Quality over quantity

Quality over quantity

Source: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-06-25-knowledge-presence/

The broad theme of this presentation is to conduct ourselves in a manner that is purposeful and considerate. We want to retain focus in order to perform at the best of our abilities. We wish to be honest to omit or avoid the superficialities that have no longer-term value in our life.

Our goal is to be present, otherwise we misuse the finite resource we have at our disposal, which is our attention span and, by extension, our time.

Rather than let ourselves be held hostage by our own idolisations or avatarisations, we diligently approach matters with a critical eye. The intent is to put an end to any tendencies of showing off, of calling for needless attention, of doing something for the sake of the performance in the confines of a social mini-game.

I am of the opinion that we are successfully building up our knowledge base when we can describe its individual items in our own words. When we put in the effort, when we spend quality time substantiating our thoughts, we practice the skills of knowledge retention.

By contrast, whenever we introduce too much automation and too much reliance on technological pampers, we risk becoming lazy and complacent, because we no longer put in the requisite work. If, for instance, our notes consist of an excerpt and a link to the original source, we encounter the problems I already mentioned: the notes do not help our future self extract valuable insights from them.

Knowledge has to be accessible, both conceptually and technologically. Bad notes are inaccessible at the level of their content. Yet there is a strong case to be made that even good notes can become bad ones when the underlying medium is not conducive to longer-term storage. If we can only access our notes via a specialised app or an online service, the chances of data loss are quite high. Our knowledge base thus lacks resilience. It is not portable and our future self may not be able to benefit from it.

Too many features often burden us with “mental dependencies”, with cognitive load, especially if we are not well trained in parrhesia and in maintaining presence. Instead of letting us focus on the task of writing, featurism seeks our attention. Perhaps to add some markup that is not really necessary, or to make certain syntactic constructs look a bit prettier, or even to use that technologically impressive but ultimately useless gimmick that would surely impress our peers.

Just as we ought to be selective with the information we gather, we must to be mindful of the tools we use. Too much convenience may come with the hidden cost of occupying our attention span. We do not wish that.

In conclusion, we start by taking care of the one brain we have. We want to develop the disposition of openness, dubitativeness, and inquisitiveness. This disposition is a prerequisite to knowledge and learning. We also need to improve our focus, to always be present. We do that by removing distractions, curing our addictions, and being honest about our choices, actions, and goals. The technology we choose must be consistent with those qualities. We want it to be an extension of who we are, not an arrangement that holds us hostage to the interests of some business or, generally, that forces us to deviate from our path.