While stimulating myself with new information all day long (which I imagine many people do), it can be easy to fool myself into thinking that I’m making progress towards a goal.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
By evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of different sources of information, I can focus on just consuming the information that helps me make forward progress in life.
With the following framework, I’m able to post-hoc analyze and categorize the ROI of information. This is useful because I don’t want to accidentally delude myself by trying and failing to learn via the same methods over and over because I was just unconsciously consuming information.
Here are some categories that accompany the question: Did this information have a good ROI?
- No. It's just Trivia because I intended to use it solely as entertainment value.
- Almost. It's considered Mental Masturbation which is defined as consuming information under the pretense of wanting to learn something useful, but in reality I’m “getting myself off” by indulging in subjects I’m already well-versed in, and therefore it fails to have a measurable impact on me.
- Yes. It's therefore considered Effective Information which I define as something that had a measurable impact on me.
My framework via an example
My father is an excellent source of effective information depending on the subject and the medium we use to communicate.
When I talk with him about running (he’s a marathon runner), I’m able to extract effective information and put it into use immediately. Whereas the running books he recommends make me feel motivated in the moment, but they don’t change my behavior and therefore I classify them as mental masturbation.
With personal finance, I’ve had enough conversations with my father to know that I don’t absorb much from our talks (Roth 401K vs Traditional 401K vs IRA—ugh, it’s too much to keep track of in my head). Because the conversations are fun but ultimately don’t change my behavior, I consider them trivia. Whereas the finance books he has recommended (The Simple Path to Wealth and The Millionaire Next Door) were effective information that helped me design a personal finance plan.
Through which medium are you consuming information?
Some mediums promote active or passive consumption depending on the effort involved to process information. Reading, which I consider to be an active medium since the words won’t read themselves, often signals to my brain that the content I’m consuming is important and worth remembering. As Ian Leslie states in his book Curious:
We confuse the practice of [learning] with ease of access to information and forget that real [learning] requires the exercise of effort.
As I’ve written before, I’m not a huge fan of television or videos. I consider them to be passive mediums because they can just keep playing—I’m never forced to pause and critically think about the content. I previously highlighted research that showed:
Following prolonged [television or video sessions], the viewer develops a strange mix of physiological signs of high and low attention. Eyes stay focused, the body is still and directed towards the screen, but learning and memory drop to lower levels than when not [watching television or a video].
A peek-a-boo world of trivia
The passive mediums promote and advance what Neil Postman calls a “peek-a-boo world” in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
[Radio, film, TV, and now videos on the internet, together they call into being] a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense… It is also endlessly entertaining.
With the flood of available information in the 21st century, it’s left me feeling numb in trying to achieve my goals. There are so many opportunities to get distracted by trivia and mental masturbation. Postman elaborates on this by saying that:
People once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful “Trivial Pursuit.” In one form or another, each of these supplies an answer to the question, “What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?” And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game? It is the only use left for information with no genuine connection to our lives.
Novel information is fun and can lead to strange new connections when combined with my accumulated knowledge. So I’ll never outright say that trivia is bad, per se. But I’ll reiterate what I said from my previous post on Mental Masturbation about intentional learning:
If I want to accomplish anything significant in my lifetime, then I must be selective in what I choose to consume in the name of “learning”, lest I delude myself into being endlessly distracted by information that could be useful in the future…
- ^
Mental Masturbation: consuming information under the pretense of wanting to learn something useful, but in reality I’m “getting myself off” by indulging in subjects I’m already well-versed in.