7 ms·

I handle it by collecting quotes that tell me to knock it off. I've since started to focus on just the things I really care about: The purpose of knowledge

I handle it by collecting quotes that tell me to knock it off. I've since started to focus on just the things I really care about: The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. ― Aristotle Knowledge isn't free. You have to pay attention ― Richard Feynman "Information is not truth" ― Yuval Noah Harari If I were the plaything of every thought, I would be a fool, not a wise man. ― Rumi Dhamma is in your mind, not in the forest. You don't have to go and look anywhere else. ― Ajahn Chah Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world, but in the process he loses his soul. ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn The wise man knows the Self, And he plays the game of life. But the fool lives in the world Like a beast of burden. ― Ashtavakra Gita (4―1) We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. ― Thomas Merton Saying yes frequently is an additive strategy. Saying no is a subtractive strategy. Keep saying no to a lot of things - the negative and unimportant ones - and once in awhile, you will be left with an idea which is so compelling that it would be a screaming no-brainer 'yes'. - unknown

pwuadi 4y ago
I like this, thanks
marketdev 4y ago
Thank you.
endymi0n 4y ago
I like it, will steal some. I followed the same strategy and always added relevant content to this doc, then forcing myself to read it every day. It‘s a non-attributed mashup of several sources. because it‘s from my personal notes: —- Core Question: Is what I‘m currently doing helpful to my goals? Get Bored. Get Calm. Enjoy boredness. Whatever happens on the front page, I’m never involved. It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system. Breaking News is most often wrong and later corrected by more breaking news. But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book? Following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day. Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow. I have not followed the news for a long time. My life does not seem to be impoverished for it; indeed, I think it has been greatly enhanced. But I haven’t found many other people who are willing to take the plunge. News makes our inner opinion volcano boil and that is toxic! Uncontrolled input prevents rest, relaxation and output. All this massive time that is lost is ultimately YOURS! I am good to myself. I am worth it to myself not to stuff myself with poison! Bad news is toxic for your body: By consuming all of this news (which is nearly all bad news), you’re stressing your body out, weakening its ability to fight off infection, and potentially causing digestive and growth problems. The really bad news is that news consumption is a vicious cycle that’s hard to get out of. Stress weakens your willpower. Without the willpower to put your phone down or turn off your computer, you’re likely to consume more and more news. And so the pattern continues. “We are training our brains to pay attention to crap.” The more a person consumes multiple types of media, the fewer brain cells there were in the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the part of the brain responsible for attention span and moral deliberation. You can no longer concentrate on books and longer articles. Your mind gives up after just a few paragraphs without absorbing any of the content. And you begin to suffer from anxiety. After all, it is also part of freedom of opinion not to have an opinion. Reading the news doesn’t help you change the world for the better. Ignore it or do something. You need to make a complete break. The best way to do this is to push through 30 days of no news at all. By the end of those 30 days, you’ll hopefully reach the point where you don’t feel the urge to peek at the headlines. What do you REALLY want in life? To be really successful at something, you need to dedicate yourself to it fully. Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Beethoven didn’t become greats in their respective fields by scrolling through news feeds every few moments. They simply couldn’t have done, wasting all of that time. —-
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Totally agree. I've also disconnected from everything but the tech news and not missing anything. We had a discussion recently where people were amazed some hadn't heard of the Turkey earthquake 12 hours later. I only learned of it 1 hour before that. But really what does it matter? Anything really important will reach me anyway. And there's nothing I can do about most of it. I also can't care about every single person in the world. Even if I know about bad stuff happening I can't help it. I just read the local paper website once a day now, and that's enough. Anything important like this in Turkey will show up there too. And most of the local news is about stuff that actually affects me. I also don't have a TV subscription anymore. I don't watch anything live, and have zero interest in watching sports so I just had no need for it anymore. Same with social media, if I could still just follow my friends like they used to offer I would, but they don't. They try to make me engage with low quality nonsense which pushes me away. The only interruptions I get now is from instant messaging, but most of the people I know and all group chats I have muted and I just check in on their chats when I feel like it. So no notifications there. Only the most important people get through.
- bojo 4y ago
  > Uncontrolled input prevents rest, relaxation and output. All this massive time that is lost is ultimately YOURS! Love this take. Thanks for saying it, has enriched my day today.
antihero 4y ago
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life” - Socrates
- labrador 4y ago
  That's going in my file!
linkjuice4all 4y ago
I'm surprised to not see Pascal's quote in this list: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" ...but maybe that better sums up OP's issue rather than a solution. Either way you'll need to take steps to make it harder to do the things you're currently doing (e.g. get a dumb phone, set up a firewall rule to block these sites, set a timer) but there might be a deeper underlying issue of having nothing better to do. Perhaps making other aspects of your life more difficult will eat up this idle time while also providing more fulfillment. I've personally found that riding a bike to get food at some place farther away (as opposed to eating at home, ordering food, or just driving somewhere) is an excellent way to detach digitally, get some exercise, and force yourself to see new parts of your town/city. Obviously this doesn't work for everyone but the gist of this is to force yourself to take time to do something unexpected and difficult and find your reward in that instead of reading every HN thread, checking every email, and responding to all the memes your friends send.
- labrador 4y ago
  > "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" I have that one in my quotes file but it's just a big text file and not easily searched by subject. I need to add tags.
- 50 4y ago
  One of my favorite pastimes (which allowed me to have a more fruitful relationship with my computer): Living in the Santa Cruz mountains, sauntering in the woods, swimming in a creek, basking in a meadow, biking down into town for coffee and bookstore scouring, and taking the city bus back up. It's just not the same in the Los Angeles greater area.
