3 ms·

My personal hunch is that the more you read, the better your model of reality is. If you have an interest to a particular time/topic and you've read almost all

My personal hunch is that the more you read, the better your model of reality is. If you have an interest to a particular time/topic and you've read almost all you can find about it you have a better understanding of "something" from a different point of views. Like read all about a particular event in WW2 from all the sides and on different levels (military, economy, social, political). A term coined by Mortimer Adler is "Syntopical Reading", but by deeply exploring a simple concept you can build your knowledge on how the world works. Several benefits from deeply knowing a limited subject: - when you listen people who are "well known" talking stupid shit about a topic you understand that the info you're getting is not always that high and you need to check multiple sources (if you need to make a decision) - you understand complexity better and "survival" bias - you can even bet for fun on a prediction market when you see a stupid narrative getting puffed up (I've made around 1k after the CrowdStrike bet that it wasn't a "hack") But the biggest win is to put more knowledge on your "tree" you've grown from a simple subject to related areas. This mental skill is applicable in almost all complex situations and this might be related to "the wisdom" you're talking about. The downside is the more you know, the more cynical you get with your sources :)

wenc 2y ago
I think reading is necessary but insufficient for wisdom. Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It does provide leverage in that way. However syntopical reading isn’t sufficient to produce good work. Mortimer Adler himself tried doing it (I believe the Syntopicon was a product of syntopical reading) but those works never did well and were soon forgotten. Books encode canonical knowledge and this works in established domains but in a domains without much existing knowledge, taking action in perturbing the world actually produces more useful knowledge. This is why in these spaces it’s important to test ideas in reality and learn from them, rather than only constructing mental models. (We should strive to do both instead of the just latter) Action often produces more information than reading alone. Having ideas is often the easy part — executing on them is the hard part. If Mortimer Adler actually had some gauge on the market before pursuing the very ambitious multi year effort of producing the Synopticon, he might have produced something noteworthy (which he did with the much smaller experiment “How to read a book.” To me, wisdom isn’t about thinking rightly (which is what rationalists hold) but about being able to make good decisions with good judgment.

wenc 2y ago

I think reading is necessary but insufficient for wisdom. Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It does provide leverage in that way. However syntopical reading isn’t sufficient to produce good work. Mortimer Adler himself tried doing it (I believe the Syntopicon was a product of syntopical reading) but those works never did well and were soon forgotten. Books encode canonical knowledge and this works in established domains but in a domains without much existing knowledge, taking action in perturbing the world actually produces more useful knowledge. This is why in these spaces it’s important to test ideas in reality and learn from them, rather than only constructing mental models. (We should strive to do both instead of the just latter) Action often produces more information than reading alone. Having ideas is often the easy part — executing on them is the hard part. If Mortimer Adler actually had some gauge on the market before pursuing the very ambitious multi year effort of producing the Synopticon, he might have produced something noteworthy (which he did with the much smaller experiment “How to read a book.” To me, wisdom isn’t about thinking rightly (which is what rationalists hold) but about being able to make good decisions with good judgment.