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by Roberto Zoia

Meaningful vs Expiring Information

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As time remains constant and information becomes abundant and ubiquitous, the question of how to read things that lead to meaningful knowledge becomes ever more relevant.

Some people are worried about how Facebook or Twitter maybe “manipulating” their timelines by deciding which news or tweets they see and which don’t. I don’t think that’s a problem per se.

Newspapers, for example, provide us with a series of news curated by an editorial staff, which certainly has its own view about what’s happening in the world. More important, some newspapers have a long-term vision about that worldview. Also, consider that most people read the newspaper that is more akin to his or her tastes, politically and socially speaking. But isn’t this falling into some kind of confirmation bias1? Some people read two newspapers to have a more “independent” view of the news, but I bet that they are few.

The problem is not Facebook’s or Twitter’s algorithm, but our decision to rely on Facebook and Twitter as a source of relevant information. For some years now —and the trend probably will go on forever— we rely on algorithms to find information. The information available is far too much for us to see without filtering. For example, Google optimizes search results for us. Which is a great convenience in a wide range of situations. Facebook customizes what is shown in our timeline according to its own criteria. We don’t know that criteria for sure, but I would bet that maximizing the time we spend on Facebook is a factor that carries a lot of weight in the algorithm. What’s Twitter’s criteria? How about LinkedIn?

Farman Street’s Shane Parrish concept of expiring information can help us make better use of our time. “Information has a predictable half-life: the time taken for half of it to be replaced or disproved. Over time, one group of facts replaces another.2” Expiring information is information that has a short half-life, and we should avoid it:

Here are a few telltale signs you’re dealing with expiring information. First, it’s marketed to you. Second, lacking details and nuance, it’s easily digestible. This is why it’s commonly telling you what happened, not why it happened or under what conditions it might happen again. Third, it won’t be relevant in a month or a year. Expiring information is one reason I stopped reading most news. It’s a false map.

Attention is the valuable asset we need to take care of:

Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable, so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days? Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20 years or so.

What did you read today? Will it still be meaningful next week? What about next year?

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash.

  1. Confirmation bias is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.” (cfr Wikipedia, Confirmation Bias.) ↩
  2. cfr Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It. ↩

Privacy Trade-Offs

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As Facebook continues to raise scandals about the way they record, store and sell their user’s data (and not only their user’s data), you may wonder why people continue to use Facebook at all.

I found one answer while reading Kill Process, a science-fiction novel by William Hertling. In the novel, most people in the world are connected by Tomo, the world’s larges social network company. Even if the book is fictional, the similarities between Tomo and Facebook are too many not to think ‘Facebook’ every time you read ‘Tomo’. Despite Tomo’s worst practices regarding user’s privacy, people continue to use the service because in a world where real, face-to-face connections are scarce, Tomo is how people remain connected to their friends. Even if it’s a feeble connection, they don’t dare drop out of Tomo because they fear loosing those conections.

Last year, I did a simple experiment: I deleted the Facebook app from my cel phone. I did not delete my Facebook account, but I only logged into Facebook on the laptop, ideally twice a day.

I’ve never considered myself a heavy user of Facebook. My posts are mostly quotes about things I’m reading. It also serves me as a reminder of my friend’s birthdays. Even so, I was surprised at how many times a day I tapped into my phone trying to open the now non-existent Facebook app. It took me more than a week to unlearn this ‘unconscious’ behavior.

Kevin Kelly, in his great book  The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, gives another explanation:

If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy. This has surprised the experts. So far, at every juncture that offers a choice, we’ve tilted, on average, toward more sharing, more disclosure, more transparency. I would sum it up like this: Vanity trumps privacy. (p. 262)

The important question you should ask yourself is: why am I on Facebook?

Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash.

Three Ideas to Improve Your Reading

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For several years, as part of my end-of-year review, I take a look at my reading1 and make plans for the year to come. I’ve written down some ideas from my process that you may find useful. Of course, most of the advice is not originally mine: I learned about these ideas by reading about how some giants –call them virtual mentors if you like– do their learning.

1. Have a list of the books you want to read this year

Compiling a list of the books you want to read during the year has several benefits. Taking the time to build a reading list is a signal to yourself of the importance you give to reading and more in general to gaining knowledge.

As soon as you start adding books to your list, you’ll soon realize that the number of books you can read in a year is finite. You will need to prune your list, which at least in my case is a painful process. But it’s absolutely necessary. Not only will it help you make the best use of your time. Sending books to a not-this-year list will also force you to think and gain clarity about what topics you really care about.

