The Collector’s Fallacy

Why do we collect stuff?

Gathering useful stuff feels good -> it feels like a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we like and thrive on intellectual stimulation. Hence, storing half the internet as bookmarks give the “feeling” of being on the cutting edge. Just look at my Instapaper, saving “for later” so many articles on AI, Bllockchain. It gives me the feeling that I am saving important material.

Why is collection bad?

We don’t learn and don’t make progress. It actively prevents progress because we feel intimated by the “pile”

Knowing about something is NOT the same as knowing something. The collector persona just makes us sound smart at a very high level in some conversations. It doesn’t give the depth needed to hold a conversation with anyone even remotely interested in the topic. Just filing things doesn’t lead you anywhere. Just storing things does absolutely nothing to your information.

Collectors don’t make progress. On the other hand, we save and save, until the stack grows intimidatingly high, until it becomes unmanageable. After that it gets ignored in the entirety. It is easy to save, hence we have 100x more than we can ever handle.

Saving is a dopamine hit. Similar to ordering something online. Reading / doing / understanding / learning is hard work. The brain wants to take the shortcut to dopamine. Saving and sorting into categories is also an illusion - that we are doing some tangible work. But no, nothing is happening.

So we have established: collecting doesn’t do anything. It does not magically increase our knowledge.

So what can we do about it? Short cycles of deliberate learning

End goal is to increase knowledge.

Knowledge can only be increased by deliberate learning.
Deliberate learning happens by reading effectively.
Reading effectively means we need to extract the ideas in the text and change our knowledge permanently through it.
And that can only happen by writing down what you learnt.

If you read without taking notes:

You will forget. Guaranteed. And then it’s like you never read anything. So in the long run it is absolutely stupid to not take notes because you rather had not read anything at all.
It’s only rational to take notes, because it will become an extension to your mind and memory. Instead of burdening your short term working memory, it becomes an extension to your knowledge. You can expand your knowledge permanently only by storing notes permanently. It’s the only way to create real, sustainable knowledge.
You will need to go through original source material again and again. If you need to refer secondary sources again and again, you can be sure that you didn’t do a good job the first time.

A way to short-circuit this collection addiction is to create shorter cycles of Research -> Reading -> Knowledge Assimilation, than long ones. With every full cycle, you learn more and the next cycle can be more targeted. Plus, it is a powerful way to circumvent our innate addiction to gather piles of stuff.

But this requires discipline and some actionable limits. E.g.

Do research for one hour only, no more // can be much smaller in the LLM world
Go through the material until the stack is empty
Review the cycle, too much too little? did you actually learn something new etc
Change the time limit as appropriate