Our Journey, Day 55

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ [[Taleb]]

https://writing.bobdoto.computer/inspired-destruction-how-a-zettelkasten-explodes-thoughts-so-you-can-have-newish-ones/ [[Zettelkasten]]

I pasted a couple of urls into my daily note. I'm not sure if I believe I'm going to go back to them, but I tagged them, so they will appear in linked notes if I do a search on those terms in the future. This has me thinking about things that only very lightly touch on my retrenchment-inspired journey (it's day 55, by the way!), but may be relevant to how I organize my time, going forward.

As part of my participation in Substack, I have subscribed to a lot of people's feeds. I get a lot of notifications that the hundreds of people I read have posted something new. It's interesting that my book club is currently working our way through Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book. The authors were sort-of old-school keepers of the flame of the European Enlightenment. Adler was the creator of the Great Books Discussion Course and had a lot of influence on generations of teachers and students. So it's not surprising they focused maybe a bit excessively on squeezing every drop of value out of canonical texts. While the techniques they discuss (I'll be reviewing each chapter in a post in my Note-Making section) are valuable, there's also a lot of value, especially today, in processing incoming information quickly and efficiently, to find the pearl in the basket of oysters. So I'm beginning to put together a process, which I'll describe when I nail it down.

A related train of thought to this one I've been having is about the value in posts, podcasts, articles, videos, and even books I consume. I mentioned yesterday that I think sometimes you need to kick back and watch a movie. Then I started wondering why. Similarly, what is it about two or three hour podcasts? Why have they become so popular? Very few of them are serving up ideas I feel compelled to write down and pursue, every minute. In some cases I get one or two good ideas that I can integrate into other trains of thought I'm pursuing. In rare cases, I discover something new that spurs a whole new train of thought. A lot of the time though, I'm not having that experience. So why do I still enjoy these media?

I wonder if it relates to the idea I've been pursuing lately, about narrative? This has come up several times in the last few weeks in the book club discussions. Chris Aldrich is pursuing ideas about orality and the way knowledge and insight was communicated and passed down the generations before the age of writing (meaning throughout most of human history, if we only had records of it!). Last weekend we talked about the mnemonic forms of epic poetry like Homer's. I think Chris would say the transition to writing damaged people's ability to remember and killed off a bunch of memory techniques that we only dimly remember even existed. I wonder whether the one thing that survived that transition to literacy and was perhaps actually enhanced was narrative.

Story seems to drive everything. Scientific discovery, political campaigns, personality, fame, and especially history. Actually, nearly all of the social sciences are built on stories. That's typically what comes out of field work in anthropology, not tables and charts. Psychological theories, even neuroscience, tell stories about what might happen when a person is in a particular state of mind. Economics often can't distinguish between the models (stories) it creates and the reality it tries to apply them to. And even quants like Naseem Taleb who are focused on an esoteric topic like "tail events" need to describe concepts like fragility to people using illustrative stories.

I listened yesterday to a relatively recent episode of Tim Ferris's podcast, where he interviewed Taleb. I didn't really learn anything new in it, that I hadn't already seen in Taleb's books. But it was still an enjoyable use of my time. Why? I suppose partly because it's fun to listen to interesting people talk with each other. It's a chance to review some of those ideas in a slightly different format. To see if they hold up to questions. But I think it's also a bit about personality, which I think might be the human equivalent of narrative. Similarly, when I listened to Eric Weinstein's nearly three-hour description of his theory of Geometric Unity, the story of the disputes he has had with other physicists helped me make (some) sense of the theory. When there's a narrative associated with an analysis, we seem to believe we understand it better.

I remember when I first listened to the audio versions of Taleb's books. The ideas in them (the power of randomness, Black Swans, convexity, and anti-fragility) were new and interesting. But I think they were significantly enhanced by both the stories Taleb told to illustrate them (which went back to the ancient philosophers) *and* to the strange, off-beat nature of the narrator himself. A big part of what sells Taleb's ideas, I think, is Taleb. Similarly, how many dumb things does Joe Rogan say, that if your drunk buddy said, you'd ignore. But because Joe is an interesting guy, people listen. He can rattle on for two or three hours and people enjoy the experience. Personally, I can't devote that much time to just being entertained, so I usually only listen to podcasts where he's talking to someone who already interests me. But then I do suspect that he's going to take the discussion someplace a typical interviewer wouldn't, so it's more interesting. I'm probably missing some good content, but I don't feel I have the time to invest.

In my mind, this brings me back to thoughts about what I am trying to do with these posts and videos. Today's installment seems a bit more distant than others from the journey from retrenchment. But maybe it's more reflective of the journey toward whatever's next. In any case, I'll probably expand on these thoughts over time. Maybe here, or maybe in another space.