The Collector's Fallacy(medium.com)
medium.com
The Collector's Fallacy
https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-collectors-fallacy-why-we-gather-things-we-don-t-need-9a55ef9979ef
23 comments
>I don't think of a reading TODO as "food" such that you should eat the old food before the new food. (The old food will expire so it makes sense to consume that first.)
Based on this explanation, maybe you should. News and information often decrease in usefulness and relevance the longer you wait to digest it.
Based on this explanation, maybe you should. News and information often decrease in usefulness and relevance the longer you wait to digest it.
Any information that decreases in usefulness very quickly with time wasn't very useful to begin with. If anything, your argument supports the idea of letting things sit in a queue for months to determine if it's still relevant before bothering to consume it to begin with.
This logic is wrongheaded, as it ignores the context which causes information to expire:
>Socially:
I'll expand this one the most, because a similar argumentative line will apply to all the other ones.
Current events stories are a common point of discussion, and current stories become less relevant over time.
For example, discussion about politics at this moment, during last October, and during this January, are marked by such flux in notable talking points that if you were reading articles from each time period during the others, you will not be meaningfully contributing to any individual political discourse.
This is true in discourse about some (or many) other fields, including tech, sports, and all modern forms of mass media, including film, television, and literature.
People who sit waiting for others to collate their media decisions for them while things wait in the queue for months will only be citing and capable of discussing settled true-isms, which is far more useless and uninteresting for discussion than being right or wrong. This is socially bad for you, and sociability, for better or worse, strongly correlates with your life satisfaction and income. In some sense, you're implicitly arguing happiness and money aren't useful or important.
>Relationship-wise:
The difference between wishing a friend a "Happy Birthday" on their birthday and a month later is in the latter case most people would recommend not bringing it up, as you waited too long. Relationships matter to most people, so shelf life on dealing with available relationship info is time sensitive
>Economically:
The moment you as a general person are aware of a major economic trend is, roughly speaking, the moment when the best parts of it have already been scraped over and most of the remainder of the trend will be late-comers fighting over scraps (e.g, bitcoin mining, getting a law degree, web startups in the 2000s, getting into machine learning and designing self-driving cars, etc). True economic edges, the ones that make people extraordinarily wealthy, come from knowledge that is going to be important but people don't currently recognize yet as such. This means time is of the essence with regards to economic information.
You can sit for months, but all you are doing is hoarding dead, useless, historic arcana: Big abstractions and high ideals, but nothing new or meaningful.
Living, useful information must be sought out in a timely manner.
>Socially:
I'll expand this one the most, because a similar argumentative line will apply to all the other ones.
Current events stories are a common point of discussion, and current stories become less relevant over time.
For example, discussion about politics at this moment, during last October, and during this January, are marked by such flux in notable talking points that if you were reading articles from each time period during the others, you will not be meaningfully contributing to any individual political discourse.
This is true in discourse about some (or many) other fields, including tech, sports, and all modern forms of mass media, including film, television, and literature.
People who sit waiting for others to collate their media decisions for them while things wait in the queue for months will only be citing and capable of discussing settled true-isms, which is far more useless and uninteresting for discussion than being right or wrong. This is socially bad for you, and sociability, for better or worse, strongly correlates with your life satisfaction and income. In some sense, you're implicitly arguing happiness and money aren't useful or important.
>Relationship-wise:
The difference between wishing a friend a "Happy Birthday" on their birthday and a month later is in the latter case most people would recommend not bringing it up, as you waited too long. Relationships matter to most people, so shelf life on dealing with available relationship info is time sensitive
>Economically:
The moment you as a general person are aware of a major economic trend is, roughly speaking, the moment when the best parts of it have already been scraped over and most of the remainder of the trend will be late-comers fighting over scraps (e.g, bitcoin mining, getting a law degree, web startups in the 2000s, getting into machine learning and designing self-driving cars, etc). True economic edges, the ones that make people extraordinarily wealthy, come from knowledge that is going to be important but people don't currently recognize yet as such. This means time is of the essence with regards to economic information.
