Hey, everyone. Welcome to non trivial. I'm your host, Sean McClure. Many of us are avid readers because reading helps us learn about important topics and more importantly, compels us to create things ourselves. But today's, nonfiction is loaded with so many references and footnotes that there isn't much room left for the author's authentic opinion.
I argue that many create readers are researching themselves out of their opinion, leaving us with dry commentary devoid of what matters the author's rich and messy experiences. I argue that we need the organic mess as much as any rationalized arguments, and that this holistic and imperfect form of communication is what gives us high quality information that has meaning. Let's get started. You David Readers. I don't know.
I'm guessing just based on the type of people that might be kind of interested in the stuff that I talk about, you probably read on a pretty regular basis. It might not be a ton of books. You might be a fast reader, you might be a slow reader. Maybe in between, maybe you go to the library and get books. Maybe you do it on your device once in a while.
It's not always easy to find time to read, but most of us like to pick up a book once in a while and get through it and read it, because that's how we stay up to date on topics, and that's how we can kind of know what's going on. And reading isn't everything, right? I think it's more important to create than to consume, although I do believe you need both. I think I talk about this all the time. We should be building things, creating things.
That's really where your philosophy of life can come from. That's where you understand how the world works. I don't know that reading books is so much about understanding how the world works. However, I think that consumption is required because it can motivate us, it can make us aware of what's possible. And it can also give you, obviously, information about different topics.
If you're reading about the potential for war between the United States and China, or if you're reading about rituals and the history of how that has played out with symbolism throughout human history, if you're reading about the importance of maybe the future is going to be more analog as opposed to the usual digital future that we hear about things like this. These are interesting. And obviously I'm talking about nonfiction as opposed to fiction.
Fiction is also important, I think, because the patterns that appear in fiction that you might read about can be useful, can be real. There are things that you can relate to, you can strike those analogies between them. So obviously there is kind of a download of information when we read.
But I think the real purpose of reading above all is just to compel us to hopefully go create our own things, whether that's writing our own book or writing blog posts or getting on podcasts and having conversations or writing software or building social programs, whatever it is, I think we should be building.
But I think to have an awareness of what's going on in the world and to see how other people are doing it and to look upon the arguments that other people are making in their books, I think that's important. So I think reading is important. I think we should be doing a fair amount of reading on a regular basis. And I think reading is in many ways better than going to the movie or watching television.
Reading forces your mind to create the images, right, to kind of struggle a little bit to make sure that you comprehend and understand the text that you are reading. You kind of create those worlds in your mind and it's that ability to kind of being forced to create, rather it's that need to create as you consume that really imprints the information effectively in your mind.
I think back in the day I'm a little bit older, one of the first video game systems to come out was I guess what we call normal Nintendo, right? The NES kind of the first Nintendo system. And it was largely two dimensional. It didn't really have a three dimensional aspect to it, right? It was just a flat screen.
And then you compare that to the video games today and you've got all this three dimensions and these sounds and you got like the fog and the mist and the explosions going off and these big battles and it's very epic to look at the video games today using their graphics cards and their really sophisticated technology to create a lot of realism to the game. But there's something lost in that, right?
Because when you do that immersive kind of three dimensionalism, you are no longer required to kind of create in your mind the possibilities. And some of the know I think like a game like Transylvania or something or Metroid, some of these older Nintendo games where you just had the kind of the two dimensional screen and you had to kind of imagine what that world was like and it added this element of mystery to it.
So I think whenever your mind is forced to create, right, because the medium that you're consuming is not giving it all to you, right? And I think there's a big benefit to that. And even in learning, you think about a lot of the technologies that come out for education, and they're really going to kind of hold the hand of the student along the way, and they're going to visualize every concept and they're going to pick up on the parts that you're weak.
And then maybe it uses artificial intelligence to kind of come in on those weak parts and strengthen. And I think there's definitely some good to that. We like visualizations, we like intuitive descriptions. I think to some extent we need that to learn. But you don't want to lose the struggle. You open that calculus book and you're looking at these boring formula and it's kind of two dimensional, right?
But if you are forced to struggle through it and to create those images in your mind and rotate them in your mind and understand the concept, it's that struggle that really imprints the information that you're after. So anyway, where was I going with this? When it comes to books, I think it's good to read, it's good to consume. I think books are better in many ways than movies and television shows because it's not given all to you, it's just kind of the text.
