If you choose to unplug completely (and or, do a draconian discipline of extremely tightly curated following, time-budgeting etc) you get zero temporal leverage.
At best you'll live int he same present as say readers of the NYT or viewers of Fox News.
Conversation
If you build a high-maintenance 2nd-brain (whether it is making Anki cards out of everything, or using Tiago's BASB model), you'll give up some temporal leverage in return for 1st brain agency. You get (say) 1 year future-vision but less personal agency than waldenponders.
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And finally, if you choose to be completely unmanaged in your use of social media, letting the winds of The Discourse drive what you do, you give up first-brain agency, but in return you get as much oracular power as the GSCITC as it has available to deliver. The Gonzo option.
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You can actually extrapolate this model backwards through old media. If waldenponding puts you at zero temporal leverage, relying purely on (say) The Economist, which is about 6 months lag, goes into negative territory.
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In general, temporal leverage can range from +2 years to -3000 years (if all you read are ancient Greek classics). The more reactionary you get, the more you need some *other* source of leverage to make up agency deficit. That wallowing in Greek classics better generate alpha.
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Can you barbell your way out of this tradeoff? I like barbell thinking for many things but not for temporal agency. A portfolio of 90% greek classics and 10% shitposts just isn't going to do the trick... because the oracular agency of GSCITC participation has sharp thresholds
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This addresses my main problem with waldenponding. To the extent *any* kind of thinking requires an input stream to work with, you can't arbitrarily decide a certain degree of retreat from "live" and a certain "deep work project" will be a net positive returns portfolio.
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I have never had a problem with social media being a "distraction". My gonzo retreat/approach radar for intuitively calibrating how to balance my temporal leverage portfolio has been pretty good. And more importantly, requires no "addiction management" type behaviors.
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I find that when I do get sucked into a longer project, I naturally retreat exactly as much as needed to "feed" that project the info stream it needs. If I need to spend more time with 10-year-old books I naturally do that.
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Replying to
No, random example. I'd say for my interests, the typical useful book is usually 50-100 years old.

