I’ll post the recording to my Thinking in public YouTube channel, which is an attempt to describe how I’m trying to be a ‘better’ academic.

After speaking to Tom I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d dropped the ball with respect to how I think about filtering information, so I wrote this post to share some of my thoughts and actions that followed our discussion.

Most ‘news’ is entertainment

Tom reminded me that most ‘news’ is actually entertainment and is consumed in a similar way. I think it’d be fair to say that I ‘knew’ that but had nonetheless managed to convince myself that the 135 RSS feeds I subscribed to were ‘different’ and ‘important’ and ‘relevant’. I’d set aside time every day to parse those feeds ‘just in case’ there was something interesting / useful / entertaining in the list. And every day I’d find some non-trivial amount of information that looked interesting / useful / entertaining. This may not be a problem when you have 10 feeds but when you have 135 even a small proportion of saved posts adds up to a significant amount of reading. And this wasn’t even reading that I wanted to do. I’d convinced myself that it was reading I needed to do.

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman (1974). CalTech commencement address.

Reduce the amount of incoming information

So I’ve just unsubscribed from 75 of those feeds by going through each of them, reviewing the last 10-15 posts, and deleting the feeds that were:

1. Little more than summaries of other news
2. Publishing high volumes of posts in short periods of time
3. Low signal to noise ratio (e.g. 1 in 10 posts were interesting / useful / entertaining)

I was surprised at how few of the posts held up when reviewed with even a low level of critique. During this process I was also reminded that anything you can get through in a few minutes is probably not worth paying much attention to, and that any source publishing more than a couple of articles a week can’t be putting much time into those posts. I still have 60 feeds that I’m subscribed to and I’m going to go through those today to make sure there isn’t more that can be culled.

I also realised that, by far, the highest number of articles (about 60%) coming into my feed reader were from 3 sources, and that I probably saved about 5-10 percent of the articles from each source, and to be honest, that number was way too high. Most of what I read from those 3 sources could only be considered ‘news’ using the most liberal definition of the word. So I was spending a relatively high proportion of time, every couple of days, scrolling through a few hundred articles, of which I’d save 10-20, none of which really mattered. It sounds like madness when I put it like that.

I even took my own advice and went to the Wikipedia news summary for February with the intention of using that as a source of ‘newsworthy’ events. But if I’m honest, I think that even this very condensed summary includes a lot of information that I’m simply not interested in. Once I cut out the news-that’s-really-entertainment, and the news-that’s-important-to-the-world-but-not-to-me, it’s surprising how little is left that deserves my attention.

Read in service of a goal

Another point Tom made that I think is worth mentioning is that reading (and learning) should be in the service of a defined and meaningful objective. Tom spoke about designing a project around a CPD requirement. Instead of going through the motions of acquiring CPD points as a tick-box exercise, choose a project based on a topic that you’re interested in and design a series of activities that would complete the project while also earning CPD points. I’d read something related to this idea a few days ago but it was this conversation with Tom that I needed to put it into perspective:

…continually focus my reading on the goal of forming a bottom-line view, rather than just “gathering information.” I think this makes my investigations more focused and directed, and the results easier to retain. I consider this approach to be probably the single biggest difference-maker between “reading a ton about lots of things, but retaining little” and “efficiently developing a set of views on key topics and retaining the reasoning behind them.”

Holden Karnofsky (2022). Learning by writing. Cold Takes blog.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to be more efficient in terms of filtering, collating, and reading through a lot of information, when I should’ve just asked what that process was in service of.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Tom and hope to follow it up with another one soon.