You can sit for months, but all you are doing is hoarding dead, useless, historic arcana: Big abstractions and high ideals, but nothing new or meaningful.
Living, useful information must be sought out in a timely manner.
[deleted]
As someone with significant attention problems, apps like Instapaper and later Pocket were a LIFESAVER and probably saved my career from mediocrity.
My brain craves constant stimulation and distraction. Do 30 mins of coding? Okay you've earned 5 mins of hacker news. The problem is those 5 minutes are never 5 minutes when you come across a bunch of really interesting articles that your brain is dying to consume instead of getting back to work.
In the old days, I'd use del.icio.us, but that got out of hand. So, more often than not, I simply would take the time to read the posts, and my 5 minute breaks would become 20 minutes. I was a young hotshot developer and I could still manage to get my work done in half the day - truly. But I didn't grow.
So, first, I got older (and slower). Second, web articles got longer. And my model no longer was sustainable.
Now, what do I do? I just skim the article, note if it's something i should read, and add it to my pocket.
Do I then get the collector's fallacy side effect? Absolutely. But it's the lesser of two evils.
My brain craves constant stimulation and distraction. Do 30 mins of coding? Okay you've earned 5 mins of hacker news. The problem is those 5 minutes are never 5 minutes when you come across a bunch of really interesting articles that your brain is dying to consume instead of getting back to work.
In the old days, I'd use del.icio.us, but that got out of hand. So, more often than not, I simply would take the time to read the posts, and my 5 minute breaks would become 20 minutes. I was a young hotshot developer and I could still manage to get my work done in half the day - truly. But I didn't grow.
So, first, I got older (and slower). Second, web articles got longer. And my model no longer was sustainable.
Now, what do I do? I just skim the article, note if it's something i should read, and add it to my pocket.
Do I then get the collector's fallacy side effect? Absolutely. But it's the lesser of two evils.
I like pocket too, but I think it suffers from the same issues as what the article is describing.
Well, Pocket is not at fault, it's more me and how I use it, but I've got a growing list of links that I've either read and enjoyed, or just saved and not got round to reading yet.
I tend to read my pocket articles on the train via my phone, and sometimes forget what I have and haven't read, or what the article was even about.
Well, Pocket is not at fault, it's more me and how I use it, but I've got a growing list of links that I've either read and enjoyed, or just saved and not got round to reading yet.
I tend to read my pocket articles on the train via my phone, and sometimes forget what I have and haven't read, or what the article was even about.
I think the author neglects one point: Deciding what to keep and what to throw away is a really difficult problem. Why is that so? Because to do it 100% correctly, you would have to know the future. Because only then you can know for certain what is worth keeping. You don't know the future so you will err. Now, in times where data storage is almost free, it makes sense to keep an ever growing but well-ordered set of files or bookmarks. It has saved me lots of time, just searching my bookmarks "I remember this article I once skimmed, and it contains exactly what I need" or even "I remember this book I downloaded, I'm sure the answer is in there".
That's essentially what my bookmarks are. An index of self-curated articles, tutorials, tools, books, etc. of things I'm generally interested in. Before I put something in my bookmarks I do a quick skim and decide if has value, even if it's not relevant right now. So that in the future instead of a Google search, where I'd have to browse through a pile of results to identify the gold nuggets, I can instead search through my bookmarks knowing that whatever pops up is going to be immediately useful because I've already screened for it.
What you are doing is essentially using your computer as a memex (as described in "as we may think"), like it is intended.
>I think the author neglects one point: Deciding what to keep and what to throw away is a really difficult problem. Why is that so? Because to do it 100% correctly, you would have to know the future.
The key point here is that you don't need to do it "100% correctly". Not even "80% correctly".
In the long term (and even in the mid-term) it doesn't matter, and most of those pieces of information collected is BS that wont contribute to anything at all with regards to one's life, career, etc.
