Yesterday I read an article about Twitter as a “global town square” or rather that it isn’t – you should read it.
There is one passage that caught my attention though and it is not directly related to Twitter – it is about the Quakers and how they think things through:
Permit me a weird turn here. I became interested this year in how Quakers deliberate. As a movement, Quakers have been far ahead of the moral curve time and again — early to abolitionism, to equality between the sexes, to prison reform, to pressuring governments to help save Jews from the Holocaust. That is not to say Quakers have gotten nothing wrong, but what has led them to get so much right?
The answer suggested by Rex Ambler’s lovely book “The Quaker Way” is silence. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members “sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.” If they must decide an issue collectively, “they will wait in silence together, again, to discern what has to be done.” There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. “To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper,” he writes. “We have to let go our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”
My engineering mind immediately sees this as the ratio of information streaming to information processing: a ratio that we should optimize for individually and yes, we obviously use too much smartphone and social media (unregretted user-minutes is not the best metric).
A few things about this ratio: it is not fixed by age or anything like that – it is unique for every individual and his/her compression progress, needs; nevertheless, it doesn’t stop me from drawing a few hypotheses (and I am omitting here the issue of information quality):
- Young minds naturally need a high (>1) ratio
- This ratio should be decreasing with age
- At societal level, right now this ratio is way too high – if we decreased it, it would probably also result in higher information quality
Relatedly, Holden Karnofsky has an article about reading books vs. engaging with them which makes one ponder more about this ratio.
Personally, I have 3067 to-read books on my Goodread list at the moment – conservatively, at 10 hours per book, that’s 3.5 years of just reading – there is no chance I will read all of them, let alone have time to process, retain and apply this knowledge. This makes me way more focused on what I read: each book is a significant time investment and in a lot of cases the signal-to-noise ratio is low – in most of the cases, it makes more sense taking a walk and thinking, the Nietzschean way.
The bottom line is simple: be wary of the information that you consume and have time to synthesize it. The latter point is especially important collectively: instead of heated debates, maybe we should debate in silence.
Go the Quaker way.
