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by Roberto Zoia

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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.

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.

The Future of Education

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Seth Godin recently shared the audio version of Stop Stealing Dreams in Akimbo, his weekly podcast. Next, he dedicated a whole episode to answering questions, mostly about education, and then recorded a third podcast provocately titled “Getting in (to a famous college)”.

Maybe you are a parent and have kids that go to school. Maybe you are a teacher, or a student. For all of us, Education plays such a critical role in defining the future of society, that this topic should be relevant to everyone.

You may agree or not with Seth’s vision of education. That’s not the point. The point is to start a conversation, beginning with the question What is education for?

I hope you’ll find this content so thought-provoking as I do.

If you like, you can grab the PDF version of Stop Stealing Dreams, or watch it on video.

Zettelkasten, a method for note-taking

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Having a repository for the things you learn is more relevant than ever. Facts can be easily checked using the internet. However, the process of connecting ideas, and formulating relevant questions, comes from deep reading and reflection.

Last weekend I discovered a method for note-taking called Zettelkasten. This method was devised by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it as an aid in his research throughout his life1. For context, during his life Luhmann published more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles on various subjects. Luhmann referred to his Zettelkästen as his zweites Gehirn, his second brain2.

Most of the things I’ve learned about Zettelkästen comes from the excellent zettelkasten.de website by Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast. At first, I thought about buying Sascha Fast’s book Die Zettelkasgtenmethode to learn the method. But alas, there’s no ebook version available. Having it shipped to Peru, aside of time issues, almost doubles the price of the book. So I resorted to reading enough of the articles on the website to gain a working knowledge of Zettelkasten.

A Repository for Knowledge

The basic idea behind Zettelkasten is to build a repository of the knowledge you gain through the years. The idea is similar to what Paul Jun, of Creative Mastery, writes about keeping a Commonplace Book, or Ryan Holiday’s notecard system. Zettelkasten adds the powerful idea of linking notes to create a web of interlinked knowledge.

I’ve been taking notes of what I read for years, first on index cards, then Filemaker, then Evernote and, more recently, using Bear. After a couple of days of appying some of the concepts of Zettelkasten, I’m really impressed in how my understanding of what I read has improved, and more important, the consistency of the system.

Instead of explaining the technique by itself, I’ll describe how I’ve incorporated it into my reading workflow.

I read most of my books on the Kindle, either using the physical device or the MacOs app on my laptop. While reading, I highlight paragraphs as I see fit, and add notes using the corresponding feature on the Kindle.

Later, on the Kindle app on my laptop, I process the highlighted paragraphs and notes. I copy each highlighted paragraph to Bear, using a separate note for each concept. (Zettelkasten refers to this as atomicity.) Each note is given a unique identifier and an appropriate title3.

Each note is also given tags for classification. Good tagging helps with accuracy when searching. The method’s recommendation is to use tags for objects, and not for subjects4. In the same note, I write down the ideas I had in mind when highlighting the paragraph, or any connection that comes to mind during this process.

Context notes are used as a map to a series of notes. A context note that outlines a more complex concept or broader subject, using links to other notes in the process. For example, while I’m reading a book, I build an outline of the things I find relevant, based on my highlights and notes of the book. Each of the outline’s items links to a separate note explaining the idea in more detail, and usually contains the highlighted text of the book.

While this process takes more time, it helps with understanding what you read at a different level, and making connection with other concepts and ideas. I’m interested in reading more books, but not if it goes against comprehension.

  1. I’m not writing to endorse Luhman’s sociology theories, because I don’t know anything about them. This article is about his note-taking method. ↩
  2. cfr Ein Zettelkasten war Lumens zweites Gehirn. ↩
  3. I’m using the recommended format in the Zettelkasten.de site of date-time to create a unique identifier. For example, 20181113131025 for a note created on 2018-11-13 at 13:10:25. (I actually use TextExpander to create the ID automatically.) The note title becomes then “20181113131025 Cultural assimilation in empires” instead of “Cultural assimilation in empires”. This ensures that each note is uniquely identified. ↩
  4. Check this article by Sacha Tietze for some insights on how to use tags effectively: The Difference Between Good Tags and Bad Tags. ↩

Featured image photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.