  - labrador 4y ago
    The bookstore scouring has sadly gone way downhill in Santa Cruz since the closure of Logo's used books.
    - 50 4y ago
temp0826 4y ago
Sounds like an addictive hobby (:
zzzbra 4y ago
Thank you for this -- adding these to my quotes Anki deck. I would also add to these the TS Elliot quote from his work, the Rock: > “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  I’m curious, how do you use quotes in your anki deck? Do you do a card like “What did TS Elliot say about knowledge?” And have the answer be the quote?
  - schimmy_changa 4y ago
    I'm also curious! If anyone has ideas, please let me know...
  - zzzbra 4y ago
    The approach I take with quotes is more subjective than it is with almost all of my other cards, since it would pointless to really judge whether or not I know some piece of maybe abstruse wisdom, I just rate it on a subjective grading of, how well am I living my life relative to this statement, and if it feels like it's something I'm really lacking I'll fail it or mark it hard. The card has no back, something that I also do for more axiomatic pieces of CS theory as well, where it's too difficult to meaningfully capture the whole idea in many different question-answers.
    - dinkleberg 4y ago
      That seems like a reasonable approach, I’ll have to give that a try.
crosen99 4y ago
Nice list. What helps me: “A preoccupation with the means is a lack of commitment to the end.” In this context, the means is knowledge. And for me, the end is building things. So, I try always to be building something (in my work or avocationally), and the high I get from that helps to resist the craving to know more about how to build things.
bohemian_hobo 4y ago
those are some potent quotes right there
isthisthingon99 4y ago
[dead]
adversaryIdiot 4y ago
It'd be cool if you could provide a brief explanation of what each quote means to you. Quotes can sometimes be hard to interpret when they're out of context.
- labrador 4y ago
  Through self-awareness and self-knowledge comes right thinking, and it is right thinking that will bring peace and joy. - Krishnamurti What they mean to me is to focus on the questions important to me. An easier way to put it is the example of writing a book. For a long time you do a lot of research and collect information. At some point you have to start writing the book which means turning your collection into a story. Once I got in this mode, I stopped "fear of missing out" about things I was never going to learn. There's just too much. My mind is limited. I'm hopeful that AI will help me with this focus.
eBombzor 4y ago
Okay... so what about academic research?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  What about it?
  - eBombzor 4y ago
    What "action" does the knowledge from academic research provide to a grad student?
    - chki 4y ago
      It enables action. Knowledge is not pointless but it is not the end goal. An education is not pointless but it is meant to lead to some action afterwards like designing a house after studying architecture. That action might even be creating more knowledge (both by researching and teaching), if you are thinking about a career in academia. I'm actually not sure whether I fully agree, I think that knowledge can also be a goal in and of itself sometimes.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I think the sentiment is not to avoid learning or reading, but to have a purpose. If you are miserable reading academic research papers in your basement everyday for no reason, I would recommend you reconsider. If you are reading them because you want to cure cancer or get a job, then that's really a different scenario.
50 4y ago
It seems to me distraction hinges on some imaginative falsivity. Kafka, in effect: "Life is a continual distraction which does not even allow us to reflect on that from which we are being distracted."
aloer 4y ago
In the context of quotes I will throw in what I read on reddit the other day: Addiction is giving up everything for one thing, sobriety is giving up one thing for everything Unfortunately knowing quotes is not enough to kick the habit. Too much time spent on reddit and HN :/
- labrador 4y ago
  That's a great quote, probably heard in a meeting
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
whywhywouldyou 4y ago
So the top comment/advice on HN about how to avoid information overload is to collect a list of information to remind you to stop addictively collecting information. Sounds about right.
- goldfeld 4y ago
  I know it's weird but here has been my ANALOG solution to HN information consumption and even to tab overload (a chronic incurable autoimmune disease I acquired when just leaving my teens, during college life, which may have impeded my growth). I write much, sci-fi and always draft some articles (but never publish), so that keeping up with HN is a sort of reference material building activity, other than it I don't go on twitter, IG, reddit, slack, mastodon or whatever IRC channel, so I try to make the most of my constrained addiction, but it's always tough work to clean up a browser tab accumulation, as the Feynman quote quips, it's costly, you have to pay attention: The method involves a paper notebook, which I use whenever I can in lieu of a PC for drafting, taking notes, planning etc. On a two-page spread I start sth like an index by arbitrary useful topics of my current researches. Each line is a one or two word topic, after the word I simply list the HN IDs separated by comma. It's nice to save individual comment threads or whole posts using the same interface. When useful I write a little two word note on top of the number. In this fashion I close dozens or hundreds of tabs and postpone/defer reading the interesting conversations to when I will take action upon it e.g. by writing a short story or poetry or articles. I also use the GTD golden 2-min rule: if I can read and/or take action on a useful discussion or link posted in a few minutes, I do it on the spot and close the HN post forever. Done.
  - whywhywouldyou 4y ago
    This sounds like a reasonable approach, with an explanation on how you personally execute it. The top comment is just a statement, and a very odd one at that, given the context of the original question.
    - mousetree 4y ago
      There’s no need to be dismissive. If these quotes help OP then that’s great. They seem to be helpful to a lot of others here too.
jvm___ 4y ago
Don't listen to your brain, it doesn't even have arms, stop letting it push you into things or hold you back. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMY6dDMx7/ https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMY6dDMx7/
ChocMontePy 4y ago
> The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. > ― Aristotle If the quote works for you, that's all good. But for the other people adding it to their quote list, it's unlikely to be a real Aristotle quote. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle concludes that the highest activity of human life is contemplation or speculative thinking.
zoom6628 4y ago
I try to deal with it by action. But the best thing for me has been running. Get physically away from devices.
zoom6628 4y ago
I try to deal with it by action - try to use what I read. But the best thing for me has been running. Gets me away from the tech.