The list will also help you avoid falling to the song of the sirens and pick the latest and shiny book you learned about some days ago. When you finish reading a book, you just look at your curated list of books and decide what’s next. Of course this doesn’t mean that your list must be cast in iron. But it should be a clear guide of where are you investing your time (and money).

While in the process of deciding what to read, book recommendations can be of great help. There are a lot of sources for this, you’ll find some ideas at the end of this article.

2. Have a system in place so you read every day

One of the best tactics I’ve found is Shane Parrish’s advice of reading 25 pages every day. If you are reading just for the pleasure of reading, keeping track of the pages you read every day may seem anticlimatic to you. But if you read to gain knowledge, and like most humans are bound to time constraints, then reading 25 pages per day will help you achieve a reasonable pace and read on average three books every two months].

It also helps to block a specific time on for reading in your calendar2. Best if it’s at the same time of the day. This will help you build the habit of reading3, it will help you focus faster on what you are reading. If for whatever reason you break your reading chain and miss reading some days, try to restart your routine as soon as posible.

Few things are as rewarding as making friends with the eminent dead. Reading isn’t something to be done once a week to check a box; it’s something to do every day. —Shane Parrish

3. Connecting the dots

We live in an age where finding information is not a problem. Connecting ideas and coming up with new ones, however, does not happen just by collecting information. Although for 2019 I’ve set a reading goal that is challenging for me, if I have to sacrifice the number of books I read to gain deeper understanding of a topic, so be it. That’s one of the reasons of why I’m not into fast reading techniques, or use executive summaries of books.

Learning how to take better notes, and anything that helps you grow a “second brain” is something you should always be interested in.

In my case, in my reading process I make heavy use of highlights and notes. After finishing a book, I reread the notes and highlights and incorporate them into my knowledge system. This is process is time consuming, but is totally worth it.

4. (Bonus) Where to find books

There are lots of resouces that can help you find good titles to read. Depending on the topics you are interested in, you may find the following list useful.

  • The book review section of The Gates Notes, Bill Gates’ personal page. Bill Gates is a long time avid reader, and writes reviews of the books he finds interesting.
  • Brainpickings. Maria Popova started Brainpickings this living monument to intellectual hunger for cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friend.
  • Taylor Pearson’s newsletter. Taylor is author of The End of Jobs, and writes about innovation, productivity, and the blockchain. Once a month he sends an email titled_Favorite Books, Articles, and Quotes_to his subscribers. You can also check his book notes.
  • Farnam’s Street Blog, by Shane Parrish.
  • Ryan Holliday’s Reading List and Favorite Read List for every year. Ryan is a writer and media strategist, author of several bestsellers about marketing, culture, and the human condition.
  • Derek Sivers notes to more than 250 books.

You don’t have to agree with me about the importance of reading. People may have different priorities and motivation. However, we live in an age where self-learning becomes more relevant every day. As less people read books, reading becomes a real competitive advantage. It’s a very effective way of standing on the shoulders of giants.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash.

  1. The results for 2018 are mixed. On one hand, I read some very good books, three of which stand out: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval N. Harari; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson; and Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. On the other hand, because I didn’t stick to my reading routine, I read less books than the previous year. Non-fiction reading gets a space in my calendar. It’s a more conscious reading. Novels, I read them on my spare time, like before going to sleep. ↩
  2. In my case, if something is not in my calendar, it has a 99% percent probability it won’t get done. ↩
  3. Resolutions or goals without habits to support them are most likely to fail in short time. The exception may be situations where emotions about the resolution are strong enough to amass enough will to cross the dip and begin forming an habit. ↩

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssonk

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I recently finished reading It doesn’t have to be crazy at work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson1. Jason and David are the co-founders of Basecamp, a project manager/real-time collaboration tool.

I liked the book very much. The argument is what the title says: it doesn’t have to be crazy at work for a company to be profitable and successful. It doesn’t have to be crazy for you if you are the founder/owner, and if doesn’t have to be crazy for you if you are an employee. Your work should not be equal to your life, and you shouldn’t expect it from your employees.

For context, Basecamp was founded 19 years ago. They’ve been profitable from month one and continue to grow their customer base every year. Although they’ve been contacted in the past by several VC firms, the only external founding they’ve accepted was a minority, no-control stake from Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos in 2006 2. They are not a public company, and don’t want to be one. They don’t have a CFO, not even a full-time accountant. Basecamp is on Forbes’ list of America’s Best Small Companies 2017. According to Forbes, this 60 employee company has an annual revenue of $25M.

