If you’re wondering what to read, here are two simple ideas that we
can combine to help us choose what to read next.
1. Understand Deeply
Get back to basics.
Understanding the basics, as boring as it sounds, is one of the key
elements of effective thinking. A lot of people assume the basics are
not important and never really take the time to learn them,
preferring the sexiness of complexity. Understanding a simple idea
deeply, however, creates more lasting knowledge and builds a solid
foundation for complex ideas later.
Build your
foundation. The key here is brutal honesty with yourself about what
you really know. Take the time to do a Feynman One Pager on an idea
you think you know really well. While easy, this process will reveal
any gaps you have in your knowledge.
The
multidisciplinary mind understands the basic ideas. Acquiring the
basic mental models from multiple disciplines allows you to see
things that other people can’t. You don’t need to understand the
latest study in biology, but you sure as heck better understand the
concept of evolution because it applies to so much more than animals.
Understanding the
basics allows us to predict what matters. Put simply, people who
understand the basics are better at understanding second and
subsequent order consequences. Plus, how are we to have a chance of
understanding complex ideas without a firm understanding of the
basics.
Remember, the
slightest wind blows over a house without a foundation.
2. The Lindy Effect
What has been will
continue to be. The second idea is the Lindy Effect, which is just a
fancy way of saying what’s been around will continue to be around.
In his book Antifragile, author Nassim Taleb, who builds on the idea
of Benoit Mandelbrot, writes:
For the perishable,
every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional
life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may
imply a longer life expectancy. So the longer a technology lives, the
longer it can be expected to live.
The nonperishable is
anything that does not have organic or avoidable expiration dates.
Time can predict
value. While produce and humans have a mathematical life expectancy
that decreases with each day, some things, like books, increase in
life expectancy with each passing day.
The perishable is
typically an object, the nonperishable has an informational nature to
it. A single car is perishable, but the automobile as a technology
has survived about a century (and we will speculate should survive
another one). Humans die, but their genes—a code—do not
necessarily. The physical book is perishable—say, a specific copy
of the Old Testament—but its contents are not, as they can be
expressed into another physical book.
When I see a toddler
walking down the street holding the hands of their grandparents, I
can reasonably assert that the toddler will survive the elder. When
something is nonperishable that is not the case.
Taleb writes:
We have two
possibilities: either both are expected to have the same additional
life expectancy (the case in which the probability distribution is
called exponential), or the old is expected to have a longer
expectancy than the young, in proportion to their relative age. In
that situation, if the old is eighty and the young is ten, the elder
is elected to live eight times as long as the younger one.
Life Expectancy
The longer something
non-perishable has lived, the longer we can expect it to live.
If a book has been
in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another
forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives
another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty
years.
This is where Taylor
Pearson helped me put something together that I was just too stupid
to do myself. He connects reading to the Lindy effect.
Older isn’t
better, it’s exponentially better.
If you were to look
at a typical person’s reading list, the vast majority of books
would be crammed into the recent, low-value portion of the curve
while many fewer books would occupy the much larger high-value, older
section of the curve.
So your ROI on
reading and understanding a concept from 500 years ago is highly
likely to be exponentially greater in the long run than one presented
only 5 years ago.
What I’m trying to
get at is that the more fundamental or closer to the source that you
move, the better the ROI in the long run.
Understanding
Time-Tested Ideas
So let’s combine
these ideas and focus on reading basic ideas that have stood the test
of time as a means to understanding them better.
Knowledge has a
half-life. The most useful knowledge is a broad-based
multidisciplinary education of the basics. These ideas are ones that
have lasted, and thus will last, for a long time. And by last, I mean
mathematical expectation; I know what will happen in general but not
each individual case.
Reading a Book is a
Conversation Between You and the Author
When you buy a book,
you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or
furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is
actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full
ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of
yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it— which
comes to the same thing— is by writing in it.
Why is marking a
book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake— not
merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active,
is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or
written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot
express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your
reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.
Reading a book
should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably, he
knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should
not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way
operation; the learner has to question himself and question the
teacher. He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once he
understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally
an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author.
It is the highest respect you can pay him.