And then you have to create the three dimensions in your mind. And I think that's really important. But again, it's not so much just to get the information. It's to be compelled to hopefully go create yourself, to get motivated to see the mystery in what you're reading and then to maybe to be part of that journey somehow, or however you want to say that. But I have an issue with a lot of books that are out today. I do a decent amount of reading. It's mostly nonfiction.
I do read some fiction, but mostly nonfiction. That's just where I'm at. I enjoy that. I kind of like to hear people's or read people's opinions about what's going on in the world and just have some awareness and again, be compelled to talk about things and to build things that are hopefully contribute in some sense to the solutions to things that are out there. Right. I want to build as well. So it's kind of fun to just read a lot and get compelled to do that.
But a lot of the books today, I find are kind of works of collation. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of research that goes into what is being written which sounds normal, like if people want to make an argument, they're going to research the topic and then they're going to assemble that research into a specific order and then that becomes the argument. Right. That becomes essentially the narrative of the book.
So when you collate, you're basically gathering information and then you're structuring it or you're ordering it in a specific way so that it makes sense. Right. And I kind of take issue with the degree to which this is happening in a lot of nonfiction books. And I think this isn't just about books. Like, this is a broader kind of this has implications for life in general. Right. So I'm using the books as an example.
The book writing, how I take issue with it, but I think it reflects something that's happening in society, how we've become essentially addicted to this notion of if you want to present something to someone, if you want to produce something, then you need to really go research it. You need to really back up what you're saying, and then you need to structure that into a good structure. Then you present it. Now, on its face, that doesn't sound bad. And it's not bad, actually.
I mean, I think there should be a decent amount of research that goes into the things that we make. Right. You want to back up what you're saying? I've talked about this in the Facts and Logic episode. I've talked about this a number of times. You shouldn't just kind of blab out an opinion that isn't backed up because then you haven't really thought about it. Right.
But if you take a nonfiction book today, I find that they are just littered with references and footnotes and extra notes at the back of the book. And so much that when I read the book, I think, okay, but tell me what you think. In other words, I feel that a lot of authors today are in the nonfiction space, are kind of researching their way out of their opinion right now. You could say, yeah, but research still goes along with an opinion.
I mean, if I have an opinion, I want to back it up, I'm going to go research to do it, so I'm just going to back up what I say. Correct. That is true. But if you research the crap out of what you're doing so that almost every second sentence has a reference to some article or to some study that was done, eventually you kind of research your way out of an opinion. It's not even you. I find that it's not authentic. You're getting a lot of work out there.
That doesn't really seem like the authentic experience of the author. It's more just someone who decided to collate a bunch of research together and bring it together in a way that more or less makes sense, as though that's doing a service to society. Now, I'm going to keep saying this throughout this episode because people tend to think dualistically in black and white terms. I'm not saying don't do research.
You should do some research, and what you're saying should be backed up to a certain amount. But you have to breathe life into what you're doing. It still has to be your experience. And heaven forbid, you might even have some mistakes in there or some things that don't seem reconciled, and they're not really mistakes per se.
You shouldn't say blatantly wrong things, but often mistakes are just kind of things that are in juxtaposition to maybe the well established consensus or something like that. In Heaven forbid, you had maybe something that kind of rubbed against the grain a little bit. I mean, that's real. That's life. So let's just recap what I'm talking about in this episode. At first I said we read, and it makes sense to read because we can learn about the world.
But I think the real purpose to reading books is to become compelled to go do things ourselves, right? We get motivated. We understand that people have built businesses or done things politically or whatever it is, and we get kind of compelled to maybe build our own version of something like that. Whatever it is, it's good to be triggered in a good way to go do your own thing.
And I think that's why it's good to consume and books is a particularly good way to consume that because you have to create that world in your own mind. And I think it's particularly motivating to do so. And then I said, but I have an issue. If you're an avid reader like me, and you read a decent amount, if you look at the nonfiction, I find that a lot of it is just kind of collated research that's been put together to such an extent.
Like, it's so researched and so referenced and so footnoted that there doesn't seem to be any of the author there. It's kind of like it was just, again, a work of collation. And I don't think that's what any form of nonfiction is really supposed to be. Now, maybe academic research, yes, where you have to be really rigorous and really formal with what you're saying and everything's laid out. But that's not what a book is supposed to be. A book is supposed to be a journey.