The few pieces that are actually useful, one will either encounter time an and again, or know they're something important from the get on.
>Now, in times where data storage is almost free, it makes sense to keep an ever growing but well-ordered set of files or bookmarks.
Data storage might be free, but time to organize and dig through is not. Besides, one can let Google be their storage.
The key point here is that you don't need to do it "100% correctly". Not even "80% correctly".
In the long term (and even in the mid-term) it doesn't matter, and most of those pieces of information collected is BS that wont contribute to anything at all with regards to one's life, career, etc.
The few pieces that are actually useful, one will either encounter time an and again, or know they're something important from the get on.
>Now, in times where data storage is almost free, it makes sense to keep an ever growing but well-ordered set of files or bookmarks.
Data storage might be free, but time to organize and dig through is not. Besides, one can let Google be their storage.
Additionally, so much of the internet is ephemeral, compared to the content that students or researchers would have been photocopying when Umberto Eco wrote the piece that's quoted in the article. For this reason, if I find an interesting article/page/whatever, I tend to save a local copy even if I don't know when or if I'll read it. It might not be online anymore when it turns out to be useful.
The dopamine point reminds me of something I read a while ago. It said that when telling people about a new project you just started, or even just plans to start, your brain rewards you with dopamine as if you just achieved something. This can make you less likely to finish the project, since you already got rewarded for it. Not as much as if you had finished it, but for some it might be enough, so they start lacking motivation.
And that's one reason to not show your work off before it's finished.
And that's one reason to not show your work off before it's finished.
Thanks. Interesting point. I found that I started a lot of hobby project, but haven't been finishing any of them lately. The one thing they have in common was that I told people about them.
The ones I did finish were the ones that I didn't tell anyone about, because they were useful only to me.
The ones I did finish were the ones that I didn't tell anyone about, because they were useful only to me.
Interesting, I made the opposite experience. I made sure to tell everyone about a very ambitious project that I wasn't sure I could pull off. That way there wasn't an easy way out, and that strategy worked extremely well.
Until you find out no one really cares what you finish, and telling people before you start gets all the positive feedback without the hard work
I see where you're getting at. I won't deny peer recognition is very nice, but it isn't the sole motivation - its just booster rockets that I'm happy to use.
I see a similar phenomenon with meetings. Talking about what we must accomplish for long enough leaves us with the feeling that we have accomplished it.
I recently realised that my articles in Pocket and the number of tabs in my browser was piling up. This was a big cause of anxiety for me. In the end I worked around the issue by just saving the links in Evernote, arranged by topic.
I now have the comfort that those articles are still there if I ever need to research that topic again, but they are out of sight and don't bother me.
I now have the comfort that those articles are still there if I ever need to research that topic again, but they are out of sight and don't bother me.
Marked this to read it later.
[deleted]
Everybody has their own angle on how to handle information overload. That said, I'll offer a different mental model of managing the never-ending reading list. The "reading list" includes the 50+ open webbrowser tabs of "stuff to read later", the digital magazines on iPad, the printouts of pdf files (tech whitepapers), and of course, a pile of traditional books.
For me, finishing what you already collected before starting on new ones is not optimal. I don't think of a reading TODO as "food" such that you should eat the old food before the new food. (The old food will expire so it makes sense to consume that first.)
Instead, I think of reading as a Priority Queue[1]. I let go of the idea that the various reading piles must be finished in the order I added them to the list. Many times, a more interesting article or book will go to the top of the queue pushing back a bunch of stuff I added weeks or months ago. The priority queue is in a perpetual state of being unfinished and constantly adjusted. That's ok. It's the same idea as a priority queue for leisure traveling. Even if I owned a $75 million Gulfstream private jet, I still couldn't travel to all the places I wanted to in my lifetime. There is no sense of being "done" with my "travel destinations collecting" and I apply that perspective to reading.
The above doesn't apply to work email inboxes. I do get anxious if there are unread items there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_queue