pwuadi 4y ago

I like this, thanks

marketdev 4y ago

Thank you.

endymi0n 4y ago

I like it, will steal some. I followed the same strategy and always added relevant content to this doc, then forcing myself to read it every day. It‘s a non-attributed mashup of several sources. because it‘s from my personal notes: —- Core Question: Is what I‘m currently doing helpful to my goals? Get Bored. Get Calm. Enjoy boredness. Whatever happens on the front page, I’m never involved. It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system. Breaking News is most often wrong and later corrected by more breaking news. But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book? Following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day. Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow. I have not followed the news for a long time. My life does not seem to be impoverished for it; indeed, I think it has been greatly enhanced. But I haven’t found many other people who are willing to take the plunge. News makes our inner opinion volcano boil and that is toxic! Uncontrolled input prevents rest, relaxation and output. All this massive time that is lost is ultimately YOURS! I am good to myself. I am worth it to myself not to stuff myself with poison! Bad news is toxic for your body: By consuming all of this news (which is nearly all bad news), you’re stressing your body out, weakening its ability to fight off infection, and potentially causing digestive and growth problems. The really bad news is that news consumption is a vicious cycle that’s hard to get out of. Stress weakens your willpower. Without the willpower to put your phone down or turn off your computer, you’re likely to consume more and more news. And so the pattern continues. “We are training our brains to pay attention to crap.” The more a person consumes multiple types of media, the fewer brain cells there were in the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the part of the brain responsible for attention span and moral deliberation. You can no longer concentrate on books and longer articles. Your mind gives up after just a few paragraphs without absorbing any of the content. And you begin to suffer from anxiety. After all, it is also part of freedom of opinion not to have an opinion. Reading the news doesn’t help you change the world for the better. Ignore it or do something. You need to make a complete break. The best way to do this is to push through 30 days of no news at all. By the end of those 30 days, you’ll hopefully reach the point where you don’t feel the urge to peek at the headlines. What do you REALLY want in life? To be really successful at something, you need to dedicate yourself to it fully. Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Beethoven didn’t become greats in their respective fields by scrolling through news feeds every few moments. They simply couldn’t have done, wasting all of that time. —-

