During the last US election cycle and its aftermath, I remember being glued to news sites, reading the latest updates from multiple sources, and becoming an armchair expert on election projections, voting nuances, and the vagaries of the US justice system. My head was spinning and I felt horrible. Going on social media was a nightmare watching everyone’s collective meltdowns. My moods were affected and I wasn’t able to concentrate the way I usually could. Many of us felt this way.
Similarly, after the January 6 terrorist attack on the US capitol, I once again gorged myself on news outlets, with a similar outcome. There finally came a time when I finally had to distance myself from reading or watching news.
The times when I’ve stepped away from media and spent my time reading books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been characterized by much better moods, more sound mental health, lots of ideas and connections between ideas, and the cultivating of good habits not just related to reading.
Why is it that dealing with two types of media can have such a different psychological result? Information triage is a challenge, and can be overwhelming when dealing with news at difficult times. But why is it that the same level of information saturation can be rewarding when dealing with knowledge acquisition?
Daniel Kahneman, Andrew Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser explore why humans are so bad at decision-making and identifying information in Noise: How to Overcome the High, Hidden Costs of Inconsistent Decision Making. It turns out that when people are confronted with a large amount of information, they fall victim to both noise and bias when trying to understand and make decisions from it:
When people consider errors in judgment and decision making, they most likely think of social biases like the stereotyping of minorities or of cognitive biases such as overconfidence and unfounded optimism. The useless variability that we call noise is a different type of error. To appreciate the distinction, think of your bathroom scale. We would say that the scale is biased if its readings are generally either too high or too low. If your weight appears to depend on where you happen to place your feet, the scale is noisy. A scale that consistently underestimates true weight by exactly four pounds is seriously biased but free of noise. A scale that gives two different readings when you step on it twice is noisy. Many errors of measurement arise from a combination of bias and noise. Most inexpensive bathroom scales are somewhat biased and quite noisy.
What happens when you fall victim to both bias and noise when reading the news multiple times, every day? Here’s Nassim Taleb in Antifragile (p. 126) :
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales at your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to .5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.
Overdoing media consumption can also cause late-night eating binges and distort our sense of time, not to mention political radicalization. Fortunately, you can go on an information diet, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff provides some useful steps on how to break the cycle.
Reading lots of books can provide the opposite effect and fuel our knowledge, creativity, and passion about a subject. And there are lots of ideas on how to make this happen.
Morgan Housel’s strategy is to start lots of books, but having a strong filter so you only finish the ones that are genuinely good, and resonate with you:
Years ago I heard Charlie Munger say “Most books I don’t read past the first chapter. I’m not burdened by bad books,” and it stuck with me. Reading is a chore if you insist on finishing every book you begin, because the majority of books are either a) adequately summarized in the introduction, b) not for you, or c) not for anyone. Grinding your way to the last page of these books – a habit likely formed early in school – can turn reading into the equivalent of a 10-hour work meeting where nothing gets done and everyone is bored. And once you see reading through that lens, your willingness to pick up another book wanes.
Which, of course, is tragic. “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them,” said Mark Twain. Every smart person I know is a voracious reader who also says “every smart person I know is a voracious reader.” There are so few exceptions to this rule it’s astounding. College tuition at $25,000 a year comes out to roughly $100 per lecture. Good books – sometimes written by the same professor – can be purchased for fifteen bucks and can offer multiple times as much life-changing insight.
The conflict between these two – most books don’t need to be read to the end, but some books can change your life – means you need two things to get a lot out of reading: Lots of inputs and a strong filter.
Tyler Cowen’s advice is similar:
The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago. Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book. Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.
Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think. They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs. "It took me 44 years to read this book" is not a bad answer to many questions about reading speed.
And when you’ve read a large amount of books in a short time, you start to make connections between ideas. It’s as if the noise and bias that are so problematic with reading news can actually become advantageous when reading books. I’ve already posted this quote from Alan Jacobs in a previous article, but it bears repeating again because of its relevance:
When you approach the text from the past on its own terms and for its own sake, it becomes a kind of white noise in relation to present concerns. Your attention to the long ago and far away makes the tumult and the shouting die, the captains and the kings depart. (Allusion alert!) It’s when the current environment lies outside the scope of your attention, when you neither seek nor expect any connection to it, that you make room for random resonances to form.
And when they do form, you begin to discern the really key features of your moment more clearly. An image begins to appear where there had been formlessness. Useless and pernicious statements start to recede into the background as you perceive them for what they are. The salient and the helpful points move to the forefront of your attention.
If you can apply the dense, interconnected, and contradictory information from the books you read to the situation of your life, patterns and purposes can begin to emerge. You still get brainwashed in a way, but with great ideas that you can apply to everyday life, and improve yourself in mindful ways. The process that starts with beginning lots of books and finishing only the good ones continues with forming parallels between new ideas you’ve come into contact with, and then using this information to improve your life. Better yet, use these connections between information to create something and give something back to the vast information ecosystem.
I used to set reading goals for every year, but never completed them. I reserve the right to go through periods where I devour books voraciously or where I savour them slowly over time. You can find a list of books I’ve read so far in 2021 here.
(Image courtesy of John Michael Thomson on Unsplash)