We’re quite glad that you read Farnam Street, and we hope we’re always offering you a massive amount of value. (If not, email us and tell us what we can do more effectively.)
But there’s a message all of our readers should appreciate: Blog posts are not enough to generate the deep fluency you need to truly understand or get better at something. We offer a starting point, not an end point.
This goes just as well for book reviews, abstracts, cliff’s notes, and a good deal of short-form journalism.
This is a hard message for some who want a shortcut. They want the “gist” and the “high level takeaways”, without doing the work or eating any of the broccoli. They think that’s all it takes: Check out a 5-minute read, and instantly their decision making and understanding of the world will improve right-quick. Most blogs, of course, encourage this kind of shallowness. Because it makes you feel that the whole thing is pretty easy.
Here’s the problem: The world is more complex than that. It doesn’t actually work this way. The nuanced detail behind every “high level takeaway” gives you the context needed to use it in the real world. The exceptions, the edge cases, and the contradictions.
Let me give you an example.
A high-level takeaway from reading Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, and Slow would be that we are subject to something he and Amos Tversky call the Representativeness Heuristic. We create models of things in our head, and then fit our real-world experiences to the model, often over-fitting drastically. A very useful idea.
However, that’s not enough. There are so many follow-up questions. Where do we make the most mistakes? Why does our mind create these models? Where is this generally useful? What are the nuanced examples of where this tendency fails us? And so on. Just knowing about the Heuristic, knowing that it exists, won’t perform any work for you.
Or take the rise of human species as laid out by Yuval Harari. It’s great to post on his theory; how myths laid the foundation for our success, how “natural” is probably a useless concept the way it’s typically used, and how biology is the great enabler.
But Harari’s book itself contains the relevant detail that fleshes all of this out. And further, his bibliography is full of resources that demand your attention to get even more backup. How did he develop that idea? You have to look to find out.
Why do all this? Because without the massive, relevant detail, your mind is built on a house of cards.
What Farnam Street and a lot of other great resources give you is something like a brief map of the territory.
Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg! Check out the re-enactors, the museum, and the theatre. Over there is the Revolutionary City. Gettysburg is 4 hours north. Washington D.C. is closer to 2.5 hours.
Great – now you have a lay of the land. Time to dig in and actually learn about the American Revolution. (This book is awesome, if you actually want to do that.)
Going back to Kahneman, one of his and Tversky’s great findings was the concept of the Availability Heuristic. Basically, the mind operates on what it has close at hand.
As Kahneman puts it, “An essential design feature of the associative machine is that it represents only activated ideas. Information that is not retrieved (even unconsciously) from memory might as well not exist. System 1 excels at constructing the best possible story that incorporates ideas currently activated, but it does not (cannot) allow for information it does not have.”
That means that in the moment of decision making, when you’re thinking hard on some complex problem you face, it’s unlikely that your mind is working all that successfully without the details. It doesn’t have anything to draw on. It’d be like a chess player who read a book about great chess players, but who hadn’t actually studied all of their moves. Not very effective.
The great difficulty, of course, is that we lack the time to dig deep into everything. Opportunity costs and trade-offs are quite real.
That’s why you must develop excellent filters. What’s worth learning this deeply? We think it’s the first-principle style mental models. The great ideas from physical systems, biological systems, and human systems. The new-new thing you’re studying is probably either A. Wrong or B. Built on one of those great ideas anyways. Farnam Street, in a way, is just a giant filtering mechanism to get you started down the hill.
But don’t stop there. Don’t stop at the starting line. Resolve to increase your depth and stop thinking you can have it all in 5 minutes or less. Use our stuff, and whoever else’s stuff you like, as an entrée to the real thing.