wkat4242 4y ago
Totally agree. I've also disconnected from everything but the tech news and not missing anything. We had a discussion recently where people were amazed some hadn't heard of the Turkey earthquake 12 hours later. I only learned of it 1 hour before that. But really what does it matter? Anything really important will reach me anyway. And there's nothing I can do about most of it. I also can't care about every single person in the world. Even if I know about bad stuff happening I can't help it. I just read the local paper website once a day now, and that's enough. Anything important like this in Turkey will show up there too. And most of the local news is about stuff that actually affects me. I also don't have a TV subscription anymore. I don't watch anything live, and have zero interest in watching sports so I just had no need for it anymore. Same with social media, if I could still just follow my friends like they used to offer I would, but they don't. They try to make me engage with low quality nonsense which pushes me away. The only interruptions I get now is from instant messaging, but most of the people I know and all group chats I have muted and I just check in on their chats when I feel like it. So no notifications there. Only the most important people get through.
bojo 4y ago
> Uncontrolled input prevents rest, relaxation and output. All this massive time that is lost is ultimately YOURS! Love this take. Thanks for saying it, has enriched my day today.

antihero 4y ago

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life” - Socrates

labrador 4y ago
That's going in my file!

linkjuice4all 4y ago

I'm surprised to not see Pascal's quote in this list: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" ...but maybe that better sums up OP's issue rather than a solution. Either way you'll need to take steps to make it harder to do the things you're currently doing (e.g. get a dumb phone, set up a firewall rule to block these sites, set a timer) but there might be a deeper underlying issue of having nothing better to do. Perhaps making other aspects of your life more difficult will eat up this idle time while also providing more fulfillment. I've personally found that riding a bike to get food at some place farther away (as opposed to eating at home, ordering food, or just driving somewhere) is an excellent way to detach digitally, get some exercise, and force yourself to see new parts of your town/city. Obviously this doesn't work for everyone but the gist of this is to force yourself to take time to do something unexpected and difficult and find your reward in that instead of reading every HN thread, checking every email, and responding to all the memes your friends send.

labrador 4y ago
> "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" I have that one in my quotes file but it's just a big text file and not easily searched by subject. I need to add tags.
50 4y ago
One of my favorite pastimes (which allowed me to have a more fruitful relationship with my computer): Living in the Santa Cruz mountains, sauntering in the woods, swimming in a creek, basking in a meadow, biking down into town for coffee and bookstore scouring, and taking the city bus back up. It's just not the same in the Los Angeles greater area.
- labrador 4y ago
  The bookstore scouring has sadly gone way downhill in Santa Cruz since the closure of Logo's used books.
  - 50 4y ago

temp0826 4y ago

Sounds like an addictive hobby (:

zzzbra 4y ago

Thank you for this -- adding these to my quotes Anki deck. I would also add to these the TS Elliot quote from his work, the Rock: > “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

dinkleberg 4y ago
I’m curious, how do you use quotes in your anki deck? Do you do a card like “What did TS Elliot say about knowledge?” And have the answer be the quote?
- schimmy_changa 4y ago
  I'm also curious! If anyone has ideas, please let me know...
- zzzbra 4y ago
  The approach I take with quotes is more subjective than it is with almost all of my other cards, since it would pointless to really judge whether or not I know some piece of maybe abstruse wisdom, I just rate it on a subjective grading of, how well am I living my life relative to this statement, and if it feels like it's something I'm really lacking I'll fail it or mark it hard. The card has no back, something that I also do for more axiomatic pieces of CS theory as well, where it's too difficult to meaningfully capture the whole idea in many different question-answers.
  - dinkleberg 4y ago
    That seems like a reasonable approach, I’ll have to give that a try.

crosen99 4y ago

Nice list. What helps me: “A preoccupation with the means is a lack of commitment to the end.” In this context, the means is knowledge. And for me, the end is building things. So, I try always to be building something (in my work or avocationally), and the high I get from that helps to resist the craving to know more about how to build things.