I specially like their view on employees’ benefits3.

(…) we look at benefits as a way to help people get away from work and lead healthier, more interesting lives. Benefits that actually benefit them, not the company. Although the company clearly benefits, too, from having healthier, more interesting, well-rested workers.

Not a single benefit is aimed at trapping people at the office. Not a single benefit that would make someone prefer to be at work rather than at home. Not a single benefit that puts work ahead of life. Instead, plenty of reasons to close the laptop at a reasonable time so that there’s time to learn, cook, work out, and live life with family and friends. (p. 117-118)

If you are curious, you can check the Basecamp Employee Handbook.

The point of the book is not to adopt each practice as-is. As the authors say, what’s a best practice for one company is not necessarily so for others. That’s not the point of the book. The real question floating in the pages is: what is your company for?

Of course: be profitable, make money. But how much profit is enough, really?

  1. DHH is also known as the creator of the Rails framework for Ruby. In fact, Basecamp was the first Ruby on Rails app ever. ↩
  2. cfr  ↩
  3. Some of the benefits for Basecamp employees are, according to the book: fully paid vacations for everyone in the company up to $5,000 a year. Three-day weekends all summer. 30-day sabbaticals every three years. $1,000 per year continuing-education stipend you can use to learn anything non-work related. One monthly massage at an actual SPA, outside the office. $100 monthly fitness allowance. ↩

Finally, you can download your Kindle highlights

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I do most of my reading either on my Kindle device or on the Kindle app on my laptop. Highlighting and adding notes is an essential part of my reading process. It somehow replaces the marking of paragraphs and jotting down of annotations some people do when reading a physical book.

The Kindle app for MacOs has always been consistently bad. Particularly annoying was the fact that in order to download your highlights and notes, you had to rely on applications like clippings.io because Amazon didn’t support either functionality.

It’s incredible that such a basic feature had not been implemented by Amazon until now. Amazon’s latest Kindle app version not only let’s you review your highlights and notes side by side with the book, but also let’s you download them.

Screenshot 2018-12-11 22.29.08

Without doubt, your are Facebook’s product

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Ted Kramer is the founder of Six4Three, a company that relied on Facebook granting access to their users’ friends data for their business model to work. His company has an ongoing lawsuit with Facebook because of a policy change in 2014 that cut Kramer’s app access to that information.

Sue Halpern, writing for The Newyorker about Facebook, comments on some of Facebook’s internal documents that Kramer turned over to the British Parliament and were made public shortly afterwards:

The two hundred and fifty pages of internal Facebook documents show, irrefutably, that the company did indeed whitelist a number of lucrative business partners, including Netflix, Lyft, and Airbnb, allowing them continued and unfettered access to the accounts of Facebook users and their friends after the company claimed that it had stopped the practice.

And did you know that if you are an Android user, Facebook recorded your text messages and your call logs?

The documents also reveal that, in 2015, a permissions update for Android devices, which users were required to accept, included a feature that continuously uploaded text messages and call logs to Facebook.

I don’t know how deep is Zuckerberg involved in all this. Most of the time, he denies the facts. The CEO of a company, however, cannot not claim ‘not to know’ such things as their flagship app collecting their user’s text messages, or big advertisers being granted privileged access to user’s data. A CEO is not judged by his ‘good intentions’, but by his actions.

Kill Process

Coincidentaly, some days ago I finished reading William Hertling‘s novel Kill Process, a fictionary story about Tomo, the world’s largest Social Media company. Although all characters are fictional, you can’t stop associating Tomo with Facebook.

Hertling goes deep to describe Tomo’s monetarization practices, which are all frighteningly plausible. Angie, Kill Process’ main character and one of Tomo’s first employees, no longer feels comfortable working for Tomo. She realizes that even if the company she works for has been severly questioned for their use and monetarization of user’s data, Tomo has a lock-in on their users:

Data ownership is a big deal. Users stay on Tomo, even when they hate us, because their friends are here. If they want to remain in contact with their friends, they’re stuck with us. Everyone is jointly locked in together.

I don’t think we are there yet. Facebook doesn’t have such a lock in on their users… yet. One thing is for sure, however: for Facebook you not only are the product, but a very lucrative one.

Update 2018-12-10: Another look at how creepy has Facebook become.