Simpler, not simple

Mostly Useful / № 4

Too much content bombards us. Much of it so ephemeral, we forget it mere moments after consumption.

There has been an exponential decrease in our capacity to retain information as its availability has increased. We "google read" everything, scrolling, skimming the surface.

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Now you expect me to accuse our society of being shallow and lazy. You think, "He's about to call out the Millenials." This essay's setup sounds like a "digital detox," read more books, turn off YouTube, and be more mindful kind of article. 

Instead, I offer a meditation on navigating this rapidly evolving world, all of its content, and perhaps how to leverage it for our good. 

What should we think of all this information? All this content? Is all of it so evanescent, meaningless, and fleeting?

When the Bible was translated into the people's language, the elite feared what the common man would do to the sacred texts. Read: they feared losing control over the ignorant, trusting peasants.

When radio was popularized, "People will quit reading books," we cried out. That didn't happen. Radio paved the way for expansive creative expression, unheard of in terms of audience size. It was compelling in a way that uniquely unveiled the power of what a story could do to people.

Television is invented, and people panic. "It will melt our brains!" This could not be further from the truth. Which is worse: a child who receives little stimulation, little interaction, or a child who receives little stimulation, little interaction, and is parked in front of Sesame Street hours on end. Neither are ideal situations, but one has a preferable outcome. It is a fact that there are many households that neglect to nurture their children properly. At least these children have access to something of substance. It wasn't so long ago that children were ignored, and that was that. Poorly nurtured and poorly educated. Not a very promising beginning, even in America. 

Television has categorically made us more intelligent. 

More accurately, television removed more barriers to knowledge. These screens opened us up to our highest potential.

Now we have the internet and technology that gives us access to stories, knowledge, wisdom, art, and most importantly, each other. 

Naturally, we need to think extremely carefully about how we might use this tool more effectively. I agree that the Google Effect reveals indicators that we should watch very closely. Mindlessly doomscrolling or just disconnecting for countless hours is absolutely harmful, wasteful, and disgusting.

Might there be a third way between addiction and abstinence? 

When we scroll Google or yell at Siri to obtain an answer to a question, I no longer believe this is because we can't pay attention or because we're lazy.

We are searching for relevance. We want knowledge, wisdom, or a story.

We have become digital foragers. We have always foraged. It's in our nature, like play or music. Foraging yields food; food sustains the community. Shifting from plants (high effort, low-caloric return) to meat (high effort, high-caloric value) is what thrust humanity forward and compelled the creation of low-effort high-yield food sources. 

The internet is the same as a mammoth. 

But instead of a mammoth, it's information. Instead of meat, it's media. We are digital foragers looking for low-effort, high-yield. We're searching and scrolling for relevance because relevance is more likely to indicate value. We've become extremely good at this. We adapted to the internet so quickly that Google, et al. were forced to modify their algorithms so that they could keep making money off us. The way we used the internet surprised them. We weren't searching. We were asking. The internet unleashed our curiosity while also removing the burden of keeping it in our heads.

Even with the way algorithms operate now, we're amazingly adept at filtering out SEO-farm "relevant content" and discovering precisely the information of value, even while using tangentially related semantic terms.

If we can find what is relevant, then we have something of value. The value of an idea indicates its potential to enrich us. 

When we have discovered something valuable, we do what we have always done: share. 

Just like berries we've foraged, or a mammoth we took down, we share with the community so that we are all benefitted.

Troublingly, ephemeral content (low-effort, low-yield; thus frequent consumption and high quantities) is currently more accessible than substantive content. Furthermore, as an unfortunate consequence of how rapidly we've adapted our mechanisms for comprehension, many of us have difficulty navigating older work that may be too lengthy or complex for us to digest and adequately grasp. Furthermore, retention is more difficult, because we outsource our memory to our search engines.

What society needs is not generation. We need iteration.

Over the millennia, we have amassed countless ideas, wisdom, knowledge, virtues, and principles for living the best life possible. We must take all of this knowledge and distill it into its essential, elemental truth. We must do this at scale.

We discover at a young age that learning is about passing grades on a test, and education ends with graduation. 

Now, with unmitigated access to knowledge, the future belongs to the curious. 

All of what humanity has ever learned or created is accessible. Now, we must make it attainable and palatable. Indeed, as the world increases in complexity, articulation and brevity become more necessary. Vital, even.

As Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

We are no longer able to retain vast amounts of information about a multitude of topics. If we want to know something, we search for it. If we're going to learn something, we learn it through experiences and emotions. This is how we create our maps. 

As our world becomes more complex, our ability to navigate complexity does not scale equally. 

Therefore, distilling complexity into essential, elemental components becomes crucial to our future success. By removing the need to retain copious amounts of information, we can focus instead on being emotionally intelligent, self-aware community-focused citizens.

Here is an example: our immune system is very, very complex. In my view, it is more important to know how to be healthy than it is to know anything at all about your immune system.

Up until recently, I believed I knew more about the immune system than the average person. Then I began working for a microbiology company. Then COVID-19 hit. Then I started working for a nutritional supplements company. Now I'm reading books, white papers, research articles, and other literature about how our immune system actually functions. And after all that, I still feel as though I know so little.

I do not think science should be made less complex. If you're a medical professional, your world is necessarily complicated! If you are everyone else, here is all you need to know about immunity:

Eat clean, whole foods, take a walk daily, drink lots of water, take good supplements, keep a thriving social community, and be charitable. 

Simpler, but not simple.

You don't need to know much more. If you're curious, you have limitless knowledge available. For everyone else, an articulated, brief essay will do just fine. Get back to understanding yourself.

This may seem like reductionism or oversimplification. I argue that if an idea can't be distilled down and articulated simply, you either don't understand it, or it's not a very good idea. Simplicity does not mean "easy." We need to articulate the collective knowledge we've amassed so that it becomes fully optimized and valuable.

The availability of relevance and communal utility is where information earns its value.

There is enough content in the world. We don't need more content creators; we need more intellectual, articulate interpreters. The objective should be to orient ourselves away from being "original" and more towards optimal utility. Removing barriers enables us to focus on understanding our emotions within our experiences to better navigate our complex world. 

If we fail to remove the barriers of complexity and at scale, I predict all but the elite will succumb to the convenience the internet provides. We will neglect the limitless potential of what the internet offers because knowledge is out of reach. Instead, we will devolve into self-indulgent addicts.

This is why I whole-heartedly believe we must encourage each other to use this tool for our edification. This is why I'm contributing my voice and will continue to do so. 

We are obligated to sharpen this tool and allow it to sharpen us. 

Just as the first gatherer became a hunter, holding a spear instead of a trowel, downing a mammoth and unwittingly opening his community to achieve its highest potential, we must take responsibility to use this powerful tool to think. If he hadn't done that, I wouldn't be able to bang away my thoughts on this piece of plastic and metal, putting it out there for whoever, whenever. Who can say how the future will be shaped by what we do with this tool? We can only say that it will be shaped. We have no idea where this path will lead, but we know it will lead somewhere.

Please do everything you possibly can do to lead us somewhere good.