I concur. Perhaps it's best to rephrase the point about geek adoption versus mainstream adoption. Geeks live in possible futures. Some of these futures materialize (i.e. go mainstream), others don't.
The Internet fatigue Chris talks about, I see it all around me, and more and more articles are popping up about Internet addictions. Plus I suspect the new Facebook redesign will suck people in even more. So in this case, I think he's definitely got a good point.
Very interesting article, I can see some of our discussions in there. I think it's indeed fair to say most people could use less stuff in their lives (minimalism). Furthermore, it's honorable to strive for a simpler life in this age of the Internet and globalization. However, I also agree with the comments that the audience for this article is probably individualistic, unbound, single young men.
Both minimalism and stoicism are about constraints. Therefore, I do not agree with replacing books with a Kindle. A Kindle - like most Internet-connected mobile devices - represents abundance: an abundance of information. Hence I find this point a bit at odds with an information diet. Having physical books puts a constraint on what you can carry around with you (especially important when traveling). Also, which is an argument not heard enough, reading from books - especially hardcovers - has aesthetic value, and it's easier to remember the contents of the book.
You hear people often about "swimmer's bodies": broad shoulders and narrow waist (V-shape), long legs and arms, not too low body fat percentage, medium amount of mass, toned & elongated muscles.
Also ancient pentathletes (modern day decathletes). Aristotle in Rhetoric: "a body capable of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or of bodily strength...This is why the athletes in the pentathlon are most beautiful"
A thought-provoking article. However, it's not at all clear to me why having a more informational economy is beneficial per se. Because the non-incremental change - or power law change - can work both ways, up and down.
Take the financial system for instance. Finance is one of the most "informationized" industries, with news coming in fast at Bloomberg terminals, ubiquitous access via smart phones, and thousands of trading orders executed every second. Yes, a system becomes more efficient the less (physical) constraints it has, but it also gets less robust. At the core of this problem is that we don't really understand non-incremental change due to the properties of information and a whole host of cognitive biases.
Therefore, I'd like to see a distinction being made to cases where the informationization is beneficial, and where it is detrimental. It's a good thing in industries where there's mostly exposure to positive non-incremental change (e.g. Internet businesses, biotech), but otherwise not.
The irrationality you are referring to is called the self-serving bias (SSB). I wrote a thesis on overconfidence for my master in behavioral economics, and the two are related. SSB is a well-documented bias. For instance, 90% of American drivers think they are in the top 50%. It's hard for people to fully appreciate this fact. Allow me to illustrate. Do you still consider yourself, even after reading this statistic, to be in the bottom 50% of drivers? If so, then you're a minority, my friend ;-) (10%, to be exact)
"If you look at Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest." (John Doerr)
I agree very much on the filtering aspect of the stream. For instance, I have a problem with my RSS feeds: there's just too many of them and it takes a long time to check them all. Of course, you could go all Zenhabits here, but in the end, people are lazy. If you can somehow rank/filter the incoming info, you're on to something. Unfortunately, that's also the hard part, because just filtering by keywords (like feedrinser) is a quite crude solution, and you could easily miss out on interesting stuff.
I think it applies to most intellectual endeavours. Especially the part about working early in the morning, when your mind is still uncluttered with bits of information, like news, conversation, etc. Your focus is greatest then.
The Internet fatigue Chris talks about, I see it all around me, and more and more articles are popping up about Internet addictions. Plus I suspect the new Facebook redesign will suck people in even more. So in this case, I think he's definitely got a good point.