It's supposed to be part of the author's experience. It's supposed to have opinion in there which may to some people be wrong. And I think that's okay. And so I think this is a broader comment on what is kind of happening in society, where a lot of the work that people produce is kind of enamored with research to such an extent that there's no life left in it, there's no genuine opinion.
And I think that's problematic because I don't think that a bunch of research really has the same quality of information, doesn't have the same information content as something like a conversation you would have if you went to coffee with someone. Okay, so let's compare those two. Let's think of the nonfiction book that someone wrote and they put together everything's very well researched.
Maybe they're talking about things on human species and so they're going to go, well, evolution shows this and studies show this. And then they did DNA over here, and then the genetics show this. And then there was a psychologist that came up with this. And here's a paper, and here's a paper, and reference, reference, reference.
And everything is kind of very well referenced, well cited, and you got extra footnotes and you got notes in the back and it's just really, really researched and collated together. And then you compare that to maybe a coffee shop conversation where you go to coffee with someone and you're just having a conversation about the same kind of things, maybe like humanity and history and maybe a little bit of genetics in there. But it's fluid, it's organic. It's kind of analog.
Not everything that is spoken about is super backed up and super referenced. And if it was like that, that would be a pretty boring conversation. I wouldn't want to go to coffee with someone and sit down and have them constantly quote journal articles and studies that were done. And the evidence shows this and the evidence shows that. It's like, okay, but what do you think? Have a real conversation with me. Be authentic. Because there is so much information content in all that extra stuff.
The institutions of the day and academia, kind of as we're raised through the academic system, we're told to focus on kind of what the core structure of something is, what's the pattern here? What's the core structure? And then we kind of supercharge that. But you need all the surrounding context. You need the meaning.
You need the different stuff that comes in and out in order to give that structure meaning, in order for it to actually establish something that has a much higher quality information content, I believe. And so this is how nature works, and we need to appreciate that nature is kind of using the full distribution, as I sometimes like to say. We might pick one part of it and say that's the most salient point. That's the real issue at hand.
And then we kind of put that issue on steroids, and that's what it means to be academic and to be rigorous and all this kind of stuff. But the only reason that salient point exists is because of the surrounding messy context that is there. If we look at how we solve problems in everyday life, it's using the full distribution of behavior.
If we look at how well humans solve problems and their ability to interact with each other, that human interaction depends so much on the body language, on the smells in the air, on the textures that we feel it's beyond even three dimensional, right? It's very high dimensional. multitextured. Multifaceted to strip. We're kind of in this scientific and engineering paradigm where we strip all that away and only look at the most salient patterns.
But those patterns don't mean anything without all that extra stuff. And so I think we're kind of at this stage, we're almost this super enlightenment stage where we're uber reductionist. We strip all these supposedly superfluous stuff out of it, and we look only at the core pattern and then kind of say that, well, that's how that works. That's not how that works. That's just the anchor. That's the core piece. You can't just have the anchor. You need to have all that other stuff.
So I think the coffee shop conversation is more authentic. I think the information content is greater. I think the information quality is far superior. And I think that's what a book needs to be. When I pick up a book, I want to know that the author is breathing life into it that they have the courage to maybe make a mistake, but to say some contradictory stuff, to do some UMS and AWS in there. And of course it's going to be more polished than an actual conversation, but be real.
I don't mean literal UMS and Oz in your words, but I just mean have some deviating thoughts, lose the focus maybe a little bit to go off on a rant and do what people do when they have real conversations. There's an evolutionary reason why we speak like that. There's an evolutionary reason why human interaction, yes, has core patterns and core structures that have clean tidiness to it, but also have this kind of messy, high dimensional, multifaceted aspect to it that makes it what it is.
And I think that's what's missing. I think we've become too enamored in society with the specific structure, with the Polish. People want to present it, whether that's for marketing purposes or to sound smarter or to sound intellectual. And I think we need to be human again and we need to bring that back. And I think that the information content is just much better quality if we do so.
So I want to give an example of this kind of thing, and it's actually not about reading anymore, but it's the same kind of core pattern, but as well as the surrounding context that hopefully will give meaning to what I'm talking about. So imagine you got invited to a dinner and there's a bunch of people at the table, and they have some different opinions, obviously, right? Some political, maybe some about nutrition. Let's use nutrition as an example.
