Thread by @IntuitMachine

Partially true, but if you want to develop a framework for understanding the latest new knowledge, you have to go back in time and read the thoughts of great thinkers. We make the false assumption that people in the past don't think as well as people today.

https://twitter.com/neilpatel/status/1402252726956789766

Too many people today are building up their knowledge using very shaky foundations. So it does not matter if you watch the latest youtube videos and blogs, to get a deeper understanding requires an investment in books.

Information overload is what limits one's acquisition of knowledge. We make the false assumption that we are also like computers that can take in an infinite amount of information. Where we value speed of acquisition over the slow process of knowledge osmosis.

So what we actually have today are people who know a lot of information at the surface level but cannot stitch the information together into a cohesive whole. Being able to create good abstractions takes a lot of time.

A lot more time than a single person has access to. Thus, you want to leverage the fact that thinkers in the past also spent a lifetime exploring complex topics. Reading a book gives you access to that lifetime of thinking.

However, I have to agree that books are problematic. I don't think humans have the ability to digest all the knowledge that is contained in a single book. It gets exponentially more difficult the more books you read.

I just realized the other day that my physical library has just gone out of control! I have no more bookshelf space and now the books are stored in crates. I have come to accept that I can no longer consume the rich contents of these books.

I am buying books at several orders of magnitude faster than I can actually consume them. I need a better process. That's why I'm looking into the latest developments in NLP as my salvation.

Yes, it's true that the latest knowledge can be found in blogs and youtube videos. It's true that these formats allow you to digest information more efficiently because the chunks are small enough to be digestable.

But if you want to create new knowledge that nobody else has created, then you have to seek a diversity of perspectives. There are plenty of thinkers in the past that most people are unaware of. We only know of the ones whose ideas aligned with the ideas of their time.

But what about all the thinkers who were decades or centuries ahead of their time? Have you read Norbert Wiener who half a century ago was concerned about AI automation and human civilization?

What about C.S. Peirce who a full century ago explored the nature of signs and inference? What about Ludwig Wittgenstein who explored the nature of language and thus human cognition? Are these people blogging or youtubing today?

Neil Patel is a marketer and he seeks a larger audience that perhaps just wants to get things done. But if you are more ambitious, then without a doubt you need to read books. Every difficult topic requires a deep investment in time, a marketer is unfamiliar with this.

You don't learn how to manufacture semiconductors or create vaccines by watching youtube videos and reading blogs. Deep technology is just at a different level of knowledge acquisition that most people are ignorant of.

Every scientist or engineer is familiar with this. You cannot say the same as management and marketing types. These types are under the illusion that knowing the jargon is the same as having a deep knowledge of the underlying concepts. We've met many of these types in our work.

So what Patel is selling you is a shortcut. A get-rich-quick approach to knowledge. A majority of people gravitate to 'fast-food' knowledge. But too much of that can lead to a very unhealthy diet.

I am sure many Q-Anon followers spent a lot of time watching youtube videos, reading blogs and participating in chat rooms. Flat-earthers are also no different. But did they advance their understanding of reality?

It's easy to sound convincing. Heck, even a machine (GPT-3) can sound convincing! It's hard to understand reality. It's hard and it takes a lot of time.