bohemian_hobo 4y ago

those are some potent quotes right there

isthisthingon99 4y ago

[dead]

adversaryIdiot 4y ago

It'd be cool if you could provide a brief explanation of what each quote means to you. Quotes can sometimes be hard to interpret when they're out of context.

labrador 4y ago
Through self-awareness and self-knowledge comes right thinking, and it is right thinking that will bring peace and joy. - Krishnamurti What they mean to me is to focus on the questions important to me. An easier way to put it is the example of writing a book. For a long time you do a lot of research and collect information. At some point you have to start writing the book which means turning your collection into a story. Once I got in this mode, I stopped "fear of missing out" about things I was never going to learn. There's just too much. My mind is limited. I'm hopeful that AI will help me with this focus.

eBombzor 4y ago

Okay... so what about academic research?

s1artibartfast 4y ago
What about it?
- eBombzor 4y ago
  What "action" does the knowledge from academic research provide to a grad student?
  - chki 4y ago
    It enables action. Knowledge is not pointless but it is not the end goal. An education is not pointless but it is meant to lead to some action afterwards like designing a house after studying architecture. That action might even be creating more knowledge (both by researching and teaching), if you are thinking about a career in academia. I'm actually not sure whether I fully agree, I think that knowledge can also be a goal in and of itself sometimes.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think the sentiment is not to avoid learning or reading, but to have a purpose. If you are miserable reading academic research papers in your basement everyday for no reason, I would recommend you reconsider. If you are reading them because you want to cure cancer or get a job, then that's really a different scenario.

50 4y ago

It seems to me distraction hinges on some imaginative falsivity. Kafka, in effect: "Life is a continual distraction which does not even allow us to reflect on that from which we are being distracted."

aloer 4y ago

In the context of quotes I will throw in what I read on reddit the other day: Addiction is giving up everything for one thing, sobriety is giving up one thing for everything Unfortunately knowing quotes is not enough to kick the habit. Too much time spent on reddit and HN :/

labrador 4y ago
That's a great quote, probably heard in a meeting
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

whywhywouldyou 4y ago

So the top comment/advice on HN about how to avoid information overload is to collect a list of information to remind you to stop addictively collecting information. Sounds about right.

goldfeld 4y ago
I know it's weird but here has been my ANALOG solution to HN information consumption and even to tab overload (a chronic incurable autoimmune disease I acquired when just leaving my teens, during college life, which may have impeded my growth). I write much, sci-fi and always draft some articles (but never publish), so that keeping up with HN is a sort of reference material building activity, other than it I don't go on twitter, IG, reddit, slack, mastodon or whatever IRC channel, so I try to make the most of my constrained addiction, but it's always tough work to clean up a browser tab accumulation, as the Feynman quote quips, it's costly, you have to pay attention: The method involves a paper notebook, which I use whenever I can in lieu of a PC for drafting, taking notes, planning etc. On a two-page spread I start sth like an index by arbitrary useful topics of my current researches. Each line is a one or two word topic, after the word I simply list the HN IDs separated by comma. It's nice to save individual comment threads or whole posts using the same interface. When useful I write a little two word note on top of the number. In this fashion I close dozens or hundreds of tabs and postpone/defer reading the interesting conversations to when I will take action upon it e.g. by writing a short story or poetry or articles. I also use the GTD golden 2-min rule: if I can read and/or take action on a useful discussion or link posted in a few minutes, I do it on the spot and close the HN post forever. Done.
- whywhywouldyou 4y ago
  This sounds like a reasonable approach, with an explanation on how you personally execute it. The top comment is just a statement, and a very odd one at that, given the context of the original question.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    There’s no need to be dismissive. If these quotes help OP then that’s great. They seem to be helpful to a lot of others here too.

jvm___ 4y ago

Don't listen to your brain, it doesn't even have arms, stop letting it push you into things or hold you back. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMY6dDMx7/ https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMY6dDMx7/

ChocMontePy 4y ago

> The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. > ― Aristotle If the quote works for you, that's all good. But for the other people adding it to their quote list, it's unlikely to be a real Aristotle quote. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle concludes that the highest activity of human life is contemplation or speculative thinking.

zoom6628 4y ago

I try to deal with it by action. But the best thing for me has been running. Get physically away from devices.

zoom6628 4y ago

I try to deal with it by action - try to use what I read. But the best thing for me has been running. Gets me away from the tech.