Maybe somebody's at the table who's a vegan and there's meat on the table and other people are eating meat and they kind of say, well, I'm not going to eat meat. Oh, and you're a vegan. You get into that conversation and maybe they take issue with the meat eating. You kind of get into a little bit of debate, okay, so why are you a vegan? And I'm picking on veganism right now. You could pick on anything. You could pick on the carnivore. It doesn't even have to be about nutrition.
It's just an example. So more power to you if this is if you're a vegan and that's what you do. But imagine the vegan is starting to defend their opinion, right, and they say, okay, well, for example, a study showed that the protein content in vegetables is just as good as meat. And a study showed and they keep going on and it's study and it's study, and it's referenced and referenced, and it's kind of not really a conversation anymore.
It's just kind of this regurgitated litany of research and references. And then you look at that person and maybe they look really malnourished or something, and they don't look like they're particularly healthy. Now, again, this is not a comment about vegans in general. I'm just using it as a hypothetical example, okay, maybe you do the same thing for a carnivore and they don't look healthy, whatever. But you're looking at the vegan.
And in this particular case, maybe they look kind of malnourished and they don't look healthy. They seem kind of low on energy. And yet they've got all these studies to point to, and they're referencing and the referencing and the referencing think this is an example of kind of what people can do with writing to decrease the quality of the writing of the book. And the reason is, is because rather than that vegan paying attention to the signals of their body, like, do you feel healthy?
Do you have energy? Do you have a good mood? Are you happy? All the normal signals that we go through, that kind of real messy, high dimensional life that you need to pay attention to, instead of doing that, they're just paying attention to studies. Well, I read this study and I read this study, I read this study, and they kind of collate that together into their own argument.
And then they live by that argument and they're living by that collated structured argument that they put together through research. And yet they're not particularly healthy. Maybe they're unhappy. Maybe they kind of look malnourished and whatever because they didn't pay attention to signals. They just lived their life according to this well read, kind of recipe, well researched approach.
And I think that's kind of an example of the kind of thing that can happen when you just dedicate yourself to research. Because the reality is, and I've talked about this before, you really shouldn't live your life by research, by published science articles. I'm not saying don't read them and don't pay attention to them, but don't dedicate yourself fully to kind of what you read there because they can flip and flop both ways, right? Particularly something as complex as nutrition, right?
They're going to say you can find articles where red wine is bad for you. You can find articles where it's good for you. You can find out where it's moderation, dark chocolate, whatever it is, exercise, moderate, high intensity, it doesn't matter what it is. You're always going to be able to cherry pick research to fit your particular narrative, right? And that's not necessarily what's going to be best for you.
If I say I want to be a carnivore, I can load up on all kinds of research that says meat eating is good, that the quality of protein is better, and this is what our ancestors were doing. If I want to be a vegan, I can do the same thing. I can go find articles on the protein being just as good in vegetables as it is meat and yada, yada, yada. And maybe meat has carcinogens in it and all this kind of stuff. If I want to be a vegetarian or something that's kind of in the middle.
If I want to take a balance. I'm on a Mediterranean diet. If I want to go keto, if I want to go paleo, it doesn't matter. I can go back that up with research and I can collate that research into a well structured argument and I can live by it. But that doesn't mean it's healthy.
That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, because the right thing to do is to maybe definitely pay attention to some of that research, but to also listen to the signals in your body to see how it responds to different types of exercise and diet and just live life in a way that gears yourself towards good health. Right? And that doesn't mean it's perfect.
That doesn't mean there couldn't be something kind of that you're doing that maybe isn't great that you didn't realize even though you felt okay. But research can't give you the full truth and you can research your way out of health like the vegan sitting at a table that's malnourished or whatever the example might be, right? That's the example. Just because you can go collate a bunch of information doesn't mean it's going to give you the truth.
You can always cherry pick that research into a narrative that suits whatever, a particular agenda or a particular belief. That doesn't mean it has the same level of the same quality of information as someone's true experience. It doesn't. It's a very low dimensional version of something. It's a very slanted version of something. It's a very one sided it doesn't blend the many kind of high dimensional, multifaceted aspects of a reality together.
The only way to kind of create that synthesis, to get at that blend is to really base it on real life, messy experience and look at signals and adjust them kind of here and there as you go and just to pay attention to what works. In other words, look at the properties of your life as opposed to trying to come up with all the reasons of why they might be. If you go chasing reasons. I talked about this in one of my episodes about being a wise citizen instead of an informed citizen, right?
