[Day 145] A penny of my thoughts: Where can one efficiently learn in 21st century?

 This topic was on my mind for a while, so I decided I'll write down my thoughts on it because nowadays, gathering useful info is undoubtedly more relevant than ever before. Why is that so? I believe that it's because of this assumption.

1. The amount of the total information available to an average person over the course of his life increased dramatically over the last 50 years.

  This, innately, seems like a good thing but every coin has two sides to it. Yes, total information available increased which almost certainly means that the amount of useful information available increased. Fine, but what about the drawback? What drawback you might ask. There is nothing more infuriating than when you are trying to dig up some useful information regarding the topic of your choice but guess what, there is just too information. To get to the valuable information you need to first, in most cases, get through a pile of stinky, smelly garbage that offers no informative value whatsoever but someone just left it there because the internet is a place for everyone hence everyone can write absolutely anything and offer literally no proof that would validate the info they provided. As soon as you realize it, the burden of proof shifts on you as you try to validate (or invalidate) info you are consuming. This "truth-seeking" can quickly turn into a futile exercise because, as you might have noticed, everybody is entitled to their own opinion which is not bad in itself but it results in the internet having a rather miserable noise to signal ratio (useless/useful info ratio).

  The logical follow-up question to the first article would be: How much did this noise to signal ratio increase over the last couple of decades? My uneducated guess would be by a tenfold. Let's say that 50 years ago (before the digital era) we had x info available out of which √x was useful. If we assume that x=100 then 10 (or 10%) was useful (by useful I mean generally helpful and not operating on unsubstantiated claims). Now let's jump back to the present and assume that now we have 10000x info (100 times more) available to us - which is, in my mind fair estimate, because in the past you would hardly receive any info from someone who didn't live in a close proximity to you unless they were popular enough to make it on the radio/TV/publish a book (or you were their relative/acquaintance) - as a result, there was much less info available/circulating around. Nowadays anyone can put basically anything out there (on the internet) in a matter of seconds. To accomplish such a feat, he needs no one's validation/approval, which means that it's easier to generate new info hence the threshold for new information to appear is much lower than before. As a direct consequence of that, exponentially more info is appearing on a daily basis no matter how thoughtless and uninformed might be. Anyways, back to the present where we have 10000x info. √10000 = 100 which means that the total amount of useful information circulating would be around 1% (excluding the repetitive information) and I am still generous here.

  Of course, I basically pulled these number straight out of my behind, but they are sufficient for the purposes of this little thought experiment. The key getaway is that there is much more noise compared to the signal than in the pre-internet era. 

  If we assume that the world is just a gigantic structure of competence hierarchies - the more competent you are, the more prominent position are you likely to find yourself in (it may not always work that way because the world is not an ideal place which means that there is a lot of corruption and other factors detrimental to one's success but let's not go there for now) then the most impactful thing you can possibly do is to attain, absorb and apply relevant information.

  For me personally, the quest for attaining, absorbing and applying relevant information is an absolute centre of the bullseye intellectually (each time you learn a new critical piece of information your worldview changes dramatically which is one of the most fulfilling intellectual experiences I can think of) and morally (with great power comes great responsibility they say - the more info one absorbs, the better is one able to take his wisdom and transform world to the better place for everyone which is the most noble cause everyone with a straight moral compass can strive for). 

  Yeah, I get it. This sweet and idealistic rhetoric is all nice, but all of us know that it always falls apart when one is unable to transform his vision into actionable steps leaving the person in question nihilistic and miserable (because their belief system collapsed). To avoid this deadly trap, we need to start with question formulated something like this: Where can I attain as much relevant information as possible? The question itself is fairly simple but working up a solution to it that is congruent with the reality we live in is astoundingly hard. 

  Anyhow, I would like this article to be sort of a philosophical preface to the next article I intend to publish sometime next week, in which I will address the issue of attaining, absorbing and applying info mainly through the lens of strategies and heuristics I use to generate as much real-world impact as possible while conserving resources as much as possible (no one wants to die of a heart attack in their thirties).

  Anyways, that would be all from me for now, I hope you are having a great day.

  Cheers