reading is important. reading provides information. information structured is knowledge. knowledge used correctly is wisdom. wisdom lets you make your and others’ life better.

what i’ve learnt about reading and consuming information in general is that an important factor about how useful that information turns out is the timing of consuming that information. there are books that are supposed to be read during a phase of life. i read a lot of appraise for the “four thousand weeks” book and read it but i don’t remember anything from it now - i think because i read it during just the start of my career. i didn’t have enough information about careers and the problems i’d face and so i was basically reading a “how-to solve” book before i’d even encountered any problems.

my point basically being that some information stays with you a lot longer and actually helps you change becuase it turns out to be the right information at the right time. and so most of it is luck.

i read an interesting substack post titled Getting the Crab to the Beach, which basically talks about environment mismatch. an excerpt from the post :-

In my musings on mental health, I frequently return to images of animals radically out of place: crabs in the canopy, otters in the desert, armadillos in the arctic. What would we learn by studying such animals? One obvious lesson is that if we wanted to help them, we should send them home. It would be a waste of time—or worse—to focus on what they were thinking, feeling, or doing, since these would be the downstream outputs of an animal in the wrong environment. For example, we could draw all sorts of conclusions by watching a crab scrabble at the smooth surface of a tree branch. Perhaps there is food just under the bark. Maybe it’s a mating ritual or territorial instinct. The correct explanation, of course, would be that the crab is trying, unsuccessfully, to burrow in the sand. Yet we’d have a hell of a time figuring this out if we didn’t already know that crabs belong on the beach.

evolutionary mismatch is the concept that we humans now live in a world that we weren’t evolved for. technology has progressed exponentially faster than what evolution can cope up with. this metaphor about non human animals being in the wrong enviorenment hit perfectly. its so obvious when we think about this scenario for non-human animals but not so when we think about it for us humans.

bayesian updating now has me place even more importance on luck. i still think the greatest roll of dice of a human’s life is their birth - where and what family they were born to.

but far more intelligent scientists have been fooled by their brains and so there is a high probability i might be wrong.

actionable tools

  1. change your environment when nothing else seems to work.
  2. when facing a choice, a useful heuristic is thinking what would be better for what humans are evolved for.