An informed citizen might look at all the different research and all the different information they could possibly gather, but then they can't really make sense of it. And so they kind of just lean one side whereas a wise citizen is one that pays attention to timeless truths and the properties that must be. And so it's kind of related to that, right? To be a wise citizen is to pay attention to the signals of what are work, what works in your life. If I eat too many carbs, I gain too much weight.
That doesn't mean I need to eliminate carbs altogether. But there is some kind of correlation, obviously, between carbs and maybe gaining weight. If I don't eat meat, I might find my energy levels low. That might not be your experience, but there's all kinds of versions of this and you have to take your experience. So anyway, the point is, as a broader comment about society in general is we tend to think that we can research our way towards truth. And I don't think that's the case.
I think you have to have the coffee shop conversations. You have to breathe life into your work. You have to have a blend, a synthesis of many different things, and you can have some research there. You do want to back up what you say, especially with some level of logic. It doesn't necessarily have to be research. It can just be I see this and I see this, and therefore I draw this conclusion.
Whether you're doing it inductively or deductively, you can kind of use a bit of rationality, as you should, to kind of back up what you're saying, but breathe life into your work. Your work should be like a coffee shop conversation. It should be multifaceted. You have a little bit of research to back up what you're saying, but you give your opinion, you give anecdotes, you give stories. Here's what I saw, here's what I did.
Not everything has to be mapped back to some statistically relevant outcome, which is problematic in its own right because statistics get abused all the time and you can cherry pick the research and on and on. So anyways, that's all I wanted to say in this episode. I think just a really quick recap. I think it's good to consume. You got to consume.
I think reading is a particularly the good version of that consumption because we create the world in our mind and reading not only tells us what's going on, but it compels us to create. It motivates us, it lets us know what's possible. It can trigger us in a good way to go build our own solutions, hopefully for the world and contribute in our own little way.
But I think that if you look at a lot of the nonfiction, particularly, it's a lot of just uber researched, highly referenced, highly footnoted work. It's just like acts of collation as opposed to being someone's opinion, as opposed to the real coffee shop conversation style life that you should breathe into your work. And I argue that that has far more important and higher quality information content to it than something that is well researched does.
Because the well researched piece, it's kind of one dimensional, it's kind of cherry picked. It's kind of just taking a very thin slice through one version of reality. Whereas something that is more conversational and real and organic and analog has that high dimensional, multifaceted aspect to it which has more truth to it, it has more reality to it and something that we can relate to as humans.
And that's what all type of whether it's writing or making a movie or whatever it is you're building, it should have that high dimensional. Real organic aspect to it because that's a higher higher information content, higher quality. And there's evolutionary reasons why that is. There's reasons why that's how people talk, and that's how they interact and ultimately how we solve problems to make progress in life and for our economy writ large. Okay, I give the example of the vegan.
The vegan can do all the research. The carnivore can do all the research. Whatever the topic, you can take, know, Biden versus Trump, it doesn't matter. You can do all the research. You can back it up. You can always back up an opinion that doesn't make it right, because everybody can cherry pick their own narrative.
At the end of the day, you got to step back and take the more organic, kind of experienced, holistic, messy, coffee shop conversation approach to really, really have good information to live by. Pay attention to the signals in your life. So I think what this really comes down to is when you're going to go create something, and you're going to go build something. Whether you're writing a book or writing a piece of software or making a movie or doing a play or putting a social program together.
Be yourself. You're already ready. I think that's the big message here is you're already ready to release yourself to the world. Just have a conversation. Yes. Back it up with some good, rational lines of reasoning. Yes, go do a little bit of research to see maybe what the consensus is or what studies have shown.
If there's a study that totally goes against what you're saying, you should at least be aware of it and consider that you want to be an informed citizen, but you also want to be a wise citizen and pay attention to signals. So anyways, whatever you're building, whatever you're creating, you're already ready to bring yourself to the table. You already have what it needs. Just pick up the mic and start speaking. Just pick up the typewriter and start banging away the computer.
Whatever it is, start producing. Okay? Be real, be authentic. Tell us what you actually think. That's what people need to hear, because that's the information that's genuinely going to contribute to a better world. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time. Take care. Nam WAM sam.