Pauca sed alta

[nyuanshin]

My resolution last year was to learn more than I did in the previous year. I'm not sure if I accomplished that, but I am sure that what I learned was of greater value. My resolution this year is to carry that further: I want to learn less, but have the few things I learn be very, very important. (Better attention management is at the top of that

Comments

[sethisalive]

Yup, I think there are two kinds of filtering:
(1) external filtering
(2) internal filtering

(1) External filtering involves nuking RSS feeds that rank poorly in terms of information, unsubscribing to useless emails, etc, choosing to not read bad publications or trivial articles. Once filtered, these stimuli are no longer present.

(2) Internal filtering involves making rapid-fire, on-the-go decisions as to the information that you let in your head, that you let your eyes glance over, that you let your attention shift to. Learning when to say "I don't care" while reading an article, getting a feel/intuition for the articles that deserve 5 hours vs. 5 minutes vs. 5 seconds of your attention, really getting bitchy but also somewhat Zen about what you take in and let yourself get involved in. Big, pompous arguments that drive one bat-shit-crazy but really, in the end, don't improve oneself or the person one is arguing with--or if they do, don't teach one much of anything, and at best merely serve to add to one's list of rhetorical devices and repetitive sayings/slogans that one spits out. Learning when to walk away, being confident in what one knows enough to truly be ambivalent about someone else's argument or paper or treatise or article or paper or book or RSS feed entry, because one has bigger battles to fight and bigger things to learn. That kind of filtering.
I like to use the word "one" because it's less pointed, but it sounds so weird!
Filtering! Yes!