3 Lessons from my Intellectual-Keto Experiment.

Last week, I decided to shun social-media/new content and switched to only reading things written over a few decades ago.

Here's everything I've learned so far.

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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 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1310306039481262081?s=20

To break the giant illusion that keeps the Forever Now media going, Nassim Taleb suggests a fantastic cure – https://twitter.com/TalebWisdom/status/1155068793686777856?s=20

Lesson #2 – The Forever Now media is predictable and repetitive.

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 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 before even reading it, it’s not information, it’s just noise.

Lesson #3 – The level of depth, insight, and nuance that is possible in debating political issues is way higher than what Twitter would have you believe.

Twitter is largely Twitterism. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1219688228913057792?s=20

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.

So, how should you use Twitter?

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.

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